Does Spring allow enclosed spaces?

How bad would this be if you use features with colvolumes imitating walls and ceilings? I wouldn't know if you could click through it.


I know for sure that spring can't do 'caves', because for any x,y location in the map, it has 1 and only 1 ground height. Shear cliffs like you see on sandcastles are engine possible, but there cannot be a 'ceiling' made of ground, and there can be only one ground height in a single x,y coordinate in world space. If it's possible to fake a cave with features, I don't think you can path in top of the fake cave, only inside of it. Features going overhead like in Industrial Revolution. Not sure how the colvolumes are in that map.

I think you'd need to write a widget to hide the features when they are near the center of the screen, or write a widget to show units and such through it somehow (whether by stippling, flat colour silhouette, or having cut out transparent holes show up in the features), AFAIK the engine has no native support for that.

quote: AFAIK the engine has no native support for that.

You can make them invisible to player by setting a los mask iirc.

Depending on the size of it all, and depending how you want to do it, would it be possible to:

Have a unit defined as 'box'
Have a unit defined as 'truck'
Have truck able to transport units that are 'box'
Able to use engine transport commands like load/unload like old surfboard to load boxes into truck

Is this what you mean by enclosed space? I think box might phase through truck walls.

P.S. I have no development experience with spring besides looking through sections of zk game code.

Well no, but actually yes.

As others have said in this thread. You can mostly simulate a roof using features, and If need be you can prehaps use an unit, which has the benefits of having access to much more animation options.

Though I feel like what you actually want are units being loaded into the trailers or let's say a truck. In that case what you want to do depends on how you want to implement this.

If you want to make a transport that acts similarly to let's C&C's transport boats then there's absolutely nothing that stops you from doing this. You can make Hercules load units into a box and Spring is perfectly fine with that. From a physics standpoint the engine doesn't actually care about the models and such of a unit. It really just sees a colvol and a few other things which you define. Having a transport truck teleport units into a enclosed box works perfectly fine.

If you want to prehaps make a moving trailer that units can freely move onto and off of, that would act mostly as a moving platform with a roof. then it's far more complicated. But it's still not out of the question. You can create the roof and floor using the colvol of a unit or feature. The movement of units on it and units coming onto it can be both handled by lua. You'll also probably need to chain all commands issue to locations on that transport to the transport. It'll be very hard but not undoable.