Tremulous RTS may be developed!

[ThePyro]

I'm curious how you plan on handling Alien defensive structures.  In Tremulous, these structures are only effective at short distances.  However, the Spring engine isn't really equipped to handle indoor environments, so typical engagement distances will be medium to long range.  Human units could destroy short range alien defenses trivially on existing Spring maps.

You could create your own Spring maps, of course, in order to limit line-of-sight to shorter distances.  Indoor environments are still problematic, though, since Spring uses heightmaps for terrain instead of "real" 3D geometry.  Vertical walls look like crap because you end up with 1 pixel of the texture stretched over the entire wall.

About the closest you can get to a decent looking map with walls (sortof) would be one of the metal world maps.

[MitSugna]

Hero in a jetsuit finished,. so you see, we are getting stuff done. I have a couple of alien queen arms too. I need to find out how to post images on this forum

Screenshots or It never happened

[Iguana]

Hello everybody... Been silent for too long and so I want to clear some stuff up.

I just want to know how you plan on balancing a 2-race RTS where one race is almost exclusively ranged combat, and the other almost exclusively melee.  A large part of Tremulous is the environment... have you considered how you're going to utilize dim lighting, hallways, and WALLWALK?

Do all human units have to make a pit stop at the armory structure before they can be of any use, and will there be binds, or will you have to go through a godforsaken menu every time?  Do humans not have any radar/minimap at all until they've killed a sufficient number of aliens?  Will you still have a 100bp cap?  Will your aliens hop around?  How accurate will the various units be?  Can one human with a massdriver single-handedly win the game?  Can alien structures be built on the walls and ceiling?  How vulnerable will the reactor be to base-hopping?  WILL THERE BE A HOVEL?!!

Obviously we will have to tweak the races to make them play better as an RTS so it has fun, exciting, gameplay; not just an FPS viewed from above! By this we are adding a few more aliens and making them very cheap. Think of aliens as the Russian race from Age of Empires 3: cheap units that can be trained en masse and favour hit and run, ambush tactics. Of course there will be really big alien units as well for those who have the dedication to get there like Princes, Tyrants and (although not as combat orientated but can convert into new Overminds) Queens. Aliens we are planning to have a stacked training queue like in AoE3. Humans will be trained in squads like in Dawn of War and to unlock new squads you will have to research their weapons and armour (e.g. you have to research a Shotgun before you can train shotgun wielding infantry.) Humans spawn with all their weapons as per the squad (e.g. if you are an aerial unit you spawn with jetpacks) and at the moment we are planning to not have the armoury required for getting more ammo. Because of the large combination of weapons in Trem, there will be a large variety of squads you can train. Also, thee are tanks and aircraft to make it more like a standard RTS. So aliens are more rush/ambush than in Trem and humans a lot more squad orientated like the Space Marines in DoW than their counterparts in Trem that can solo things... Build points are a resource so can be harvested from the environment and the reactor provides a trickle of resources. There for it is more like a traditional RTS wood resource. I'm afraid I cannot commit to any HUD at the time seeing as though we are still in the resource and asset design phase and are slowly working on he basic game engine; no fancy stuff yet but I assure you we will try to cram as many features into it as a commercial RTS.

Just bear in mind that when your RTS ends up being complete shit, like it inevitably will, you'll have a vast international community pissing all over you.  Please give me your e-mail address now, I want to have plenty of time to prepare my hate-mail for the release date.

I find your lack of faith disturbing, young paduan.

I have some experience with the spring engine. What I won't have till start of next year is much time - but I'll be sure to follow this !

Question (though I realise you probably already set on the engine decision): What sort of scale are you thinking of - ie do you want to keep the size of the game similiar to Tremulous, with maybe 30 - 60 units a side, or larger. I'm asking because my feeling is that the Spring engine lends itself well to large/epic scale games, but only so-so for more limi ted ones. Hmm, I think the impression also has to do with the size you want to represent... I could be mistaken though.
I would have thought Glest might be your better bet, to be honest, but then, I have no idea how much flexibility that has on the Engine side.

Well, see you round in any case !

Sean

P.S. Spring does not yet support Skeletal animation - probably quite a drawback for any game that want's Organic movement  (no idea what Glest does).

You are correct; we are aiming for very large games limited only by your skill and by your CPU. Spring supports tens of thousands of units and we want that sort of capabilities open to those who really love large armies (like me; I can't stand unit caps and only in Spring can I let my inner masser come out in earnest)! And as with you, I could not find out the sort of stuff Glest had to offer; there was no real "Features" section on the webpage. And for the skeletal animation, as far as I know Spring has 3rd party options to allow it to support skeletal animation and official support is being developed right now. This means that it should be out by the time we are ready. If not, 3rd party extras will serve just as well. I like skeletal animation because of inverse kinetics and easy integration with a physics engine; something I think would really benefit a Trem RTS. Also, Spring has a large-ish community so it will be fairly easy to ge the odd bits of support when needed.

Attack1, tell him to join forces with Blood_god and his team =]

We are always looking for help with such a large undertaking.

[twigstik97]

Lookin awesome.
Could u give a % on how much you've finished?
Or atleast til u can give us a beta?

Also:
With alien vehicles/aircraft.
Just make vehicles like normal cept with tentacles and other freaky shit.
Aircraft can be flying aliens.

Humans are obvious

[CreatureofHell]

Lookin awesome.

 

[Demolution]

Lookin awesome.

 

We're all trying to imagine what something like this will look like. He's just imagining harder than us.

