Hi all,

It's been a very long time since I've made or attempted to make a game with Gamestudio. But recently I've become interested by the prospect of making a real time strategy game similar to StarCraft or WarCraft.

Just to quiet the naysayers out there, no, I don't plan to make this into a "real" game. It's just a project. I'm not trying to compete with any of the big guys in any way.

Mostly I'm doing this to test my skill. Making FPS games is fun, but it doesn't take much programming to get a simple game rolling.

I've only been working on this project for a few days, but knowing what kind of a project it will be, I wanted to ask for some advice from the experienced users here.

Right now, I only have one question:
1. Pathfinding. How should I get started tackling this monster? Can anyone suggest any articles I should read? Books? I've heard of an "Intense X" plugin that supposedly handles pathfinding, but their site seems to be down and I'm not keen on the idea of wrapping my entire project up in some plugin I'm unfamiliar with.

(Note to mods: I do plan to keep this thread updated with details for those that are interested in this project, so please don't move this)

This would probably give you a good start good luck with the project.

Thanks for the input, MrGuest! This will be very helpful. But now I have another question for you guys.

For the last few days I've been thinking about creating a simple tile based map format, but I noticed that using ent_create() to spawn multiple map entities in this fashion chews away at the nexus at a ridiculous rate. Can this be changed? And if not, what kind of map format would you suggest I use?

I'm reluctant to build my maps in WED because I want to keep my game grid based and simple, and WED interferes with this idea on a number of levels.

If you are using map entities to form your level (tiles) use "tex_share" (dunno in lite-c) to preserve some video memory.
The same thing (I think) can be applied to models , in MED use an "external texture". Not shure about this , but I think it loads it only once , and makes the models smaller (this way they'll use less memory to load).

BTW , if you have problems with FPS with a lot of tiles , dont assign them a function. Use one global function to control/update tiles one by one. A lot of small functions drop the frame rate a lot. Atleast thats what I've experienced in the past

EDIT : Forgot to mention. Again not shure , but I think weaker light calculations also lower the map entity size , wich should decrease memory usage and increase FPS.

The article with which i learned A* was this one

I also started a RTS project some time ago, but atm i'm to lazy to implement open and closed lists.

How my levels are build up:
- a wmb with terrain and modells
- texture as a mask for trees
- texture as a mask for nodes

The graph is grid based and is stored in an array ( i use no ents for this )

Perhaps we could exchange our experiences. Till new year i want to implement the pathfinding

muffel

@EpisloN: Thanks for the tips. I'll see if they fix my problem.

@muffel: Thanks for the link! I'll bookmark it for later.


What do you use to build the terrain? I've played around with MED to do this, but the tools seem insufficient for building terrain that's anything less than chaotic and mountainous. And I'm not a texture artist by any means so it's hard for me to apply any more texture than simple color to my terrains.

On that same note, I've seen numerous references to a Terrain Texture Generator plugin for MED in the manual, but I can't find it. What's that all about?

For texture use Multitexturing shader on the terrain to add up to 4 textures , tiled on the whole terrain (find it in the Wiki).
For creating terrains (not randomly) use Photoshop and clouds (or some other method) and manualy form the environment with the paint brush Good idea is to have a tablet...
In case you dont know how to paint terrains , darker to black is lower points , lighter to white is high points when you import a terrain height map. You can even make a terrain in Paint but that'll be very annoying , pixel by pixel.

Yeah, I understand what a heightmap is.

The trouble with simply painting a terrain in something like Photoshop or MED (using the Magnet tool) is that you end up with a very hilly terrain that doesn't suit an RTS very well. In an RTS, you need lots of level areas to build bases and move your units smoothly.

Traditionally, RTS games only use slopes to move from one plane to another. I want to emulate that kind of terrain in my game.

EDIT: On another note, I've tried adding "tex_share=1" before my level_load statement, but it didn't seem to work. I think it's important to note that I'm loading an empty level, and then I'm adding multiple map entities using for() loops to act as the tiles.

Is there anyway to tell the engine that I will be loading multiple copies of the same map files, and that it need not allocate multiple copies of texture and/or geometry data for each entity?

Ok, I've decided to go with terrain based levels. To make them, I use MED to create a terrain 128x128 vertices in size, with each polygon sized at 64x64. The standard trooper unit is considered 128x128x128, meaning each polygon is half the size of a trooper.

To keep my terrain simple, I'm making heavy use of the min/max options of the magnet tool.

For fine tweaking though, such as adding perfectly smooth slopes, I would like to be able to do use an image editor. However, MED cannot export HMP files as bitmaps (although it can import them), so I'm stuck there. Does anyone know of a plugin that can export HMP files as BMP files?

EDIT: For the multitexturing shader to work, it seems that I also need the heightmap in an image file (for blending purposes). So I'm doubly screwed if no one can help me. :\

my favourite tool for terrains
maybe you get a nice result
http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/