A Glimpse into Our Old RTS Project
Today, we're excited to revisit our old RTS project, which began as a passion inspired by countless hours playing Stronghold Legends and Age of Empires. While these classics were our primary influences, we aimed to integrate features from Paradox’s Grand Strategy Games and Civilization to create something truly unique.
In the early stages, we became obsessed with perfection, focusing too much on minor details, which slowed our progress. However, this experience taught us valuable lessons, and we’ve since evolved our process. You can read more about what we learned and how we’ve improved in this dedicated post: sparklab-studios.com/old-rts-what-we-learned/
In today’s post, we’d like to showcase some of the medieval-style buildings we developed back then, designed with a focus on realistic graphics. We'll also touch on some of the challenges we faced during the building process. So sit back, relax, and scroll through our designs.
The Challenges of Building with the CS SDK
Our models were initially built using the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive SDK—a tool intended for creating maps in CS. Emil, having spent over 500 hours mastering the SDK, was very familiar with it, so we decided to use it for model creation as well.
However, converting these CSmaps into usable 3D objects for Unreal Engine 4 via 3ds Max proved challenging. With the help of Wallworm and other 3ds Max extensions, we managed to force the models into UE4 but ran into several issues. Textures were often misplaced, missing, or even became transparent (as seen with our monastery model). Additionally, the objects are imported as a single mesh, limiting our ability to modify them within Unreal.
Because of these hurdles, we’ve since shifted to building models using Blender, 3ds Max, or directly within Unreal Engine 5—all tools that are far more compatible with our current workflow.