[Iguana]

Lookin awesome.
Could u give a % on how much you've finished?
Or atleast til u can give us a beta?

Also:
With alien vehicles/aircraft.
Just make vehicles like normal cept with tentacles and other freaky shit.
Aircraft can be flying aliens.

Humans are obvious

I'm not committing to any time until completion or % since this is a large project that may, for a completely unknown reason, have to have bits redone. An unexpected flaw in Spring could set us back months so I do not like making guestimates on completion time when in fact I have no idea. We will provide updates and status reports when we see fit.

Also, should aliens have vehicles? Remember that as far as I know there is no intelligence in aliens, only the Overmind and even then that is limited to coordinating attacks and building. I doubt aliens have the mental ability to build machines... unless of course they go all flood on us and 'infect' machines/buildings which is not fitting at all with the back story or anything. However, we do think thaat the two races should be balanced yet contrasting just like in the original game. hat is why while the humans have a wide variety of units each for specific purposes, aliens have but a few units but are highly effective and generalised in use... While humans have vehicles aliens have massive tanks (like the tyrant and princes) which can act like an alien vehicle. While humans can call down support from above (in really advanced stages) like orbital strikes, aliens can attack from below with special attacks depending on how many Overminds you control (OMs are converted queens) (e.g. if you have one OM every 5 mins or so you can call for a tentale or spike to attack someone from below. If you have five OMs then every ten minutes you can summon a great big bloody tentacle thing that can destroy entire armies.) It is just an idea we are tossing around.

Lookin awesome.

 

We're all trying to imagine what something like this will look like. He's just imagining harder than us.

Lol

[Winnie the Pooh]

I'm not committing to any time until completion or % since this is a large project that may, for a completely unknown reason, have to have bits redone. An unexpected flaw in Spring could set us back months so I do not like making guestimates on completion time when in fact I have no idea. We will provide updates and status reports when we see fit.

Please do yourself and ALL of us a favor by giving yourself deadlines to meet. Things like this need deadlines more than you can imagine, because without them, nothing gets done (humans are lazy pigs). You can keep it to your inner circle of developers, sure, but at least have one.

[Iguana]

I'm not committing to any time until completion or % since this is a large project that may, for a completely unknown reason, have to have bits redone. An unexpected flaw in Spring could set us back months so I do not like making guestimates on completion time when in fact I have no idea. We will provide updates and status reports when we see fit.

Please do yourself and ALL of us a favor by giving yourself deadlines to meet. Things like this need deadlines more than you can imagine, because without them, nothing gets done (humans are lazy pigs). You can keep it to your inner circle of developers, sure, but at least have one.

We have deadlines and milestones of course... But as far as "The whole game will be ready in x months"... No, I do not plan like that. The developers and I are breaking it down into stages e.g. "The human models will be ready in x weeks" and "the game HUD will be ready in x weeks" which means that we can add stages and remove unneccessary stages from the project easily without messing up our plans too much. This allows us to make a very general, broad and dynamic 'range' of when the project may be completed without actually setting anything in stone which I think is a bad idea (as I said, an unexpected delay could set us back months). And we are keeping our deadlines private for now as if we fail to meet a single dateline, no matter how small and simple, I know everyone here will hate us and I could never use the pseudonym Iguana again.

[Blood_god]

Hero in a jetsuit finished,. so you see, we are getting stuff done. I have a couple of alien queen arms too. I need to find out how to post images on this forum

Screenshots or It never happened

I completely understand your point of view. Unfortunately I am not frequent on forums and so have no idea how to post a picture. What do I put in the section between img commands? tell me and You get those screenshots as soon as I read your post.

[Blood_god]

I notice we have a troll here.

Scimitar, fuck off

[mooseberry]

Hero in a jetsuit finished,. so you see, we are getting stuff done. I have a couple of alien queen arms too. I need to find out how to post images on this forum

Screenshots or It never happened

I completely understand your point of view. Unfortunately I am not frequent on forums and so have no idea how to post a picture. What do I put in the section between img commands? tell me and You get those screenshots as soon as I read your post.

You do just like on any other smf forum. <.< [img]ImageUrl[/img ] <-- But no space there.

[Celestial_Rage]

or you can paste the url of the image. Highlight it and click on the picture frame on the forum icon.

Code:

[img]http://www.urloftheimage.com/image.png[/img]

[Iguana]

I think you may have to host it externally on an image host site, correct?

[Kiwi]

That's correct, you do have to host it externally, I recommend Image Shack.

I notice we have a troll here.

Scimitar, fuck off

:/ I don't think thats quite the right attitude to have with people here.  Were all full of skepticism, a lot of things get started, but never get finished.

[Kaine]

Kiwi, I fucking love you.  Blood_god: Blow me.

[mooseberry]

That's correct, you do have to host it externally, I recommend Image Shack.

Actually that is not the case. While hosting it to some image hosting site is probably a good idea in general, allowing you to share the URL with anyone through any medium, it is not actually neccesary for posting images here. If you look under the box for typing your post, you'll notice something called "Additional Options..." Click on that to Attach an image from your hard drive to the post.

Although, to be frank, figuring out how to post pictures on a forum is really not that difficult of a task. I hope you are better at coding and modeling than you are at image posting.

[Kiwi]

But that takes up space on the tremulous.net servers, we wouldn't want to take up more space than we need to now would we 

[MitSugna]

You are just confirming me.

[Kaine]

Isn't that a Luthern thing?