Design Competition: Star Wars Spring

[Warlord Zsinj]

Greetings from Star Wars Spring!

Welcome to our first Design Competition!

About Star Wars Spring
Star Wars Spring is a modification for the Spring Engine. The Spring engine is a remake of the classic Real Time Strategy, Total Annihilation (voted The Best Strategy Game of All Time) into a modern 3D engine.
It is a free Open Source project which has been blossoming for the last few years, and will have 300 or so players in it's gamelobby on a good night.

Spring lets you play on a gorgeous 3D engine, which looks like this:


There are also a large variety of mods available to play, such as:


Star Wars Spring is an evolution of a mod for Total Annihilation, Star Wars TA. Our first release for the Spring engine largely involved porting these units over to Spring, and remodelling a few of the uglier ones. This was released over a year ago, and has attracted over 8,000 downloads in total, and was featured in a popular British Gaming Magazine [click for article].

However, the simplistic nature of the unit models seen in that article is due to the fact that they were originally intended for the TA engine. Dating from 1997, it was the first 3D RTS, and feasibly limited polygon counts at around the 200 mark. Spring however, allows us to bump this significantly higher, and modern graphic standards means that players expect a far higher level of visual competence. We are working hard on a new release, seen here:





To the actual Design Competition!

Introduction
In redesigning much of Star Wars Spring, we have taken it upon ourselves to refine and change the balance. One of the things we are intending to do is to make the two sides (Rebels and Imperials) more assymetrical.

Currently, both sides commence the game with a similar construction vehicle. The ugly thing we use now doesn't really fit the role for the central element of imperial's player war machine - and it is not particularly impressive at all. Furthermore, to reflect our balance changes, instead of each side starting with almost the same construction vehicle, we've decided that the imperial starting unit would not be a mobile vehicle, but a static headquarters building (A bit like the Construction Yard from Command & Conquer). There is no real canon for this; the only precedent in the Star Wars universe to this is the the Prefabricated Garrison Base. Which is more or less what we want, but on a much, much smaller scale.

Given the importance of this unit, we think it is essential that it looks as good as it possibly can, so we're opening the design up to you in a competition.

The winning design will be used in our next release as what is essentially the most important thing in the entire Imperial arsenal; something which is seen in practically every single game of Star Wars Spring.
... And of course you will be credited accordingly

Onto the specifics:

Requirements of Design
Here are the 'rules' for the required submissions. Please understand that we are flexible regarding rules in some regards (obviously not in others such as "It is an immobile structure"). The rules are there more as an indication of what we need, and as a starting point. We aren't setting out to inhibit your creativity; creative designs are what we are after!. Please feel free to query us regarding them.

Required elements

1) It should be no bigger then indicated in the image above (use the Stormtroopers as a guide for scale. Old commander included for ugliness comparisons
2) It should be an immobile structure
3) It should be capable of constructing units either through:
- "training units" inside itself
- Having a clear "landing pad" structure where units can be delivered from an unseen orbiting Star Destroyer via a shuttle.
It will not be building any large vehicles, only stormtroopers and probe droids, and perhaps a speeder bike, so you don't need to make it look like a giant factory.
4) It needs some sort of radar device. This does not have to be a standard radar shape, it could look like a military radar, or it could just be a big antenna.
5) It is armed with the following:
- 360 degree light laser battery
note: We are not specifying a specific weapon type, so you don't need to go search for a "light laser battery". We simply want a weapon that is intended to destroy infantry at a medium range. It could be guys standing in guard towers, it could be automated turrets, anything really.
Furthermore, 360 degree fire coverage doesn't mean you can't have 4 guns with 90 degree arcs each, or two guns with 180 degree arcs, etc.
- An anti air weapon
Again, this could be a missile battery, or a flak turret. Its up to you.
6) It needs clear provision for team colours

