Spring RTS Engine

Recently I was playing Sim City 3000, and I noticed that before the game started, a map and all the hills and water could be randomly generated in it. Also the densities of water, land, and trees could be set (amount found on the map).

This may be a stupid question, but is it possible that spring could randomly make maps before a multi-player game started? That way noone would have practice on it.

Reticulating Splines?

Sj wrote one.

However it sint feasable to generate them on the fly in the existing map format. The compile time for these maps would be as much as several hours.

Yes, there was a thread on this where SJ had made a map.

Also, L3DT can generate maps from random seeds (many of the current popular maps were done with L3DT) and you can make some choices along the way.

Yeah, after I post this I'm gonna move this to feature requests... BTW I think this is going to be a MTO soon... maybe with JCs new map format we'll be able to get something like this, designer would give some good textures and general basics of the map (water density, moutains chains, rivers, lakes, features) and it would build something like that and the descriptor file (text) would be generated on the server and transmitted to the clients with the start script.

However SJ hasn't released his code yet...

Well, anyone have a link to L3DT?

GOOGLE FTW!

Chances of it being balanced or fun are minimal.

lots of other rts games have random map generators

age of empires
empire earth
some c&c games

anyway i like random maps

There is also RTS that doesn't have
TotalA
Dawn of war

Random Generation by the Map Maker =! On The Fly Generation by the Average Player

The first may be possible in the near future, since there was that sort of "proof of concept" map built.

The second, not so much, on account that it still takes some time to build a map. AOE, EE, and the C+C games had much less complex maps than Spring. For example, there is no Random Map feature in C+C Generals, IIRC, and Spring's new map format is actually pretty similar to the C+C:G format.

One could invision it being possible, with a fairly bland set of premade component, but the amount of work to get that functional would be non trivial.

CompWiz wrote:lots of other rts games have random map generators

age of empires
empire earth
some c&c games

anyway i like random maps

The balance and map mechanics in those games is far less complicated than in Spring.

Honestly, you haven't figured that out, comp?

Ofc they are more complex..

It would require a hell of an algorithim, or pattern, and a standard issue texture pack!

With the new map format it would be quite easy IMHO. To assure fairness, main layout could be symmetrical, and some slight assymetries could be introduced in postprocessing.

Das Bruce wrote:

CompWiz wrote:lots of other rts games have random map generators

age of empires
empire earth
some c&c games

anyway i like random maps

The balance and map mechanics in those games is far less complicated than in Spring.

ya i should have known better