Spring RTS Engine

Well, as you may or may not know, I'm studying architecture at Uni. A few days ago I was given a file for a project which is basically a scaled model of the CBD of the city of Melbourne, Australia (my home city).

This has evidently been compiled over a while, and while some buildings are just simple blocks, some are quite highly detailed.

The strange flat bits are either river, or simple footprints of buildings that have yet to be made 3 dimensional (it is a work in progress).

Anyway, I'd really love to see this as a Spring map; either the whole thing, or using bits of it, if anyone is interested. The models need to be UVwrapped and textured, and I certainly don't have this capability. I think any such map should really take advantage of scale, so that the units are tiny compared to those buildings, allowing the player to use the streets as cover, etc.

Anyway, I don't want to send it to too many people, because it's an 8meg file, and I'm on dial up (and could get in some nasty trouble uploading it or spreading it around too much), so I'm certainly not going to stand in the way of bribery. SWS needs some new skins for models as well as some star wars themed maps!

That would kick the absolute crap out of your computer.

But it would also be really, really cool.

that would take over a month to complete.

Well, you wouldn't need to do every single building. Spring's current feature system couldn't handle that many features anyway. What you would do is pick about 10 generic buildings and repeat them, and then put in the more individual sky scrapers.

At the very least, this would be a great salvage point for anyone wishing to make their own urban map, because this takes out the entire modelling side.

oh no, spring can handle tons of buildings...

(this was just to see how many features I could get away with. it played well btw... outside of springs odd path finding forcing units to deviate from their cued pathing...


However, I am modeling at least 4 stages of destruction for every building.

most of the time I have been spending on this map is for the feature destruction levels(see feature resource sticky thread for a preview)

You had to stay looking straight down or your framerate died however.

Das Bruce wrote:You had to stay looking straight down or your framerate died however.

that was only you bruce.

thinking about it, I would personally love to get a real good look at that model warlord. If you would be so kind can you email it to me? It would be alot of help as far as a really good reference for a real world city.

Well, I meant that Spring only lets you have a certain number of features due to the limited SMD colour value of placing them, IIRC...

I meant the number of individual features, rather than the number of instances of those features.

PM me an email address you'd be happy to use, Smoth. Can't guarantee I'll get it to you soon, as I'm on 56k, and it's 8meg, so I need some time to work it out.

Seeing as smoth is only going to be using this for inspiration purposes, it's still available to someone who would like to actually spend the time converting elements of this into an entire city map...

Warlord Zsinj wrote:Well, I meant that Spring only lets you have a certain number of features due to the limited SMD colour value of placing them, IIRC...

It might be possible to get around the limit as it is imposed by the compiler (like so many other things). I could write a feature placement editor if anyone wants one. It would allow a great more accuracy and control over placement.

that would be great!

I was thinkin of making a groupAI that you loaded the map up with and it elt you place features down adn see what they're like ingame but then you'd ahve to recompile the map with the feature stuff wouldnt you........

i toyyed with the idea of making a city map.. but instead of the buildings being features, i thaught about making them as extremely steep hills so that anyone could play..

the 2 problems though were, adding detail to the side. - solution idea make the buildings sleightly less steep and add a thin detailess wall tex

and secondly if a building was flattened it would look stupid.. solution - make the ground insanely hard..

this was an idea so that everyone could play it. anyone got a solution for working out the bugs?

dead why every one cant play map with features ?
and please never do a map with terrain as buildings

Masse wrote:dead why every one cant play map with features ?
and please never do a map with terrain as buildings

agreed