Optional Elements
These do not have to be included for the design to be accepted, but you may wish to include them, and designs using these elements will be looked upon favourably:
1) A "folding up mechanism", whereby the structure is capable of somehow turning on an armoured state. This could be through unveiling steel armour, through folding up and closing into itself, burrowing beneath the ground, etc. This should not involve star wars-style energy shields.
2) Upgrade slots: Visible areas on the commander that will receive extra "appendages" as the player constructs certain upgrades on their commander, to give it new abilities (you don't really have to provide these abilities, we haven't quite decided these ourselves, nor worked out how to trick the Spring engine into letting us to do it), but maybe think about how this building would be "expanded" on top of what is already there.
3) This thing is meant to be dropped by a Star Destroyer onto a planet to subdue it. Therefore, some sort of landing animation that could play at the outset of the game (and perhaps if we allow the player to build more) would be nice. This could involve a sort of meteor slamming into the ground, then opening up effect, or it could be some sort of shuttle lowering the thing to the ground. Or it could have engines built into it, so that it lowers itself into the ground, etc. Whatever you can think of! Have it land in a giant egg which hatches open!
4) Include the Imperial Logo somewhere on the structure

Aesthetic Elements / The spirit of the design
Think of these more as guidelines or suggestions then rules, unlike the necessary requirements indicated above. I want to encourage interesting and varied designs, not funnel you all into producing the same things.
1) This is the centrepiece of the Imperial warmachine. It needs to be big and nasty, and look very impressive. It needs to look like a command centre; but also a command centre meant for war on the front lines. So it needs to look battle ready. Think of it as a "field HQ". (no tents! )
2) It must be Imperial. Imperials tend to use sharp lines, heavy concreted elements, advanced war technology, and cold steel. It should look foreboding, and more then a little evil. In looking quasi-megalomaniac, it shouldn't look B-grade supervillain fortress either. It should look realistic, and functional as well as evil and oppressive. Think Stalin or Hitler rather then Ming the Merciless
3) People like to look at a structure that appears to be alive rather then an inert mass. Pieces that move, maybe stormtroopers that walk around the perimeter, or scan the horizon; rotating radars, etc. Vent fans that spin, or flashing lights are always good.
4) If you plan to have units be trained internally rather then using the landing pad, some sort of visual animation to convey this to the player would be needed.
5) The image earlier showing size is the standard Spring view. Certainly, the camera can be rotated into pretty much any position; but for the most part, because this is an RTS, players are looking at it from this perspective. Your design should aim to look the best from this view.
6) The way in which it "meets the ground" needs to be resolved; does it look half submerged? Is it raised on a concrete block?

Some important features/limitations of the Spring engine to bare in mind:
- Spring models are UV mapped, with channels for reflectivity, self-illumination, and team color. That means you can have shiny surfaces, glow-in-dark pixels, and that the team color doesn't have to be bright red/blue but can be gradually blended with the base texture. You are not expected to UV map a model for the competition, though a textured model is a lot easier to understand and imagine in-game then an untextured model.
- If you decide to do a model, it should be kept under 4000 polygons, preferably even under 2500. However this is an important unit, and will likely be limited to one per player, so we are happy for you to go as high as 4000, as long as it's worth it. For instance don't waste thousands polys on a grill, or on a perfectly round sphere.
- The engine is capable of handling smoothing of edges, so you can have round elements. 8 sides is all you need for a reasonably flawless cylinder.
- The animation is done with translation and rotation of solid parts. No skeletal system. No polygon deformation.
- The engine can spawn effects on the building, such as decorative lights, lasers, etc. Smoke is preferably avoided to keep particle counts down.

The Requirements of the Competition
Submission Types
3D models are looked upon favourably, as we can rotate them, zoom in and out, etc. If we like your design a lot, we may be able to just use the model itself in the end. We can deal with most common filetypes.

You are welcome to submit sequential screenshots showing how things work, animation clips, anything that will help us understand your building.

However, we are just as happy to receive illustrations and drawings indicating your design, and how your unit works, instead. These could be scanned sketches, photoshopped works, anything. As long as they are:
- Clear
- Have a couple of different views, perspective, isometric or orthogonal, so that if we choose your design we can easily translate it into 3D.
- indicate through illustration or annotations the most important animations you have intended for the structure.
For example, if you decide to have your commander fold up into an armoured state, we would need a picture of it open, a picture of it closed, and perhaps a picture of it as it "folds up" to explain how this works.

Closing date
Given that we are trying to push a release out, we can't wait too long for this, so the deadline for all submissions will be Monday, the 30th of April.
This is just over three weeks from now. Hopefully this will give you enough time to work out and refine your designs.
If there are any changes to the length of the competition, you will be all informed of this well in advance of the closing date.

FINAL submissions should be emailed to: starwarsspring@gmail.com

However, we very much encourage you to post your ideas and work-in-progress in this thread, so that other users can comment and criticise, giving you the chance to rework your designs, change them, etc.

