Spring RTS Engine

Support for 3D heightmaps and Texturemaps.

Of course, thats problably never going to happen...just thought I'd open up some discussion for it. This could make things possible like an actual under in spring maps, bridges, and would eliminate verticle texture stretching on steep maps. Just for a start.

This would be amazing, I see it already, Soldiers marching under bridges, through caves...

This would be quite the improvement eh

What on earth is a 3d heightmap? Voxels?

I thought it was on the MTR .. but it isn't.

Anyway, I've read somewhere that it would require an entire engine rewrite, or something near .. I guess it means it's a rather huge work

funnily enough, engine rewrites are kinda what goes on around here

LOrDo wrote:Support for 3D heightmaps and Texturemaps.

Of course, thats problably never going to happen...just thought I'd open up some discussion for it. This could make things possible like an actual under in spring maps, bridges, and would eliminate verticle texture stretching on steep maps. Just for a start.

I think just making maps fully 3d would work better than that.

Or making features walkable, together with a function to void the terrain so units can pass through would work.

Making Features / Buildings walk-overable would be comparably easy. Even then, it would require cubical collision meshes.

Making fully 3D terrain would require that big chunks of the engine be re-written from scratch. It would significantly increase the amount of hardware dedicated to terrain processing, and probably make anything but very small maps unplayable in Spring... and we'd have to rebuild every single map to utilize both a 3D mesh to define it, and a lower-poly collision surface- I don't know of any signifcantly better way to do this. In short, don't count on that happening any time soon.

How about WalkOver Features - with Teleporters on Both Side- That we could at least do Tunnels and Bridges.. Ugly Work Around... But hey what else to expect from me But hey, that would be another Great Joke .. Teleportation Points on Maps... i can see the Building Fortifications at the End of the World.. around some Sort of Gate

This aint going to be feasible for another 3-4 years (assuming standard exponential growth in processing technology)

Having real 3d collision meshing for units and features shouldn't be impossible...

yeah dragon what are u smoking?

The whole system in Warcraft witht he bridges as features is what we need... (well that and the ability to use hit boxes)

I would recommend that more primitives be SUPPORTED. For example, a rectangular prism and a collision mesh. The default should be spherical tho.