Spring RTS Engine

After a few games online, I have discovered that there is a horrible flaw in the game design.

Wolves can be spammed far too easily, using the Central-Build GroupAI and Sheep. It means any player can turn out hundreds of Wolves much faster than any other possible unit, due to the fact that they fly.

I didn't see it when I was building the mod, unfortunately, but it's definately a real problem. I will address it and put out a new version.

Thanks to all beta-testers for this round, especially the players who found this bug.

Here's a patch that addresses the problems found. Please play with it, not the original.

Yeah! hopefully being the first new mod will mean more people playing!

We shall see. Meanwhile... if anybody can beat Random Enemies on NanoArena V2 in less than 20 minutes, I wanna see a replay. My best time thus far is 21 minutes. I garantee a challenge, despite the current lack of NTAI support.

That mushroom cloud made my day.

Hawt Secks!

Awesome. Played an arena game against one human opponent, won in 26 minutes.

I turned the tide when i sent one demon to kill his mega sheep wall of plasma spam and then let the springer/knight combo do the rest.

All these new effects are neat. Every mod should have coulured nanos.

Glad you're enjoying it. I think that it's pretty well-balanced, but I'd like to hear if anybody's having trouble with the current gameplay.

A short tutorial/introduction would be most welcome, it took me a while to figure out sheep give you resources :)

read teh wikis!!!

argh, put that link in the readme. at least then its their fault

Yeah, that link should be a mandatory read even before downloading, explains a lot :)

Lolz... don't worry, I will write up a manual for newbies (for the billionth time, but the gameplay has changed again).

I just didn't have enough time before release.

For those who're brand-new... here are some starting hints:

1. NanoBlobs is not about "spamming units". Good players can own you in a minute or less, if you do not defend yourselves. NanoBlobs really requires that you either kill your opponant with micro early, or kill them with strategic play over the long term. Every unit has a purpose- every unit has at least one counter.

2. Sheep are your economy. Lose your Sheep, and you will lose the game.

3. Sheep can hover, and while they're not fast, they're not super-slow, either. Use their mobility, especially on larger maps, to build more bases.

4. Even if Lord-death doesn't mean you lose, the Lord is by far the most important playing piece, and will remain so throughout most of the game. Use the Lord aggressively to push bases and defenses up.

5. Keep the pressure on. Attack from multiple directions.

6. The Wolf is one part scout, one part commando assassin squad.

Cool deal Argh, looked it over graphically, you are definately breaking ground towards improving the standard of weapon effects, weve still got a ways to go but impressive with what weve got.. I hope you dont mind if I modify and utilize some of your graphical effects..

Unfortunately I found one problem with the explosion generator.. I dont know if you noticed it but it seems there is no way to flag explosions as like epic or always visible. I used your nuke explosion graphic for my nukes, and found to my displeasure that apparently unless you have LOS it doesnt render.. really bites to fire a nuke at something and not see that awesome explosion..

Sorry if that was off-topic I just really like what youve done from a development standpoint. Hope Nano blobs gets well played It deserves some attention for the work youve put into it..

Well... it might be nice to have a tag where a given explosion event wasn't culled regardless of LOS, or to assign an explosion its own "can-be-seen" radius, so that the engine could cull it, and not even draw it, if it's far enough from the camera frustrum... which might be better, honestly, because it would keep the spam-factor down.

I'd have to say that the FX in there aren't half as sophisiticated as I think they can be. But I was literally having to put it together while it was being coded, so ... er... I made do with what I could cram in

And no, I don't think that talking about the technical side of the mod is off-topic at all. It's meant to be a technical showcase, along with being a lot've fun to play. I want people to take a look at its features, and learn from the mod- I've made it as clean and "modern" as I could, given my time constraints. So if you're a modder, please feel free to bombard me with questions, if you have any- just do it here, instead of PM; I want to make sure the answers are publically available.

Maybe a bit off-topic but Argh, have you discovered yet how to make individually reversing tracks? I read in some thread that you were trying to as well.

It's not hard, actually. Just never got around to it. Basically, you'd just get the X,Z locations of a pair of points and figure out whether it's turning right or left. The tricky part would be speed.

You should be able to see all explosions you created.

<shrugs> wasn't my choice. Didn't write that part of Spring

Truthfully speaking, I'm not sure how much of 0.73b was really "mine" in the end, anyhow- maybe 3-4 lines, honestly. Yeha pretty much re-wrote all of my flamethrower code from scratch.

I'm gonna give this mod a try when I get some time.

About the track reversal stuff: I'm kinda stuck with a static value which is either positive or negative and gets larger and smaller the more often it checks, when the unit is turning. The thing is how to make it an angle I can work with. I basically only need to know if it's a hard turn (>90°) or not (<45°) in order to stop reversal. Left and right is determined by the value being positive or negative. I tried a lot of things and more or less spent an entire week on it without any good outcome.

Here's a test unit, originally made by KDR_11k, I only added some stuff and changed the script and added the missing texture. It displays the current turning value. The latter depends on turn rate and refreshrate. It's 1000 with a turnrate of 500 and refresh rate of 50 ms, ~4000 at 250 ms refreshrate. Well I'm completely lost with maths that being said so I could need some help... :)
Maybe I should have started a new thread, what ever I'm tired and got toothaches.
http://rattle.from-hell.net/spring/counter.zip

To stay even a little bit on topic, the Springer is pretty cool (just like about everything else).

Here's a demo. Best time yet- got it under 20 minutes, using Random Enemies, on NanoArena V2.

Can you beat that time?

If you can, you might be ready to actually play this game against a human