Spring RTS Engine

OK.TASpring engine boasts in a 3d deformabale terrain.Mappers are not using this feature sudfficiently in my opinion?its suppose to allow us to play maps that after some playing time will require different strategy and force different combinations to be used as a result of changes in terrain.Most maps do not make good use of it..If a tank shoots a big plasma ball and it hits the land shouldnt it leave quite a deep crater? i mean plasma should be stronger than current projectiles shouldnt it? so why not make real use of deformable terrain in maps? for example maps that after some play will not allow you to use vehicles any more cause you have so many deep craters...

The decision here is not made by the mappers. The game developers of all the major games on the engine have elected to lower impulse values and thus reduce deformation of the terrain by their weapons.

Deformation = massive lag

Forboding Angel wrote:Deformation = massive lag

Actually, I've never found it to cause much beyond when it occurs.

Pure. Deformable. Terrain.


And Acid. 1vs1.


&quite Old, nearly necro. Sorry to all others already used to it

neddiedrow wrote:

Forboding Angel wrote:Deformation = massive lag

Actually, I've never found it to cause much beyond when it occurs.

every time deformation occurs, pathing has to be recalculated

theres not much lag unless deformation is given to a weapon that fires 20 times in a second

This isnt mappers, it is modders. BA esp. 99% of weapons in BA have 0 crater boost and 0 crater mult. No matter how soft the map is, their shots would still do nothing. This is to reduce lag and pathing issues. Another major problem with high crater values is that the craters are usually created on top of a unit. This means that a lot of larger, tougher units will quickly sink into the ground when shot, meaning they are constantly walking uphill (This happens often in CA, t2 tanks will almost always be going up a hill to get out of the crater that just formed on top of them, which really slows them down).

XTA has a fair bit of deformation on a range of weapons. CA as mentioned has heaps of deformation on almost every weapon (Probably too much).

It is also most certainly not due to impulse values, as they have nothing whatsoever to do with craters. Thats a myth thats best not repeated. Craters are their own tag entirely. You can make a weapon that does nothing whatsoever except make a big hole.

hmm..so basiclly the deformable terran is there but cant be used..maybe thats why supcom didnt have it.. its more of a gimick..

Saktoth wrote:It is also most certainly not due to impulse values, as they have nothing whatsoever to do with craters. Thats a myth thats best not repeated. Craters are their own tag entirely. You can make a weapon that does nothing whatsoever except make a big hole.

False. Create a weapon with an impulseboost of 9001 and a cratermult of 1.

DZHIBRISH wrote:hmm..so basiclly the deformable terran is there but cant be used..maybe thats why supcom didnt have it.. its more of a gimick..

Nah, it can be used, and it isn't a gimmick.

It has quirks, but IMO they're not that bad. The CPU load isnt huge, fighter spam is much much worse. Its just that 'It causes lag' is sort of a good enough reason to remove it for most people, since they see it as candy and not a core game feature. It was also accused of causing desyncs but desyncs arent an issue anymore (Hooray!).

As long as its only artillery and such, rather than frontline assault units, its fine. If bulldogs etc have it, they'll just sink into the dirt as they shoot eachother which is kinda whacky, but if artillery and stuff that cant really hit mobile units has it, it just tends to rip up the landscape (Though a closed DDM sure sinks pretty far before it dies). Its fine on unit death explosions too.

Its only really BA that doesnt have much cratering, even XTA has cratering. If its really, really pronounced though it can make any battlefield quickly become a porcy quagmire, which isnt so great for gameplay.

Edit:

False. Create a weapon with an impulseboost of 9001 and a cratermult of 1.

