rts Sample Project

Spot­ted a dis­cus­sion on the GameCore forums regard­ing a turn-based game, and men­tioned that the sim­ple RTS exper­i­ment that I’ve been work­ing on would be some­what of a start­ing point for devel­op­ing this.

So here it is in all of it’s glory:

The GameCore Basic RTS Project Template

As far as I know, this tem­plate will work with the Default Script library that shipped with 2.0.5, but I may have added a few things. If some­one can do some test­nig of this and let me know — worst case I can post an updated ver­sion of the script library.

Sup­ported Features:

rts-style cam­era sys­tem
well, real­is­ti­cally it’s more of a world-in-conflict style cam­era sys­tem but it’s much bet­ter than most rts cam­eras). To move around the world, either move the mouse to the edge of the screen or sim­ply use the wsad / arrow keys. To rotate the cam­era, use the middle-mouse button.

mul­ti­ple unit / selec­tion box
this is also a demon­stra­tion of how to use the recently exposed Sprite sys­tem that gamecore pro­vides in 2.0.5. You can do things like selec­tion boxes, info boxes above a unit’s head (health / name etc) and so on. Click / drag to select mul­ti­ple units, right click to get them to move to a destination.

unit group­ing / quick select keys
You can group units into quick select groups by select­ing them (via the drag-selection as men­tioned above) and then press­ing shift-number key to assign them to the asso­ci­ated group.

So select­ing mul­ti­ple units and press­ing shift-1 would add them to quick select group 1. to select that group in-game you can either press the ‘1’ key or press the asso­ci­ated but­ton on the interface.

mockup ui ele­ments / forms
I have two mockup ui ele­ments imple­mented:
– unit group selec­tion
– unit formation

both of which do what you might expect. the group selec­tion is basi­cally an on-screen but­ton that does the same thing as press­ing the 1–9 keys — and will select the units in that group.

the unit for­ma­tion will set the spe­cific for­ma­tion for the unit to move in. this is sort of a sim­ple hack at the moment, doesn’t really do what i want it to, but it sorta works. basi­cally when you click on a des­ti­na­tion for the units to move, the script checks to see if you have mul­ti­ple units selected. if there is only a sin­gle unit selected, the unit attempts to move to the exact point that you spec­i­fied. if you have mul­ti­ple units selected, it will spec­ify a ran­dom off­set of the des­ti­na­tion point and move the unit accord­ingly. this is so that a bunch of units don’t fight with each other to try and get to the spe­cific des­ti­na­tion (which can result in some funny after effects).

So, that’s about it — should be able to unzip it and open it ‘as is’.

The major­ity of the ‘fun stuff’ hap­pens in the camera.gsl script located in ‘media/scripts/controllers’ — the other scripts used are the sim­ple bad guy con­troller AI script that ships with gamecore and the network_character script.

Basi­cally each ‘unit’ in the RTS is an AI con­troller. The AI con­troller pro­vides the ‘brain’ for the unit, and checks to see if there are bad guys nearby, etc. The char­ac­ter con­troller is the low-level move / ani­ma­tion con­troller and han­dles all of the low-level details like choos­ing which ani­ma­tion to play, etc.

By seg­re­gat­ing each of the com­po­nents like this it keeps the indi­vid­ual scripts nice and clean and more impor­tantly, understandable.

The camera.gsl script does every­thing else — unit selec­tion, group­ing, for­ma­tions etc.

Your mileage may vary, but hope­fully this is use­ful to someone ;}

Related posts:

1. Project revamp