The taint of *A

[smoth]

So i do a lot of posting on moddb/indiedb and I was recently privy to this gem:

Spring engine did nothing for me. If you noobs cant tell the diffferance between a prehistoric Spring engine and top quality Indie engines, you need to see an optromtist! Never liked those mechs put together by card board boxes! Maybe it changed since but not enough to catch my interests.

Card board boxes? what do you mean?

I don't really know what you are talking about.

@ Smoth: In answer to your email...Mechs/card board boxes? heh heh When i 1st glimpsed at the Spring Engine mods back in the Total Annihilation days, the robots appeared boxy, like small, big boxes put together at the joints. Rough shape. No roundness & smoothness. That was then and i never cared for it at that time. Like i said, "Maybe it changed since". With todays graphics cards you get realism! Then i thought, maybe its the modders themselves & how they slopped together thier mods back then with what tools (Spring) were available for excited kids to apply thier new found skills. Most mods today are done by experienced college/ university adults. This is my opinion. Believe me, would like to play a Xenoforce Reborn mod if it was made over 12 years ago? Thats your choice. I love todays standards & *censored* ROCKS!

Good to know that despite my best efforts to post ample media, despite what I have done to actually do things right, people still think spring = TA and even worse think all projects are *A.

I really hate this.

[SinbadEV]

Unfortunately you can't really control what kinds of stuff people develop for your free open source engine... the only way to escape this problem is, in my opinion to A) promote specific Games instead of the engine or B) get someone to make one of the Good Looking and Free from IP Issues Games to be the "official" or "flagship" game.

[very_bad_soldier]

Good to know that despite my best efforts to post ample media, despite what I have done to actually do things right, people still think spring = TA and even worse think all projects are *A.

Smoth, spring IS actually pretty much = *A.

[Agon]

Rename/fork and don't use TA related content in any tech demo on the "new" website. Also remove the loader. Which game engine has it's own loader to load a game?

Oh and do a google search with this: engine+total+annihilation
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&o ... nihilation
Guess where you will end....

[smoth]

nfortunately you can't really control what kinds of stuff people develop for your free open source engine... the only way to escape this problem is, in my opinion to A) promote specific Games instead of the engine

No it has a lot to do with the lingering stigma that people see spring as ta. It is unfortunate but most of the early advertising was done that way. So now we are stuck with the reputation that the *A is all spring can do. I have bothered to update the spring indie db profile and continue to develop gundam to be a top shelf project but ....

get someone to make one of the Good Looking and Free from IP Issues Games to be the "official" or "flagship" game.

no matter what I do you people act like gundam is it is invalid due to non-indepedant ip. Personally I wish you would stfu about the ip independent shit mainly because it acts like projects like mine and starwars are somehow less than they are. I don't see you getting upset about the outright stolen ota content. It is really denigrating.

So because I do not give away EVERYTHING I DO, my project is somehow less. The entire source is free to use just not the models. Of course that isn't enough, you lazy slobs want the art as well. I once thought about doing such a game but after comments like that one and the constant attitude of entitlement among gamers over the years. I realized that grts is the LAST free project I will do, the amount of effort that has gone into grts is disturbing. So should I develop something IP free I will go completely commercial and share nothing because I am tired of no matter what I give you guys don't think it is enough, while you contribute NOTHING.

VBS, yeah that sucks, people stay playing the same thing over and over but it isn't like my project has a valid solution, it is too unstable due to me constantly adding and changing things. Currently there is no stable project beyond ba(which is getting a fantastic graphics upgrade thanks to bob)

Yeah agon, the google search stuff is pretty disturbing but is there a way to combat it?

[Agon]

..
Yeah agon, the google search stuff is pretty disturbing but is there a way to combat it?

As I wrote, rename Spring, only mention Games in a list on a wiki, advertise with tech demo(s). (...Remove the loader...)

[knorke]

lol what do you expect?
There is always lots of "low quality content" made for every game.
95% of the custom maps made for Counterstrike look like this:

Did this hurt the game or mapping community?
No, because there is/was enough high quality stuff.

