Spring RTS Engine

I made a patch to revert Spring from XTA to good old TA.

You can download it here:
http://www.fileuniverse.com/?page=listing&ID=90 (0.5MB)


It only changes:
/download/*.tdf
/guis/*.gui
/units/*.fbi
/weapons/*.tdf
Which are the buildmenu, and the stats sheet.

So far it works for me, I hope the Swedish Yankspankers havn't implemented any new tag in .fbi and .tdf that are required for Spring, but if so I'd like them to tell me.

Do I just drop the .ufo in the Spring folder?

And do you know how to use the maptools?

i wish there is simple checkbox switch for this ...

There are no new tags that I know of.

having jst played a game of XTA and discovered just how much it sucks I suspect that this will be very popular and will cause lots of confusion with people dropping because they have the 'wrong' units, I think we'll need a tag or something - could the game MD5 the data files and compare them with the host's? or have something in the lobby for XTA or OTA (or, indeed AA)?

-Gurkha

Putting my totala hpi and rev3 files in Spring seems to give me a hybrid game of some sort. I have some (all?) of my modified units but the commander's build menu is far larger than in regular TA -- Spring thinks he can build every level 2 factory for some reason.

Remove, and I repeat, REMOVE the taenheter.ccx file from the Spring folder!! It has numerous download tdfs that override the OTA/CC GUI system, and add all kinds of weird things that aren't supposed to be there.

I tested, and it works well even in multiplayer if all players have it.

If some players have it and others don't have it:
- Chat will be flooded by message like: Synch error for Nick 8248 B13AD758 D024D90
- Players will still be able to chat ingame inbetween two errors messsages
- Each player will be able to play with its own unit
- But each player won't see the enemy units, save maybe the commander
- You'll be able to fight with the enemy comm, and he'll fight back and stuff, while for the other player, nothing will happen.

But if the two players have it, all work fine.

I'm sorry if it causes any confusion, I hope that soon the lobby or spring itself will have something to support mods. Meanwhile just ask in battleroom. And just move around or rename the file when not wanted.

Sean Mirssen: I overwrite the gui and tdf from the taenheter.ccx by including blank gui and tdf in my "patch". The taenheter.ccx is needed for my patch. You can't use your HPI and GP3 from your old regular TA because they don't have the textures in .bmp You do need to keep taenheter.ccx. I choosed that solution because otherwise the download of my patch would have been 12MB instead of 0.5MB.

Can you try it with my method?

-Extracting palette.pal file, the anims folder and the unittextures folder from taenheter.ccx and placing them in the Spring dir.
-Removing taenheter.ccx from Spring dir.
-Copying totala1.hpi, CCData.ccx and rev31.gp3 into the Spring dir.

I believe that is the method I used...

Let's hope both method give results compatible in online play. But I fear not, because when I forgot to remove the rev31.gp3 I had put as an early attempt, I could not play with people having my patch. My method keeps XTA scripts and models, that must be why.

But how come we got errors while both having it, zwz?

zwzsg, I have the extracted bmp textures of OTA, TA:FF and SWTA, and they all together are just 3.19 Mb. That's not really a reason to not include the extracted OTA textures into the OTA patch, if it will provide people with a good gaming experience.

I have tried it against one other guy and it did work for me.

Thankfully, someone released an OTA conversion, as XTA was seriously starting to irritate me with its horrible balance lately. I started to get frustrated when 100 metal scout vehicles (weasels) where destroying buildings and many times as many units, and where actually absorbing more damage in comparison to higher grade vehicles of the same level.

Sean Mirrsen wrote:Can you try it with my method?

-Extracting palette.pal file, the anims folder and the unittextures folder from taenheter.ccx and placing them in the Spring dir.
-Removing taenheter.ccx from Spring dir.
-Copying totala1.hpi, CCData.ccx and rev31.gp3 into the Spring dir.

I believe that is the method I used...

What utility do you need to exctract all that from ccx files?

Download [ HPI Viewer ] and open the .ccx with it. Works wonders.