Spring RTS Engine

haha. I guess I'd make a thread here.
Titles: AudioSurf, Beat Hazard, Bit Trip Beat, Rhythm Zone, The Polynomial (which is distantly related to Spring by the way of me sharing some code to SpringLobby, and i think to Spring too but i do not remember for sure).

:3
I bought it.

I loved The Polynomial when it was just a fractal viewer, and it looks amazing finished. I can kick back and spend an hour just flying through pretty glowy things and shooting whatever's getting in my way.
Two requests: The settings values need a reset button, in case you forget what it was that they were originally set to. Also, the music algorithm needs some work. I have no idea how the music affects gameplay. :/

There are also a hundred ways you could expand on this. It's a great framework for a large number of game modes. Are you considering doing that at all?

...I haven't played any of the other games yet, I'll comment on those tomorrow, I guess.

I did already own AudioSurf, though. That game's an amazing little thing, and a gem for parties, especially with more video-game-y friends.

EDIT: Oh also, what about a merge with the other Steam sale thread?

the only bad thing about the pack is that even though just about everyone has audiosurf already, they still seen fit to put audiosurf for sale for 2.5$ for a day or two right before the pack. This is jut meh. It suddenly made me from being somewhere roughly on par with audiosurf as far as selling the pack goes, to the title that's driving this pack by far. I just did not expect this from them at all, i mean, seriously, just about everyone got audiosurf, it is already just free-loading here on our bandwagon, and it's not as if it had a problem recovering the initial investment. And they did not give me a lot of time to decide to be in the pack or not. All in all, this pack has been a good, but expensive advertisement campaign.

Yeah, I already have Audio Surf but I also have Beat Hazard and Bit Trip Beat with zero interest in Rhythm Zone (looks like Guitar Hero without the novelty of the plastic instrument) so the only thing I'd get out of the pack is the Polynomial itself.

dizekat wrote:the only bad thing about the pack is that even though just about everyone has audiosurf already, they still seen fit to put audiosurf for sale for 2.5$ for a day or two right before the pack. This is jut meh. It suddenly made me from being somewhere roughly on par with audiosurf as far as selling the pack goes, to the title that's driving this pack by far. I just did not expect this from them at all, i mean, seriously, just about everyone got audiosurf, it is already just free-loading here on our bandwagon, and it's not as if it had a problem recovering the initial investment. And they did not give me a lot of time to decide to be in the pack or not. All in all, this pack has been a good, but expensive advertisement campaign.

Ya, For me polynomial was the only title in the list I was really interested in.

got the pack, didn't have audiosurf, i tried polynomial with anaglyph glasses it's nice, audiosurf is good too

Satirik wrote:got the pack, didn't have audiosurf, i tried polynomial with anaglyph glasses it's nice, audiosurf is good too

yes, audiosurf is ok game... you're coming from outside steam. On the steam they had been marketing audiosurf for a long long while, and then made it go for 2.5 before the pack, for I think 2 days, and it seems just about everyone interested in games that animate to music got it before pack. Ah well. I don't mind it so much. I got some really good publicity off it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Vh7WMnMU_w
and it is also great that it was done on saturday, so that i get more normal people's opinion before those 'professional' reviewers who review 'casual' games (match-3 clones, other 2d stuff, largely clones of unknown russian games from the eighties and early nineties) as their monday-to-friday daily job. Those usually are not too thrilled.

dizekat wrote:haha. I guess I'd make a thread here.
Titles: AudioSurf, Beat Hazard, Bit Trip Beat, Rhythm Zone, The Polynomial (which is distantly related to Spring by the way of me sharing some code to SpringLobby, and i think to Spring too but i do not remember for sure).

Beat Hazard is awesome!

I thought audiosurf sucked, there is so much more that could be done with the idea of 'game to music' than a shitty 3 lane block dodger

Air Pack is finally on sale. Dogfighter, Altitude, Gratuitous Space Battles, Flotilla, and Plain Sight.

Awesome. Loved Altitude, Loved Dogfighter (played on a free weekend), can't wait to try Plain Sight... GSB sounds like it might be hard to get into, and Flotilla has got the "cool but repetative" complaint common to overly-procedural indies.

Ahhhh, I'm so on the fence for this one! I'm not much of a flight sim or space sim player, so in that regard I don't see dusting off the joystick for any of these.... GSB looks interesting... but I can't really see if there's that much depth into the game. I'm not a big real time tactics fan. Altitude is a bit too much "worms on steroids" for me. Looks stressful to play.

Plain sight looks cool, but honestly I don't understand what the heck it is.....

Plain Sight is the weirdest awesome thing ever (just bought it, haven't played it yet, though). It's $5, spring for it, imo.

@SwiftSpear

It's $5.

And Dogfighter is anything but a simulator. It's Quake with planes. You can play it with a joystick to get proper flight controls, but I just use mouse and keyboard and do pretty well for myself. Altitude is incredibly fun and easy to pick up. I can't see the comparison with worms except for the 2D perspective and art. Altitude is another simple arcade-y plane game.

Only interesting thing is GSB - the homeworldcartoonclone just shows how difficult it is even for indies to master real 3d battles. You need a completely diffrent controllset to get that done- and they did it wrong.

Imagine yourself as a 3d cursor - and you have to paint the formations you want to use as a sort of layered (like in photoshop, just in 3dimensional space) structure and then you are getting somewhere.

With point and click, like in normal RTS you will always have to reduce speed and get some distance before you can oversee the action.

To be fair it's turn based and you really need that rotation control that's adding most of the control complexity, Homeworld didn't have armor zones like this.

iirc, didn't Homeworld actually sport additional damage for flanking actions? Not that it mattered, all ships had so much armour that any flanking damage would only be the first few shots of hundreds after the ships turned to face one-another.

The real 3d controll problem doesent go away even turn based. It just is stress relieved, but you still have to do a second (height-click) for every action, that is not object related (directattack/directguard, etc.)

I was thinking that if you went with a strict-isometric view (rather than a free camera), you could just use the scroll-wheel to control the Z-axis. Display the play-area as a cube viewed from a 3/4 angle, with everything projected onto the two walls and the floor so you can keep your bearings. Maybe even allow the cube to scroll if you have a play area larger than the display-cube.

It would be incredibly abstract and kind of ugly, but it might present a 3D mouse-driven game with almost as much control as a 2D counterpart. A simple RTS could be hella-fun in such an environment.