Spring RTS Engine

Just cause I'm curious...

I like good looking terrain. Hard drives are getting cheaper and bigger plus uf loves FA's huge maps and has infinate bandwidth for them

fixed

I think they're fine a slong as I dont have to download 100MB worth of maps in a single file just so I can get at just one of them.

The problem comes when you're waiting 30 mins for a game to start while someone downloads the map, or when they finally change the map at the 60% downloaded mark.

These answers are confusing ..
both are true for me :)

I have a feeling this is related to spring. If so why is the poll about Quake 3?

Quake 3 looks terrible even with Textures all the way up. I stuck with Doom II. I can video edit ingame!

SM3 is both smaller in filesize and very pretty

Argh wrote:SM3 is both smaller in filesize and very pretty

But, currently, insufficently supported.

I wonder how much of sm3's reputation is true and how much of it is just unfamiliarity...

when playing over lan its annoying if everybody has to get the 2+ GB of maps. i dont care about a texture that repeats itself sometimes. but when the whole map is a shade of brown it looks boring.

Don't forget stuff, including the map me thinks, will have to be copied onto the ram. So people with less and slower ram will suffer from good terrain.
But then again, this is only a thought so I could be wrong. Someone, but definitely not me, should find out.

Actually I do play ET on minimal configuration. I'd turn the textures off if it was possible. They're distracting.

I don't like huge maps because your average mod has about 20-30 move types and it takes aeons to calculate here.
I don't mind huge filesizes though. If a good map is worth it, so be it. No one is forcing me to download a map either, so I don't get why there has been discussion and arguing about filesizes in the past.

Well, some of you may not understand the quake3 referance; obviously some of you do.

Back before the advent of easy to get broadband access, here in KC there were huge lan parties hosted, and I liked quake3 but wasn't super into it. At that party I saw a first. A guy playing quake3 with absolutely no textures.

I thought to myself, How is winning in video game so important that they would make it look super crappy just to gain an edge over opponents? I still sometime think back to that and I'm honestly bewildered that a game could be that important to someone.

The quake3 poll option was in it's own way a joke, even if it's only funny to me, however it represents the option of preferring less quality.


As I said before. Peoples opinions on this don't really matter to me, but I am curious. Look at it this way. With Icexuick's maps, my own, and a few various others (Noize come to mind... He's done really neat things with terragen texturing), and yes, even altored divide a la caydr (there is no denying that it is absolutely beautiful, regardless of how playable it is. Metal patches look a bit funky but meh, that's small beans).

The point is that when people download spring, I want them to be impressed with the visual quality. Azure rampart and starfish isn't exactly going to impress anyone (regardless of whether I like them or not, which I do...) they are 100% fugly, and there are tons more like that, Play great, look like crap. SM3 is not gonna change anything. A monkey could make a map in sm3, that doesn't mean that just because sm3 is in some ways visually superior (and unfortunately, many ways not) that every map is gonna look like hawt sex.

The fact that we have anyone being able to contribute to the maps for spring is in 1 way a good thing, and also a bad thing for the same reason. Many rts' you buy commercially may look awesome, but your selection of maps to play on is kinda limited, whereas in spring we have near limitless choice, but not all of those possible choices look very good.

With my maps (and no, I'm not begging that you download them or even play them) I try with every new one to break a boundry of some kind. I think in many ways I have succeeded. Sometimes I have succeeded and failed in the same breath (Iron Gauntlet comes to mind. Looks omgawesome, plays 100% fail in everything save BA, which is fine, but not exactly what I had in mind).

Regardless of anything I have to say, nothing in spring mapping is likely to change and I'm not sure anything really needs to. But there is one thing to be aware of. In the current spring map format, the more complicated the texturing, the large the filsize. Less complicated texturing = low filesize. Honestly, I think that we mappers need to be setting the bar higher, whether it be via sm3 or not, cause people playing current commercial rts' may or may not be impressed, but the more they are impressed, the more likely they will be to tell all their friends about it.


SM3 has some big problems right now. Let me go ahead and outline them so that everyone knows.

Normals, they look great, but we cannot control the blend, which makes using them to good effect quite difficult.

Performance, they perform like crap, even on high end systems. Even my machine chuggs down to 15 fps with full settings on them.

Feature placement, atm... Sucks, and it sucks hard. Don't think I need to go into detail here.

Documentation, Needs a kick in the ass. JC has done a great job so far, but the documentation is still quite incomplete.

Lack of lobby support, the biggest issue of them all. Without proper lobby support for them, there isn't really much point in making them.


Mehere101, you cite possible lack of knowledge about sm3 being the largest stumbling block. Hardly. Myself, mufdvr, weaver, and various others are Very knowledgeable about sm3, which is why we aren't doing anything with it atm.

It's getting really annoying for people calling for maps in sm3. They have no idea why we aren't using it atm, and they don't care to actually read anything (I.E. This post) to understand why we currently are not.

Don't misunderstand me here guys. I am not berating the devs at all about sm3. In fact, as I understand it, many of the above issues are somewhat taken care of (no word on lobby support yet though). So certain parts of my sm3 talking about are not entirely relavant to the next version of spring. Honestly, it seems like JC has lost interest in SM3 to some extent, which is a damn shame considering that he is the lifeforce behind it. He did however make quite a critical mistake in thinking that only about 3 texture layers will be used in sm3's. Whakamatunga riri is not a good example of sm3, simply because it uses 8 or 9 levels of texturing, which is somewhat unreal.

In all honestly, most sm3 maps will probably need about 4-6 levels of texturing.

Meh, anyway, I've gone somewhat off topic.

iamacup wrote:

I like good looking terrain. Hard drives are getting cheaper and bigger plus uf loves FA's huge maps and has infinate bandwidth for them

fixed

Ya know, when Fileuniverse bit the dust, I had almost secured a deal to host my own maps of my own accord. Not a day goes by when I am not thankful for Unknown Files.

mehere101 wrote:I wonder how much of sm3's reputation is true and how much of it is just unfamiliarity...

smoth wrote:

We can use it just fine.


This is a discussion of the format:
http://spring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewtop ... 2&start=20

Unfamiliarity... not really. It does currently run like an old man riding a unicycle whilst getting punched in the face.

TASClient shows my SM3 testmap fine, it just needs a minimap making (I cba for a test map)

Gameplay is most important, but if you can make the map look nice too, why not? Filesize should not be excessive, i.e. the analogy would be don't use TIFF when you can use PNG, but don't use crappy compression jpg either.

Unfamiliarity... not really. It does currently run like an old man riding a unicycle whilst getting punched in the face.

But.. disabling the bumpmaps, does it run well enough then?

Im being 100% serious when i say the only reason i play video games is to be better than other people at them.

I could be playing tetris or crysis i dont give a shit as long as im competing

The only thing I have against large filesize maps is that they take frakking forever to download...