Even though ive tested this before, thats exactly what i just did. I tried it vs a weapon with an impulseboost of 1 and a cratermult of 1 (And an impulsefactor of 1 in both cases, for the record). Otherwise identical weapons. The craters were exactly the same depth.

hunterw wrote:

neddiedrow wrote:

Forboding Angel wrote:Deformation = massive lag

Actually, I've never found it to cause much beyond when it occurs.

every time deformation occurs, pathing has to be recalculated

theres not much lag unless deformation is given to a weapon that fires 20 times in a second

That's true, but the (one-time) path updates are
not actually what cause the slowdowns. It's the
rendering of the terrain that takes up far more
cycles when there are damaged areas in view
(load up Comet Catcher, .cheat and .give yourself
20 nuke silos, then tell them all to fire at one single
location and move the camera from an untouched
portion of the map over to ground zero).

DZHIBRISH wrote:hmm..so basiclly the deformable terran is there but cant be used..maybe thats why supcom didnt have it.. its more of a gimick..

You clearly weren't around in the days when it wasn't even an option for modders OR mappers, when EVERYTHING caused craters and we didn't have restoration either. A group of ten samsons or really any unit for that matter firing on a field for about 2 minutes would make it totally unpassable for the rest of the game. Look up some of the old topics of people playing with nuke mines and soft maps.

The map hardness tag was given to mappers, who immediately started using it, turning deformation either way down or effectively completely off because it ruined games not necessarily due to lag but often due to the map becoming unplayable after a while.

Then modders got the weapon tags to control deformation on their end a little better, and it was established as a kind of unwritten rule that only large weapons, like nukes or BBs or other somewhat rare, large scale weaponry of that nature should be able to deform terrain, not particularly due to lag but because it renders the game unplayable (or at least turns it into a nuke/long range cannon/air war only) after a while.

So basically, if you want lots of deformation, make a mutator for your mod of choice. Remove the weapon tags mentioned, and play on a map with a low hardness. You'll probably quickly see that it's much better with deformation disabled for everything but special weapons, but if you disagree, post your mutator and play with friends. No one's telling you you can't do that much.

Please don't always use "LAG" to globally talk about slow downs.

LAG is network related and has nothing to do with pure cpu overloads issues.

I suggest you look up what lag actually means.

ralphie wrote:I suggest you look up what lag actually means.

"In computing and especially computer networks, a lag is a symptom where result of an action appears later than expected. While different kinds of latency are well defined technical terms, lag is the symptom, not the cause."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag

Sounds like network to me

Lag = high latency in the network. Your computer chugs along quickly, but messages sent out are taking too long to come back. bad ping. etc.

What we're talking about is framerate. Halting. Slideshow. Resource utilization. Deformed landscape doesn't cause lag, it causes slideshow.

It sounds important to me to use right words when we talk about slow downs in spring. I rarely experience network issues out of "no response" > caused by true disconnection or "delayed response" > too much pron dling. I often experience 0.6 speed games with cpu usage over 40%. It's not the same thing.

BTW, sorry for HS

Mr.Frumious wrote:Lag = high latency in the network. Your computer chugs along quickly, but messages sent out are taking too long to come back. bad ping. etc.

What we're talking about is framerate. Halting. Slideshow. Resource utilization. Deformed landscape doesn't cause lag, it causes slideshow.

It causes lag in the form of exposing you to possible drops cause your machine sometimes will start bursting data in large chunks and if the host has a firewall, the firewalls will generally start blocking said large chunks of UDP.

theHive wrote:

ralphie wrote:I suggest you look up what lag actually means.

"In computing and especially computer networks, a lag is a symptom where result of an action appears later than expected. While different kinds of latency are well defined technical terms, lag is the symptom, not the cause."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag

Sounds like network to me

"In computing (yes this is highly relevant to networking but not restricted to it) lag is a symptom where the result of an action appears later than expected"... In other words, lag in computing is anytime you experience unexpected slowdown or dead time between taking actions and them being preformed.

Spring has multiple instances of this problem, the two most notable are when CPU load is high general slowdown will be experienced on all games, and when ping is high, your actions will take longer to register on your own screen (while the simulation will still remain accurate between players). Either can be called lag, neither is accurate to the traditional FPS definition of lag though.