Spring RTS Engine

I want to make a map that has no ground or water or anything, but a skymap... Basically an empty space map. Obviously the skymap needs to cover both up and down. Maybe the land or water would still be there for the units to sit on, but not visible.

I have no idea how to do this tough? Possible?

LUA will be used to create custom game mechanics for economy etc so it dosn't need metal and such obviously. Perhaps LUA could be used to render everything in the "map" at a later stage but I think simplicity would be good for a start.

Void water, I suppose.

Void Water works, with two drawbacks:
1) The map needs to be underwater. Then again, if you're voiding the map, you probably don't care.

2) You map will only work with newer graphics cards. Old Nvidia cards ignore VoidWater, leaving the player with a very ugly blank map sitting in front of them.

2) is an engine bug, terrain that's not visible shouldn't be drawn at all, ever. It should never even be known about by the graphics card nm handled by it.

Having said that, a tag that disabled terrain drawing full stop regardless of height would do good.

This is essentially what current pseudo ff does with water, though we haven't given ships the canlandonwater tag yet. Otherwise, that's what old FF did back in OTA days.

AF wrote:2) is an engine bug, terrain that's not visible shouldn't be drawn at all, ever. It should never even be known about by the graphics card nm handled by it.

Having said that, a tag that disabled terrain drawing full stop regardless of height would do good.

Maybe there is alredy someway to do it with LUA? Or there should be as said...

no because lua doesn't render the ground the engine does.

Erom wrote:Void Water works, with two drawbacks:
1) The map needs to be underwater. Then again, if you're voiding the map, you probably don't care.

Why does it have to be underwater?

On the practical side of things, what do I need to make such a map? Can I just use some 1pixel files for the map textures that are not used anyway? What colour would I use on these one pixel textures? Or do I need to use big textures for some reason, even if their never rendered?

The skymap will be the _only_ texture actually used. No platforms/big asteroids.

Sorry I don't know anything about map making and all the tutorials go trough how to create heightmaps and stuff, which I don't need at all, but I still have no idea how to properly disable these things (what should a heightmap be like when theres no land, white, black, grey? etc).

Also I'm not doing this for existing space mods, I can adjust the mod if need be for optimal results, things like water/underwater/land building etc. I think I want the spaceships to be land/water units, with fighters/drones as aircraft (yes I will lua code starcraft carrier style things).

Well, you can't turn off anything when building a space map - you need a full size texture map, full size height map, ect.

As for what VoidWater does, it causes any terrain under water to not be rendered, so if the entire map is underwater... invisible map! The heighmap can be anything you want, flat black, flat white, a big smily face, anything so long as it is completely under water. A single flat color is better, of course, because the compression algorithms will turn out a map with a smaller filesize if the flat color is used. Also make the texture map a flat color - no one is going to see it anyway, might as well make it as small as possible (in terms of file size - the pixel size of the image can't change or the map won't compile.)

And yeah, I really wish this could get fixed on old cards. The inability to view VoidWater maps properly on my compy is why I canned my spring project.

Are you planning to make a HW kind of nebula map?

rattle wrote:Are you planning to make a HW kind of nebula map?

What do you mean, more precisely? Nebulae filled skymaps or actual LUA rendered stuff that looks like nebulaes?

I'd hope for some variety in skymaps yes. LUA rendered on and offmap stuff like nebulae clouds and things like that could be cool yes, might be even needed for some reference in the map.