Spring RTS Engine

Very simply... I'd like to see if anybody would be interested in making pro-quality Anim libraries (that'd be, animated cursors- open up Otacontent.sdz in the Base folder of Spring for an example) for distribution to the public. They would have to be released under the Creative Commons license- no copyrights.

I've tried Erom's out, and assuming he releases them, I will use them for NanoBlobs 0.6b. However, I think it's high time that the artistic souls among ye got together and started making more of these, and of higher quality. Erom's version is nice, but I'd like to see some sets that are more idiot-proof in their visual presentation.

Credit will be given, of course.

do you mean cleaner/less busy?

... and more iconic. More deliberate. More basic, simple and designed to say, "hey, this is prompting you to heal" or whatever. And more polished graphically- I want to see rotating 3D renders, beveled edges, all of the polish you'd expect in a professional game's UI.

One of the problems I ran into in my first set (I'll make some more.) was that the context scheme I used seemed to be at odds with how most people viewed the controls.

I'll elaborate. My cursor set is target sensitive meaning it changed color according to what the nominal target for the cursor was: blue for ground, green for friendlies, and red for enemies. But from the responses I think more people want an action sensitive set. For example, one color for movement actions, one color for nano actions, and one color for weapon actions. This would be closer to the original TA design. Of course, then is Defend a nano or a weapon action? Depends on the mod, and what kind of player that person is (I use defend almost exclusive as assist factory, or autoheal defensive turret. But some people use defend to link units they are going to attack with.)

Either way, I think Argh is right, the easiest answer is to just have a bunch of cursors all Creative Commons-ed so mod user can chose their own to use directly or work from.

As I'm a bad graphist I made a simple set
I made them as clear as I could
(thanks to Erom by the way, yours were a good source of inspiration)




they should be pretty self explanatory ..

they of course are Creative Common
but gif is uglying them a bit, how should I compress them ? does spring support mng ?



And by the way, thanks Argh for liberating Spring :)

Feel free to check out the icons included in xect vs mynn. I'm pretty pleased with most of them, they might be a good starting point for an interested iconist.

Spring's cursors are stored as a sequence of bitmaps (each frame is its own bmp file) with a transparency color of RGB 84/84/252.

The names are as follows:
cursorattack_0.bmp
cursorcapture_0.bmp
cursordefend_0.bmp
cursormove_0.bmp
cursornormal_0.bmp
cursorpatrol_0.bmp
cursorpickup_0.bmp
cursorreclamate_0.bmp
cursorrepair_0.bmp
cursorrevive_0.bmp
cursorunload_0.bmp

They can be as many frames as you like. The number iterates by one each frame, obviously.

One thing I should mention is that if we can get this project going, then it may be possible in the future to allow users to choose their own cursor set... maybe as part of a GUI skin, maybe as an entirely different, user-controlled thing (after all, GUIs can and probably will be pretty mod-specific, but a good set of cursors may be used by a given user for every game they play, just like players of FPS games tend to have a favorite crosshair bitmap).

Moving back to the main topic, though...

I think that the main thing is that each animation needs to be more explicit, and less abstract. Erom, I think the colors you used for your set were just fine- what is less than totally perfect (not, "bad", mind you- I am using 'em) is that I think users will not be able to tell, immediately, what each one means. I think you tried too hard to copy the very abstract style of OTA... and quite frankly, while many parts of its interface were stellar, its cursors were only so-so.

Cursors really need to tell a story in 10 frames. Users should not be confused about what they can do, or figure it out by just randomly clicking on stuff. If somebody has never, ever played Spring before... the last thing they need is to have icons that don't tell them what they're able to do.

That story may be "click here to cause something to move here", or "click here to Guard this object", etc. This is harder than it sounds, especially with a 1-bit alpha and a 10-frame limit, but dozens of games have solved these problems more or less successfully.

The following may sound stupid, and of course, as artists, I want everybody to find more expressive and unique way of doing things, but here are some concrete examples:

1. For a "Fantasy Wars" set, Move would show a set of feet walking, terminating in the tip of an arrow where the legs intersect. Attack would be a pair of swords striking each other rapidly. Guard would be a shield, simply animated by lighting effects but otherwise still, Capture would be a pair of manacles, etc. In short... tell a quick story.

2. For a futuristic set, Attack could be a shot moving rapidly from offscreen, and then an explosion. Guard could be a quick animation of a spacecraft defending a larger ship from attack. Move could be a rocket ship flying to the top of the button, using exaggerated perspective to tell the story of movement.

See what I mean here? Even OTA, which was trying to convey a sort've futuristic, abstract feel, had blatant, obvious crosshairs for Attack, which in turn changed to cool colors when you were doing "non-angry" things like Guard, and an abstract symbol for Guard.

