Porting Rts Sk To Tse
by Ian Winter · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 08/28/2005 (5:56 pm) · 5 replies
Yes yes, I know with been here before and I have read the answers from back then, but last time I saw the question asked was prior to Atlas so my question is, how much work is involved in porting the RTS SK to TSE now that Atlas is in? I'm assuming it'll make porting say, the mini-map a little less trivial that before for starters and I'm guessing there'd be a little more work in porting the selection circles? Am I right in thinking that? What other things would prove difficult now if any?
I'm an average programmer and can work my way through most things however I'm not really up on how Torque does everything yet still, is this something I could potentially attempt or will I likely need to know the engine inside out to port the RTS SK?
Finally, is there any plans for GG to do an official TSE port ever? I'm guessing it'll be sometime in the future if so and apologies again - I'm sure I've seen this asked elsewhere before but I couldn't find the old question and response ;)
Thanks!
I'm an average programmer and can work my way through most things however I'm not really up on how Torque does everything yet still, is this something I could potentially attempt or will I likely need to know the engine inside out to port the RTS SK?
Finally, is there any plans for GG to do an official TSE port ever? I'm guessing it'll be sometime in the future if so and apologies again - I'm sure I've seen this asked elsewhere before but I couldn't find the old question and response ;)
Thanks!
#2
I think peoples around could join their efforts to port RTS Starter kit. I can spend some hours to solve some problems.
09/01/2005 (12:28 pm)
Quote:It seems that many people want to port RTS starter to TSE, but nobody (officially) has achieve it. For GG I read (don't remember post), that they wait to see if their is enough people interested on it. (Remember they for the momment, don't have port the FPS Starter Kit. It's a member (Joseph) who has done it!)
is there any plans for GG to do an official TSE port ever?
Quote:Atlas is a major improvement of TSE. I think don't use it is a mistake. Why is your pathfinding code too tied? isn't their a way to translate these calls?
However we're not using Atlas because our pathfinding code is too tied into the older terrain API
Quote:I ran TSE with a debug build, with a PIV 2.4GHz 1Go RAM, GeForce 6800. It ran at 10-20 FPS. When I made it in release build, it ran at 80-90 FPS.
with a debug build I'm getting around 7 fps ...
I think peoples around could join their efforts to port RTS Starter kit. I can spend some hours to solve some problems.
#3
Actually, now that I think of it, the main TerrainBlock call we were using was just "getHeight". Atlas doesn't have that because the heightmap info isn't loaded in at runtime, but I could use the raycasting functionality to do it. However, Atlas (last time I checked anyway) also doesn't have any in-engine editing tools to modify the terrain/paint textures, etc. It is a fantastic terrain engine though and I expect we will use it at some point down the road once the tools are there. Too many other things to work on for now anyway. :-)
That reminds me, one major problem I do have with the current (legacy) terrain is that if we tilt the camera from an overhead view to more of a first-person view where you can see the horizon, the game slows to a crawl (like, 1 frame every couple of seconds). I never had this problem with the normal RTS kit, just within TSE. From what I could tell from running NVPerfHud it seems to draw separate primitives (quads?) for each piece of terrain instead of stitching them together, so with the repeating terrain blocks it ends up rendering 10's of thousands of objects which just kills performance. Since an RTS uses an overhead view it's not really a big issue for us, it just limits what we can do with the camera angle. Just thought I'd mention it, in case you see the same thing.
09/01/2005 (1:52 pm)
Quote:Atlas is a major improvement of TSE. I think don't use it is a mistake. Why is your pathfinding code too tied? isn't their a way to translate these calls?
Actually, now that I think of it, the main TerrainBlock call we were using was just "getHeight". Atlas doesn't have that because the heightmap info isn't loaded in at runtime, but I could use the raycasting functionality to do it. However, Atlas (last time I checked anyway) also doesn't have any in-engine editing tools to modify the terrain/paint textures, etc. It is a fantastic terrain engine though and I expect we will use it at some point down the road once the tools are there. Too many other things to work on for now anyway. :-)
That reminds me, one major problem I do have with the current (legacy) terrain is that if we tilt the camera from an overhead view to more of a first-person view where you can see the horizon, the game slows to a crawl (like, 1 frame every couple of seconds). I never had this problem with the normal RTS kit, just within TSE. From what I could tell from running NVPerfHud it seems to draw separate primitives (quads?) for each piece of terrain instead of stitching them together, so with the repeating terrain blocks it ends up rendering 10's of thousands of objects which just kills performance. Since an RTS uses an overhead view it's not really a big issue for us, it just limits what we can do with the camera angle. Just thought I'd mention it, in case you see the same thing.
#4
09/01/2005 (3:55 pm)
Quote:I think I have a solution... Tell you later if it works.
Actually, now that I think of it, the main TerrainBlock call we were using was just "getHeight"
#5
09/09/2005 (12:48 pm)
I Have the solution to getHeight problem : www.garagegames.com/blogs/51584/8672. 
Torque Owner Justin Tolchin
We're also working with porting RTS over to TSE. However we're not using Atlas because our pathfinding code is too tied into the older terrain API. We don't have selection circles working in TSE either because I could never figure out how to port it - I'm really not a graphics guy and I find the terrain code rather unfathomable. :-) So I can't be much help I just wanted to wish you luck, and if you do get selection circles working I'd love to know how (even if it is with Atlas since we might move to that somewhere down the road).
We have gotten most of the other functionality ported over; however performance is terrible right now (with a debug build I'm getting around 7 fps with 10 buildings and 10 units on screen on a P4 2 Ghz with a Geforce FX 5900) so I'm going to have to start finding out why pretty soon. :-/ Also I'm having some lingering issues with the minimap - it has some "noise" in it but I think I'm just not clearing the texture properly first. Don't have minimap "pings" working either.
I do remember seeing a post saying that they wanted to do an "official" port of RTS to TSE, but it's probably a long ways off still. Stephen Zepp or Ben Garney can probably tell you more.