Comments - Pxtl

I mostly thought about Android because of the various no-name Ouya-like android stick devices like the MK808 and uHost 2 and Dell's upcoming Ophelia that are becoming popular as emulators. That's a pretty fringe platform though.

Since you're going cross-platform, any plans for a Android/Ouya release?

... thought about an Ouya port? 4-player split-screen would be nice there.

This is really interesting - part brawler, part Armored Core, part Super Smash... any plans to go beyond 4 players? It's not like PCs are hard-limited to 4 controllers like consoles are.

It's a SpringRTS game. The community has always been a bit insular. Hard to get the word out.

Does this game support local multiplayer? Can I hook up a pile of gamepads and play kick it oldschool with some IRL friends?

Wait, what? No big release announcement, no download, just *boom, it's on Kongregate!*

Whoa.

The intent isn't to unify the visual style across the whole game - that would require throwing out too much content - but to unify the visual style within each context. So the turrets all look like each other, and every unit within each lab matches the other units in the same lab. Thus, the labs function kind of like factions. Stealthbots look like other stealthbots, and shieldbots look like other shieldbots, but stealthbots and shieldbots look completely different.

This happens because of two reasons:
1) Gundams do have some odd stances and motion that Smoth tried to capture.
2) Spring does not support importing animations. Animations must be hand-coded in a scripting-language. This means that instead of doing your animations in a 3D graphics program, you're writing rotations and translations in a text-file. Often modelers will work around this by posing the model and then jotting down the coordinates, but that's hardly an optimal workflow... and sometimes, it shows.

"Ever since the franchise, a Gundam based traditional RTS was never commercially made and I know there are millions of fans who are dying to see this. The closest thing was a fan-made Starcraft 1 project: Gundam Century, which was very well made, much respect. I hope to create this project for the community, by the community, and fill this much desired demand. "

What?

What's wrong with GundamRTS? Is it too unorthodox with the TA-like unit movement? Economy too complicated?

Not to rain on your parade - I mean, if you want to make this, of course you should - your work looks great. I just don't get why you aren't contributing to Smoth's project instead of re-inventing the wheel. Smoth's game is even based on a free engine (Spring).

So, will the settings be the seven virtues? Or the villains, maybe?

Copperplate Gothic?

Aww, it's the C64 Gridrunner and not the PS1 1v1 CTF GridRunner. The other games all look good though... but I already filled up my indie gaming queue thanks to the recent Steam sale.

Didn't realize you were working on Gravinull too. Mad props.

Long-missing feature, and with the flood of indie developers using MODDB to promote their games, segregating them is a good move. Not that I'm complaining, I love reading about indies as much as I do about mods... but they don't need to be intertwingled.

I'm left wondering about things that muddle the line - when does a game move from being a mod to being an indie game? The Spring engine is particularly befuddling, since it functions more as a modding-platform-without-a-base-game than it does as an engine... but it's also hard to call the games for Spring mods (even if it does do so, internally).

Is the distinction primarily going to be commercial vs. hobbyist/OSS? Or standalone vs. mod? Or free (and not ad-supported) vs. pay? Or free (incl. ad-supported) vs pay?

After reading the comments I suddenly feel very, very old.

One thing is that most anti-blobbing measures become ultra-tedious. Spring mods suffer from annoyances of maintaining proper build-spacing, unit-spacing, etc... and a well-spaced army gets most of the combat power of a blob with none of the disadvantage other than the micromanagement of maintaining safe distances.

This looks like Crack Dot Com's Abuse. Any relation/inspiration?

Will you be including character selection a-la Hunters DS, or will it be a Samus-type suit for everybody?

Uhm, you should probably post to moddb that you're up to 0.85 - I'd no idea there was a new OA.

Holy crap, Rocket Birds looks awesome.

Looks more directly related to the Difference Engine, the prototypical Steampunk book, in which an important event in the book is a race of steam engines.

The big problem with a 4gb requirement is that 3gb is the limit for 32-bit OS's, so you're putting a massive userbase right out there.

Holy crap this looks awesome... and you know one of the reasons it looks awesome? It looks like it's about _combat_. That's why I'm playing games, for the action. It's not an MMO. It's not yet-another-Elite wannabe where I spend 80% of the game farting around space looking for things to mine. It's a space fighter game. I don't think we've had one of those since Freespace 2. I want the Unreal freaking Tournament of space-fighter games.

Please let this be as awesome as it looks.

I'm pretty sure that multiplayer is impossible - it's not something you can retrofit.

There is a multiplayer clone of Dyson called Quantum, but it looks utterly fugly and half-assed when you put it side-by-side with Dyson. Still, it's a solid implementation of Dyson's gameplay in Java, with multiplayer.

Apistudios.com

Haven't fetched the release yet (PURE crawls on my PC) but I developed the launcher - unless Argh has renamed the file, it's in the Program Files\PURE folder and is called Pxtl.AppLauncher.exe. It was developed so that he would only have to put one icon on the desktop - I don't know if he put it in the Start menu.

It's only in Windows, since it's a VB.NET 2.0 app.

The documentation is a little chaotic, but start here:
Spring.clan-sy.com

That's the Spring engine homepage. Also try the forums and the various chat-channels in Spring's IRC.

Essentially, there are several tiers to Spring modding - the most trivial is just editing text files that control unit stats and build lists. Spring mods are just renamed 7zips, so all you need is Notepad and 7-zip for that.

Also there is Lua scripts, which involve understanding coding in Lua and Spring's Lua API - PURE does a lot of this, but for a Total Annihilation style mod you don't need Lua, since the engine has built-in support for all TA gameplay (which it was originally built for.

For units, you model them in the modeling program of your choice, but don't animate - instead, you do the model as a heirarchy of parts with a shared skin, import that model into Spring through Upspring, and then script the movements of those parts with Spring's second scripting language, BOS, which is then compiled with COB.

Really, just go to the wiki and start reading, and hit the forum and start asking questions.

That's a weakness of the Spring engine - Spring uses a clone of TA's old scripting language for animation. That means that animation is hand-scripted, as in you have to literally write-out each rotation of each part as a loop. No nice IK-based 3D modelling software to help you animate.

However, there is a guy working on getting MD5 support into Spring. At that point, guys like Argh will be able to improve their animations.

I've been having a problem: I've been trying to play some mods against bots, and can't get it to go. I've been trying Superheros, BFGTag, and Bouncy, and none work. Is this a bug? An impossible feature? I ask because the main game seems to have working bots. What gives?

@limagic

No, it's obviously based on Aardappel's Cube engine (notice the editor shot in the top-right-corner, and that Makke is involved). Can anybody explain what this brings to Cube besides kiddification? I assume the main Quake-like game of Cube has been removed.