Spring RTS Engine

Just a crazy idea... been awhile since I proposed one, so I suppose I'm due...

How's about, instead of the current trees, mappers could call up a list of .S3O trees from an arbitrary list, and they would be applied to the map's tree-spots randomly at game start by the server? If such Features obeyed LOS, then they wouldn't even get drawn a lot of the time, and we could have much prettier, more random scenery, and it'd be a snap to upgrade existing maps to use this feature. I think it's a terrible shame that Lathan Stanley's awesome Features get used pretty rarely in large part because they have to be placed by hand, and if they're used they don't obey LOS and drag down map performance.

That, and I'm 100% sick of the default Spring trees, which were OK when SJ made them three years ago, but look pretty lame at this point, tbh.

Hey, and if Features could obey scripts, then we could do some really amazing and random stuff... lol... yeah, had to toss that back in there... moving right along now...

You see this sint how trees work at all.

In spring, the autogenerated trees have the featurenames tree1-tree16. MapConv doesnt palce trees, it places extra tree features. So whereas you might put down a feature of a wreckage, mapconv will add tree1-16 randomly and silently if you want it to palce trees. Spring then reads this.

This is not spring behaviour, it is mapconv behaviour.

To remind you AF...

That, and I'm 100% sick of the default Spring trees, which were OK when SJ made them three years ago, but look pretty lame at this point, tbh.

I wouldn't mind trying on some more low poly good looking trees.

that and the current trees are not models they are made by code if I understand it correctly.

Wait a minute... does that mean that we can make Features named Tree1 - Tree16 and put them into map folders?

Or put them into the Spring Root?

I've gotta try that...

I am pretty sure they are generated trees... feel free to ignore me though.

Try recompiling mapconv to use "tree17-32" instead then building your own trees.

the trees are procedurally generated.

yes but mapconv procedurally places them. If you modify mapconv to use a different set of featurenames you could make all the trees rocks.

There;s no special 'tree' part of the map format, its just a tree autoplacer function of mapconv.