I think this guy is aware that Spring has games other than *A, at least it seems so from

Mechs/card board boxes? heh heh When i 1st glimpsed at the Spring Engine mods back in the Total Annihilation days, the robots appeared boxy, like small, big boxes put together at the joints

And YES, spring units still ARE boxxy, DO move in jerky ways and whatnot. So of all released games, S44 and Gundam have maybe best looking units.
Look at the infantry of S44, then look at games like Company of Heroes.
Look at the mechs of GundamRTS, then look at the robots in Warhammer:40k
"But those are AAA games done by large companies and spring games are done by people in their spare time blabla"
Yeah, but the gamer does not care how hard the game was too make, does not care if it took you a million tries to export your model, does not care if you took a whole night to look up one little Lua function, does not care how much time you spent on a texture.

Doesn't "Currently there is no stable project beyond ba" really sum it up already?
There is not too much BA, there is too little other games!

So how would we get better games? If people make them. But being realistic, making a fullscale RTS game is out of reach for most people.
Just the sheer number of models to make is impossible for any hobby guy who just made his first over 9001 poly tank in blender.

And no experienced dev/mod team will touch an engine with a documention like Spring has.
The only way to make something in Spring currently is to crack open other mods, trial&error and hang out in #lua #moddev etc.
And to you should have played other spring games before for a year or so you know the quirks of the engine, lobbies, filesystem etc.
This is good for a hobbyproject but be realistic, no "top shelf project" will ever be made this way.

Maybe if games would not put all these buzzwords into their descriptions and took themself a bit less srsbsnss they would be recognized and judged as hobby projects not as vaporware desperately trying to get customers.

Can't we just accept what Spring currently is instead of pretending?

[very_bad_soldier]

Why do you rely on spring so much at all? Have your own website, your own installer and, most importantly, your own lobby server (maybe you can have a one-directional connection to the main server, so people on the main server still can see/join games on your own lobby server). Players that are new to grts dont have to realize at all that it is the spring engine working under the hood.
You are completely on your own then. I dont say that this will work for sure but maybe its worth a try since you realized it is too hard to compete with the spring main-lobby server.
I am sure that this idea is not new to you, but why dont you try it? You think its not worth a try?

[Gota]

Spring needs a rename...thats a good idea.
Also dont mention the engine ever when you advertise,nobody gives a shit about that.
also, that guy seemed like a troll..He could be either a TA or Supcom fan or a springer that was banned or was pissed at spring for some other reason...Or maybe he is some c&c or red alert fanboi etc etc...

[knorke]

yea, must be a troll if he says what is even said in this thread by others:

spring IS actually pretty much = *A

[KaiserJ]

i really do hope that smoth does the own-server thing, because i feel like it would put a lot more focus on his game rather than the current effect of overwhelming *A-ness when someone downloads gundam and comes to the main server. VBS i agree with 100%, many have suggested it in the past, but i think apart from arghs game, nobody has actually tried it. i hope ZK will do it, and i think it would be a great move for gundam as well.

gota i just find the whole thing kind of amusing at this point; the guy complaining to smoth is out of line talking about spring like an expert when he clearly has next to no knowledge of any of the related projects... its probably somebody who, if indeed had his lust for "standard" graphcs filled, would just find something else inane to complain about. the very fact that he won't play his favourite game, "Xenoforce Reborn" (whatever that might happen to be) because the graphics aren't good enough, suggests that he can never be truly pleased with a game, not in the sense that you or i might be.

its hard to even take comments like that seriously; people who want AAA quality graphics and polish in independent games must be for the most part very depressed and unsatisfied people.

sorry to talk about mai balls so much, its just i guess in my local slang, the thread title is very amusing

[SinbadEV]

i really do hope that smoth does the own-server thing, because i feel like it would put a lot more focus on his game rather than the current effect of overwhelming *A-ness when someone downloads gundam and comes to the main server. VBS i agree with 100%, many have suggested it in the past, but i think apart from arghs game, nobody has actually tried it. i hope ZK will do it, and i think it would be a great move for gundam as well.

