Spring RTS Engine

How about a Gamespectator in the Lobby, that only shows the dots on the Minimap, and Unitdescription? That way you could see, how long a Game will last, and if it is worth wanting the Replay...

Uhm... nifty idea... that doesn't sound like it would be horribly difficult to produce... but how would you stop people signing into the lobby with second accounts to gain access to the feature and spy on other players?

Good reply- maybee make it timeshifted ? You see what was ten Mins ago, or - you put in a mistake gen, who every three or four Mins prdocues a dot rush? that vannishs again... Sorry maybe the Idea is not that nifty ...
Or you make every view Minutes a invisible jump into a diffrent Game with the Same Map (just a sudden dot build rush) and then a backflip... no it is hopeless - lock that thread, the thing is dead

I've always thought it would be very cool to be able to stream replays to a huge number of people at once. It would be very nifty during a tournament, enabling a huge number of people to spectate a live game. Sinbad makes a good point though. The client would have to block IPs from users in the current game from spectating. That in itself would not be hard, but people will always find a way around that with proxy servers.

This is one of those dream features that will probably never make it to reality unfortunately.

couldn't you just have it check for the spring executable in memory?

Too ineffective. What if he has a second computer? What if he renamed it? You can't easily access another process's memory in a multitasking OS.

Well I don't know much abotu how Sprign is designed since I don't know C++ code and I haven't even looked at the source.

But if the Devs followed good design guidelines and use proper class setup following programming rules for class design and all that crap. Then the minimap itself shoudl exist as a class/modul thing possibly interfacing with others objects/classes. so you could create a separate object class in spring that simply grabs a snapshot of the minimap or something and send it out, you don't actually need to grab the BMP data though, just the data of where dots are and what they are if necessary and send it to the game server.

Of course just grabbing a bitmap snapshot of the minimap might actually be more effective in terms of data sent. either way it would stress the game server a lot even if this data was only sent fomr the games every 5 or 10 minutes. Unless you get the host to just send it out to all the peopel "spectatign" in the lobby.. but that'd possibly slow down and create lag for the host, and oculd be abused as well.


of course again, I haven't seen the code and don't know how much object based coding Spring uses or if it's mostly a top down aproach.

but in theory it shoudln't be difficult to capture and export the data for someone who knows a bit of C++you'd potentially need either a separate app to catch and distribute the minimap data from spring, or add that code into spring as well, both could have advantages or disadvantages.

Yes but it'd be too exploitable.

There would have to be judges, who review the Replays, looking for Pre-knowledge and such stuff. This would never work if it would be live, it would just bring spring the same Cheater problems as CS had. So only way would be watching it 10 Mins behind the Game... which is - uninteresting.

By the Way KDR - which Animee is that Avatar of yours from ? It is not Crest of the Stars.. so much is obvious

That's just a model I made for a game concept I was thinking about once.

looks nice

Post whole Picture

Something I would like is being able to join a game that is currently running, to spectate.

THere's a whole wack of features that are unavailable because there is no way to join a game in-progress. This is more than just a minor change though - the fact is that the game only sends time-assumed change data, so the current worldstate can't be sent. That's why when a game desyncs, there's no way to resynch. So late-joining-as-a-spec is a HUGE amount of work to add as a feature.

What I'd like to see is much smaller: when a player dies, a menu pops up with their options:
1: spectate (irreversable, what happens already).
2: spectate alliance
3: join team
4: quit (brings up the quit menu)
join team has a list of your allies with a checkbox for each. Click on any of the checkboxes and then hit the "join team" button. The requested players get a "player X has requested to join your team" message, which they can accept with a .accept command. Afterwards, you share units.

Alternately, players can just give units to a guy who's on "spectate alliance" since he's really just a player in the alliance with no units. Any player with no units can hit escape to get the "you're dead" menu back.[/list]

+1 for pxtl's idea

would be cool, that if instead of posting the minimaps live to the web, wich when I think of it would be bad :p

Spring saves a copy of the minimap every 5 minutes or 10 minutes, could be settable, and again it should be reaosnabely easy to do for someone with c++ knowledge, maybe even hve a setting for what size you want it saved as.

Then when the game is done either spring itself, or you could do it manually withanother pgoram, assembles all the saved minimap images into an animated gif.


and voila easy live preview of the replay

...or the replay of the match can be distributed, providing a truly live replay with a 30 or so fps...

Pxtl wrote:THere's a whole wack of features that are unavailable because there is no way to join a game in-progress. This is more than just a minor change though - the fact is that the game only sends time-assumed change data, so the current worldstate can't be sent. That's why when a game desyncs, there's no way to resynch. So late-joining-as-a-spec is a HUGE amount of work to add as a feature.

What I'd like to see is much smaller: when a player dies, a menu pops up with their options:
1: spectate (irreversable, what happens already).
2: spectate alliance
3: join team
4: quit (brings up the quit menu)
join team has a list of your allies with a checkbox for each. Click on any of the checkboxes and then hit the "join team" button. The requested players get a "player X has requested to join your team" message, which they can accept with a .accept command. Afterwards, you share units.

Alternately, players can just give units to a guy who's on "spectate alliance" since he's really just a player in the alliance with no units. Any player with no units can hit escape to get the "you're dead" menu back.[/list]

THis would be kick ass.

I agree.

Yay for Pxtl. Good thinking. Needs one more option though:

- replace dropped player

Apart from that, tthe ability to take a worldstate snapshot and resynch/let specs in with it would be amazingly sweet.

espylaub - .team does that