Here is the latest good test-build of NanoBlobs, mainly built to showcase some good things (and a few problems) with the current Spring engine. Developers, please at least take a 5-minute look.
Spring developers, just to give you something more interesting to look at than, "hey, uh... I made an experimental widget", I have done a bunch of beauty-treatment stuff to this version, and added a new unit (gasp!) the TriRook, which (along with a revised Demon) uses my brand-new ground / water detection script, and uses a very beautiful animated climbing motion into and out of water, like a true swimming vehicle. Yeah, yeah, it has some problems with map height detection, and occasionally clips, especially the Demon... er, but it already had that problem, so
Oh yeah, and I also rebalanced a whole load of things, added tracks to all vehicles that have ground contact, cleaned up all Units so that they are built from my DEFAULT_UNIT template (included in the mod, of course) and found that lag bug with Beamlasers, and a bunch of other gameplay tweaks... but those are just tinsel on the tree, really.
If you do nothing else in the next 24 hours... and if you have a card that is, ahem, "ready for dynamic water"... check out the TriRook and Demon as they swim to hostile shores
At any rate, until I have new explosion and particle/weapon code to play with, I think I'll leave y'all alone for a bit... this version was useful for pointing out a few things...
1. Missiles are one of the few major areas of lag left. I would dearly, dearly like guided weapons that:
A. Do not have smoketrails.
B. Obey BurnBlow.
C. Obey NoAutoRange.
D. Have smooth, curved guidance, updated every 5 frames or so, instead of flying straight to the predicted target point like an unguided weapon. Having watched the weapons a lot... that's pretty much what's going on, and it's wrong, wrong wrong.
2. I have observed weirdness with ballistic weapons.
A. First off, I thought that "Ballistic" was fixed via grep... about 2 versions of Spring ago, but current code still has "Balistic", unless one of the newer SVN versions has finally had this typo fixed.
B. If a weapon has Lineofsight=1, it should never, ever use a ballistic arc calculation... period. This is not the case, and I am kind've peeved that the current "what weapon am I code" isn't able to figure this out and assign the weapon to the right class.
3. I really want custom groundscars that can be called by weapons, right now. I hate how I have little machineguns that should not be leaving any groundscars at all (a minor cause of FPS slowdown, but still a factor) leaving hundreds of them, and eating up the valuable "groundscar count" which should be available for my pretty vehicle tracks and stuff.
4. The more I play with custom explosions, the more I think that when I have the next real version, I will be able to make anything... anything at all... muahahahah... er... uh... moving-right-along...
5. I would like to humbly request more than one type of deformer bitmap for things that can deform the dynamic water grid while moving, preferably namable in a TDF. Yes, yes, minor stuff and all that, but ... when people can someday use dynamic water without crying and whining about the FPS drop, you will be happy that I asked for this now. I would also like a pair of variables to determine waveheight max/min, so that I can make things "split the waves" more properly. Coupled with LUA scripting support and dynamic unit stats... mmmm, tasty... I could have boats that shove more water out've the way, the faster they moved, by swapping out waveheights on the fly... mmm
6. Um, I really think that Spring needs to check for weapon collisions about twice as often as it currently does. This would just about cure weapons collision problems unless the weapon is moving at truely silly speeds, so long as modders build units with a minimum S3O radius of 8 (or 1 Spring "square").
... that's about it for now. Check it out, this is really pretty, and with settings down, quite smoothly playable even with quite a few units on the battlefield. Dunno about game balance and stuff... it's fun, but I'd say still pretty badly balanced at the moment. Plays great with NTAI, tho.
