Gamedev:Glossary
Game Dev Glossary
This page contains definitions of technical terms and acronyms associated with Spring game development.
AtlasedTexture
An alias to a texture. This means the alias must be defined somewhere and pointing to to a real texture. For AtlasedTextures used in projectiles (like those spawned by explosiongenerator) they need to be defined in resources.lua under the [projectiletextures].
A line defining a texture alias in resources.lua looks like this:
alias = "real_image.tga",
Most spring supported image format can be used in AtlasedTextures, but not compressed dds.}}
CColorMap
A collection of 2 or more RGBA colours. They can be expressed either as a string of decimal numbers, or pointing to an image file where each pixel will be used as a colour.
Example:
This gives a ColorMap with 2 colours, the first one blue and second one white:
colorMap = "1.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0",
Or it can be pointed to a bitmap file:
colorMap = "bitmap_file.tga",
ColorMaps usually describe how the colours of an entity will shift during its lifetime, where the first colour will be used at the beginning and then cycle through all colours until the last one is used at the end of its lifetime.
OTAism
Refers to a feature, bug or design quirk which traces its routes back to the early days of Spring when it was designed to reproduce Total Annihilation gameplay.
QTPFS
Quad-Tree Path-Finder System. A path finding algorithm based on a Quadtree data structure.
See also:
springcontent.sdz
A base content package which is always loaded for all Spring games. It supplies many 'background' files that games generally won't need to overwrite (but may do so). It also supplies example gadgets in the LuaGadgets/Gadgets/ directory which can be directly included by a game, most importantly:
unit_script.lua- For running LUS animation scriptsgame_spawn.lua- For spawning units on game startgame_end.lua- For controlling game ends conditions
Example:
return include("luagadgets/gadgets/unit_script.lua") in LuaRules/Gadgets/unit_script.lua
as well as the base content gadget handler itself:
VFS.Include("luagadgets/gadgets.lua",nil, VFS.BASE) in LuaRules/main.lua and LuaRules/draw.lua
See also:
