I'm looking strongly along the lines of an RTS for GameDev's 4E4 contest (sadly it seems so are many others). I wondered if there are any links people could give to RTS-specific tutorials/articles etc. I guess it's mostly AI-related stuff such as path-finding, unit AI and so forth I'm after. One thought I have at the moment is how much extra work is involved doing a 3D terrain to a flat one. In a flat terrain each tile can be marked as passables or impassable if rocks/water are there - this can be replced quite easily I think in 3D by checking the steepness of the terrain each tile in a 3D world, so path-finding is maybe not much different. But there's extra problems with figuring out if units can see each other behind hills, and if they have line-of-sight for shooting etc. Are these major isues - and is it even required that they are taken into account, or could the game just ignore such problems at the cost of units occasionaly shooting a hill? If anyone here has worked on an RTS I'd be most glad to chat with you via email/PM by the way...

I still can't really find much. Loads of articles on apth-finding and unit formations, but nothing else. The topics I now think I need to read up on are (in no particular order):

High-level RTS AI - base builiding, planning attacks, resources etc

3D terrain issues - line-of-sight issues and desirability, extra work from a 2D world...

General game structure - designing for flexibility and addition of new features later on etc...

I found one RTS book (RTS in DX6 or something) that was severly slated on Amazon, but all the articles when I search for RTS AI, RTS programming etc are about pathfinding and nowt else!

Thanks for any help...

Quote:Original post by d000hg

High-level RTS AI - base builiding, planning attacks, resources etc

Crosspost from http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=329005 -- read my reply there.

Quote:Original post by d000hg

3D terrain issues - line-of-sight issues and desirability, extra work from a 2D world...

Depending on how hilly you make your terrain, a plain circle can be fine for gameplay, as a reasonably approximation. Otherwise, simply test if a line between the eye and the object ever hits the ground ( or a tree or building, depending on sizes and game mechanics ).

Quote:Original post by d000hg

General game structure - designing for flexibility and addition of new features later on etc...

It might be easier to finalize the important features list before designing the game's architecture. Other than that, just use good software engineering principles.

Note that if you want to include multiplayer, you'll need to design for it. If you want a deterministic engine, you can't just work that in at the end.

ever fool around with the map editor in Warcraft III? You will realize that they don't check line of sight against the ground. It uses levels just like Starcraft! If it is good enough for Blizzard it is probably good enough for you.