There's nothing wrong with approaches like Erom's, and considering how abstract and non-newb-friendly NanoBlobs is (you have to understand Spring's features, like auto-queues and chained commands to beat an AI, let alone a human) I doubt if it will matter- NanoBlobs is geared to a different audience than most mods are. Many mods, however, could use a more explicit approach... and if we can make the Cursors a user-chosen item... then people may want, and make, all sorts of silly custom cursor sets in the future, just for the heck of it

Oh, and thanks, Gnome! I didn't realise that you could have unlimited frames (within reason, of course). That means we could tell very complex "stories", if we wanted to!

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if there is SOME limitation, like 64 frames or something... but it seems to be rather high from what I can tell.

I thought it was hard-coded, like some of the other things involving bitmaps are (like, for example, the Flare). Even 32 frames is enough for some pretty amazing animations, as any GIF site will show you

https://spring.clan-sy.com/wsvn/filedet ... rev=0&sc=0

Assuming I'm reading that right, it looks like every time it plays an animated cursor, it just iterates through the directory until it tops off, then goes back to frame 0. I guess that'd mean the limit is the the max value of an int, which for this purpose is unlimited.

hm I see that XectvsMynn patrol cursor has 71 frames, so that may be even higher

actually, thoses are really nice, you should see them if you haven't already
https://taspring.clan-sy.com/svn/spring ... sdd/anims/

I'll run through and offer some suggestions:

cursorattack_0.bmp - Target
cursorcapture_0.bmp - Tank changing colors from blue to red
cursordefend_0.bmp - Shield
cursormove_0.bmp - Rotating green target
cursornormal_0.bmp - arrow
cursorpatrol_0.bmp - arrows in a triangle
cursorpickup_0.bmp - Crane hook
cursorreclamate_0.bmp - Unbuilding object
cursorrepair_0.bmp - Wrench
cursorrevive_0.bmp - Rubble rebuilding itself
cursorunload_0.bmp - no idea :/

I'm not the best pixle artist but I'm bored so I'll describe what symbols and stories I would associate with each cursor for a TA-like mod

First of all a general principle for colors I would use;

Offensive would be red, constructive would be green and basically neutral would be blue.
cursorattack_0.bmp
Simple Grey Crosshairs with red "lasers" sooting from the four corners in sequence to the center

cursorcapture_0.bmp
Red circle, get's surrounded by a green line and then fills up with blue coulour, then flip back to a red circle and start again

cursordefend_0.bmp

gray circle orbited by little blue circles, a green arrow will connect the 2 circles

cursormove_0.bmp

a grey crosshair box with blue tank treads on the left and right

cursornormal_0.bmp

simple arrow

cursorpatrol_0.bmp

like the defend cursor, except only one orbitting circle connected to itself around the circle by an arrow

cursorpickup_0.bmp

green circles move to the center and then down into a box, when it gets in the box, the other one moves into the box and another circle takes the firsts place
cursorreclamate_0.bmp

two verticle blue bars, dotted lines (like nanospray) go from the first to the second while the first like disappears

cursorrepair_0.bmp

(because repair and build are the same) exactly the opposite od reclaim

cursorrevive_0.bmp

simmilar to build except instead of the second line slowly appearing, it starts lying down and slowy moves to verticle

cursorunload_0.bmp

obviousely the opposite of load.

I've long wanted to do a set for "realistic" mods that are somehow derrived from modern NATO military sybology... simple line art, minimal animations.

Except that once I actually got started, I realized that unless you knew NATO symbols they were impossibly hard to use.

I am fairly sure someone Masse? did some a while back, I searched but couldn't find them.

Weaver wrote:I am fairly sure someone Masse? did some a while back, I searched but couldn't find them.

We started with Masse's when we did the XVM icons. If I recall correctly, I only changed them by making the color more intense. The additional Icons I did tried to follow his style, which I liked a great deal.

While I like the XvM ones, they require a little more polish imo.

I also received a set from Secure that was very interesting, but I'd like to see something that was executed with more than just painting single pixels, and told more transparent stories- thus far, what I've seen needs to take more advantage of the fact that Spring is a 24-bit graphics world, not OTA's limited-pallette world.

In short... I think we should build stuff that's been animated with 3D software or heavy Photoshopping, and looks and feels 100% professional. Everything I've seen thus far is ok, and in some cases pretty solidly "explains" what it means in context, but lacks that extra polish that really makes people say, "hey, that's COOOOOL"

mm... lemme check out :D im not sure did u include my cursors :)

i could do new ones... i saw many flaws with old ones :) but i might or might not have intrest ^^

//edit//
nope they dont look like mine unless they are very modified :)
here they are