I’m currently working on RTS. I’ve searched this topic, but I can’t seem to be able to find a lot of discussions about it.
How would you go about creating commands queue for an RTS? My RTS currently is blueprints only and I might create a basic stack interface in C++ for this.
Currently:
I want to create an array of structs.
Each struct has this info:
Vector: To hold location for movement/patrol
Actor: If it was follow/Attack command
Enum that holds these commands: Attack/Stop/Hold/Patrol/Move/spell
Spell number: 1-4
This is just theory crafting. I’m not sure how to implement it. Behavior trees could do good with this. I’m not sure. Any ideas?
This is an old thread, but this answer is not helpful. ZeroMQ is a networking fabric, and doesn’t solve the original question at all. I’m reading this old thread because I’m looking for best practices in how to build a queue of commands in game logic / blueprints. (I think I know how to do it with an array and a custom blueprint structure type, but checking other examples are always good!)
The core of your problem is you’re going to need a way to define a type that can be organised and called on with parameters with some concept of priority.
First, you want a base “command” type.
There are design patterns you could look to for this sort of thing, but I would avoid looking into those as they will probably result in confusion and unnecessary code.
Keep it simple!
You need a type, we’ll call it RTSCommand.
Your RTSCommand will have an int run() (return 0 for success, other for error), and an int priority.
Each of your commands will be a subclass of RTSCommand.
For example I might have a RTSTrainCommand which will train a unit.
You probably want to add a unit type, so add a text property to the class that is the URL to the Blueprint that is to be spawned after training is complete.
Then your run() function will start a timer and spawn the Blueprint specified in the URL at timeout.
Only thing left is to discuss priority.
Let’s say I add another thing to the queue.
You can add to the end of a list of RTSCommand and that will get the job done nicely, but for a more flexible implementation I’d use the priority value.
The priority queue structure in the standard library works in Unreal C++ at least on Windows machines, but even if it doesn’t it’s very cheap and simple to traverse a small list and figure out which item has the highest priority number.
Make sense?
For more complicated implementations, you can look to how the C++ standard library does threading, but you’ll be going down one hell of a rabbit hole.