Please note that this competition is being simultaneously run at the following other communities:
Jedi Council Art Forum
ModDB
Spring Art & Modelling Forum
We have no bias for any site, but want you to understand that the final winner may not necessarily be from SFM.
Also, don't worry about checking those communities to keep an eye on competition, I'll be cross-posting all WIP entries.

Good luck!

And a final little note:
While the winning design will be used, we have to reserve the right to be able to alter the design a little bit, in the case that it is difficult to do in 3D, or in Spring, or for any other number of functional requirements. If we do this, we'll endeavour to talk with the winner about this so that he/she still has input on this.

Warlord Zsinj
Star Wars Spring



P.S: I'd just like to extend my sincere appreciation to comco for being extremely helpful in this process, and allowing me to run this competition at SFM. Thanks a heap, mate!

[Captain J. Wesley]

:| Wowness. Although I can't do it myself, I will be an interested bystander.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Don't be shy now! I'm happy to hear from anyone interested and answer any questions.

Here's a good one from the Spring community:
[paraphrased:]
"Can I have probe droids patrolling the permiter of the building? What about troopers that patrol the walls of the structure?"

Our response (it's a little technical heavy, because these guys are already very familiar with the Spring engine. If you want me to clarify anything, please ask):

Working units into the design is fine; but I think it is important that these units stay within the bounds of the building, from a functional point of view.

This is due to the fact that they wouldn't be units with normal unit intelligence, they would just be animated parts of the building. This means that units won't necessarily behave the way you want them too when interacting with other units. It also means that enemy troops won't fire at those "building parts" when they are being fired at by them, but will rather fire at the building itself, which could look odd.

Perhaps, instead of using patrolling probe droids, you could use a hovering drone armed with lasers instead? That would deal with pathfinding issues (you'd just make it a floating turret), and make it look a little bit more believable. That could be pretty cool, IMO.

We haven't really investigated too much into the new LUA scripting, but it might be possible to spawn the drones as individual units (with their own unit AI's, rather then actual parts of the building) whenever the building is under attack, and then remove them once the threat has been removed. I'll have to check that one up for you.

EDIT: Updated above post to reflect new information. Having troopers with legs that move around the building is perfectly fine; but you are best to keep them within the confines of the building perimeter.

[Andrew March]

And exactly what is the incentive for the creative types amongst us?

[HawkMan]

Besides havign your work shocwcased in what is probably the oldest surviuving TA/Sprign mod around, and also the definately most well known after being in at least one magazine.

Well you get some experience in workign towards game desgin and what that means wich may or may not be of future interest, and you get to see your work actually be used. wich is somethign that a lot of the artists who complain that noone sees or comments on their artwork can't say. and this is the one unit that is the most important in the game for the imperial side, and will allways be present.

This is afterall a free mod project, who despite everything has survived since the early days of TA modding. what do you want, outside of fame and glory.

Maybe I'll give this a whirl after I install Max again, even if my superior skill is completely unfair to everyone else


I say give it a go, it's a lite project(relatively compared to what people usually model on these forums) and anyone can participate, make some sketches or whatever and see one of the Amazing SW:S modellers bring your concept to life. This is your chance to build the very headquarters of the imperial forces and later see it in action and use it in game.  UV W mapping isn't even necessary, for those that fea r the UV monster and want to do the model themselv es.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Thanks, Hawk.

Andrew, as Hawk stated, the only real incentive I can offer is your chance to have a design which you created used in a mod. I'm sure many people who post here do so to get their artwork out to the world, to an appreciative audience. Well, this is that on a larger scale; your opportunity to have your work seen by a whole lot of people (over 8,000 downloaded our first release); and not just once either. Your design isn't a pretty picture that people look at once, it's something that will actually be used by people every time they play our game, and something which is so important in that it sets the tone for the immersive qualities of the game as a whole.

Beyond that, I can't really offer you any more incentive, other then perhaps a cookie or three. Bringing money into an open source mod project is a bad, bad idea; not only because I have none ( ) and everyone working on this project is doing so out of their own free time, for their own benefit, but also because involving money brings a sense of expectation; like something "paid" should therefore be "earnt".

Anyway, the first few sketches have rolled in over at the Spring forums. Nothing flash, just some early ideas which people have thrown onto paper to show what they're thinking and get some ideas/criticisms from other people.
I really encourage you guys to do the same, it gets people talking, it gets ideas out in the open, and it benefits everyone.

From user 1v0ry_k1ng
http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/9600/atmcgh8.jpg
his concept is that the building uses the legs to absorb the impact of the shock when it lands.

From TheRegisteredOne
http://www.fileuniverse.com/images/T...nter%20WIP.GIF
A pretty solid WIP, you can clearly see where he is going, and the C&C influences.

EDIT:
Another one just came in, from user AF:
http://img471.imageshack.us/img471/8043/swdesignyt3.png
This design is grappling well with the concept of being 'dropped down' and 'prefabricated'; though a little more focus on the structure itself is still needed (it is a preliminary sketch).

[jack cloudy]

Ah what the heck, I'm in. I've never done a building before so this should be good practice.

Now half of my design is actually submerged underground in an arteficial crater of sorts so that that dome shell on the bottom can rotate around and cover the actual building. I'm looking towards fattening out the building a bit before I go to the unnesesary details. (Such as fat engines on the bottom which are normally underground anyway.)

The interesting thing for me is the limit the dome places on the size of the building.

Two renders, one with dome and one without.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Good on you for having the courage to go first up! Much respect

I like the geometric basis of the design. Imperial stuff does tend to be a blocky, and heavily geometrically based.

Empire jiggy 1
Empire jiggy 2
Empire jiggy 3
Empire jiggy 4
Empire jiggy 5
Empire jiggy 6
Empire jiggy 7
Empire jiggy 8
Empire jiggy 9

I think, however, that while basing your design strongly on geometrics is good, you need to be careful to make it not look like it's made out of duplo (not saying yours does, it's just a potential pitfall).

Also, be careful about putting down some blocks without thinking about what they are there for. You don't want the weaponry and radar that you'll put on to feel like an afterthought. I can see that this is an early concept, so I understand why you have ommitted those details.

I am interested as to what the big horizontal cylinder is for? Is it like a tunnel or entrance? Is half of it meant to be obscured under the ground, so it's actually a half cylinder? And the sphere, what is that for?

I like the sphere that closes up. It reminds me of a building from TA, the moho metal maker:
YouTube - Arm Moho Metal Maker (recorded it for you )
The way that works definitely opens up some doors for you with the vertical limitations of your building, don't you think?

Before I move on, I need to ask you, and anyone else entering here, permission to host their images on imageshack or elsewhere, so that I can post them into the other competition forums.
People from outside this forum cannot see the images without registering here first. Let me know ASAP!
(or even better, host them somewhere I can link to here, so I can just nick the links! )

----------------------

Dr.Zais down at Moddb has put something out too:
http://img174.imageshack.us/img174/6514/base1hl2.jpg
http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/297/base2aw2.jpg
Very interesting landing idea; good level of completion and detail. I think the greater form needs a little bit of work, though.

[jack cloudy]

Of course you have my permission.

Now as for the building, I do intend to turn it more into one structure, folding the different wings together and see how it turns out. Maybe it will turn into Duplo, though I hope not. And hopefully I'll manage to keep the polies down. Those things always kill me.

The cylinder was a big rotating gear of sorts that turns the dome around so yeah, it was half submerged. I think I'll ditch it though. Why have a rotating piece on the outside of the protective dome when it could do its job while safely hidden inside the thing?

And the sphere, that was a placeholder for the radar. Sorta like the big spheres on the Star Destroyers. I always thought those were radars of some sort. Well, gotta jet. Homework's calling.

Ps: thanks for the Moho Metal Maker. I based the dome on the Core Solar Plant, minus the sinking into the ground of the whole building. I stop at half. Never figured out the usage of the protective shells there though. Those things still blew up whenever a Flash got close.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Good to see a fellow TA fan

Sometimes it's good to see a big gear mechanism on the outside. A bit of steampunk can go a long way to making a structure both scifi and believable.

From memory, the spheres on the star destroyers were actually the shield generators, though I may be wrong.

I wouldn't be too concerned about polies. You can do a lot with 4k polies. Don't forget that you only really need 8 sides to get a near-flawless cylinder/rounded area because of the engine shading. (I use 12 for larger cylinders, and maybe more if it is a very large and very obvious rounded section, but generally not many are needed).