gota i just find the whole thing kind of amusing at this point; the guy complaining to smoth is out of line talking about spring like an expert when he clearly has next to no knowledge of any of the related projects... its probably somebody who, if indeed had his lust for "standard" graphcs filled, would just find something else inane to complain about. the very fact that he won't play his favourite game, "Xenoforce Reborn" (whatever that might happen to be) because the graphics aren't good enough, suggests that he can never be truly pleased with a game, not in the sense that you or i might be.

its hard to even take comments like that seriously; people who want AAA quality graphics and polish in independent games must be for the most part very depressed and unsatisfied people.

sorry to talk about mai balls so much, its just i guess in my local slang, the thread title is very amusing

I too live in Canada and refer to that part of the human body as the 'taint (as in it ain't the anus and it ain't the Y... replacing Y with the appropriate females or male genitalia)... I'm pretty sure I got it from an SNL sketch however... maybe only Canadians still watch SNL?

edit: http://snltranscripts.jt.org/00/00ntaint.phtml

[Wombat]

heh heh When i 1st glimpsed at the Spring Engine mods back in the Total Annihilation days, the robots appeared boxy

what an idiot, talking about prehistoric days, wc3 models were made of triangles, so our boxes pwns foo.

[luckywaldo7]

Who says a game needs to have cutting edge AAA level graphics in order to be fun and become popular?

[AF]

We actually DID change the name of the project, from TA Spring to Spring.

Since then the actions of me, other major content developers, and the engine developers, have subtly changed the name of the spring to Spring RTS, and then to the current Spring Engine or Spring RTS Engine.

And yes we DO have good non *A content. Aside from Gundam, what about Evolution RTS? Kernel Panic anybody? Heck Im likely to get replies and PMs saying "You forgot to mention us!!!!!"

You want the *A problem gone? Here's some thing I've been reccomending for the last 2-3 years that seem utter taboo, things other people have reccomended too and endorsed:

• Move TA to a new site, a subdomain even, or at the very least move all TA material into a section of the site. By hosting it here we're endorsing it, and sanctioning it as official. This is both unnecessary and costly to our growth. We want explosive growth, not organic growth.
  Our TA based content is being stunted by this too, yet nobody seems to want to recognize this.
• Remove *A material from our media pages. Having an arm commander looking out on a map and BA bases and Maximum Annihilation videos on this site is both out of date and sends the wrong message
• A BA site. I'm perfectly happy to help out with this and shoulder most of the work, but Im not going to do it if there is no interest. I'd build it, I wouldn't be the one sorting out the blogposts and updates etc. Such a site would be of enormous benefit to the distribution and growth of BA.
• A proper and effective procedure for the updating of this website. I'm happy to build a new spring website BUT, I want to know that Im not going to have an admin waltz in and do their own thing without telling anyone, or that 5 line bug fixes take 5 days -5 months to reach the live site once being committed.

[Wombat]

Having an arm commander looking out on a map and BA bases and Maximum Annihilation videos on this site is both out of date and sends the wrong message

this this this this this this this

seriously, im not *A, BA or something like that hater, but lets remove all these from website, ppl will find BA after joining main anyway >>

btw, i was pressing f5 for like 2 min and i was confused... saw 1 KP pic and rest were SW and BA... so basicly unplayable game and fugly pics

[knorke]

good idea, lets remove the only project that has a community and serious playerbase not consisting of devs.

[Wombat]

lets remove from website the only project that has a community and serious playerbase not consisting of devs.

fixed

ppl will find BA after joining main anyway

website is usually the first place ppl see any screenies or get any info about games. how do u think what they think after seeing MA/BA screens and videos ?

[Guessmyname]

And yes we DO have good non *A content. Aside from Gundam, what about Evolution RTS? Kernel Panic anybody? Heck Im likely to get replies and PMs saying "You forgot to mention us!!!!!"

Don't forget 1944.

good idea, lets remove the only project that has a community and serious playerbase not consisting of devs.

Well, why not? They don't need the help, whilst the games that do show what Spring can do could use the extra attention.

[Wombat]

you forgot to mention Cursed!

and 0k ?

whilst the games that do show what Spring can do