Zero-K - Page 2

Zero-K

Various things about Spring that do not fit in any of the other forums listed below, including forum rules.

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Licho
Zero-K Developer
Posts: 3803
Joined: 19 May 2006, 19:13

Re: Zero-K

Post by Licho »

Default command interface is gestures and "integral menu".
Menu has structures dividied by categories - tabs, no need for paging anywhere.

Gesture menu also allows easy access to all structures through keys or simple gestures without paging.

Can all structures reaally comfortably fit in one page of iceui command menu? ZK cons have many more options than BA, because each can build everything in game.
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KaiserJ
Community Representative
Posts: 3113
Joined: 08 Sep 2008, 22:59

Re: Zero-K

Post by KaiserJ »

lol iceUI.

yeah i bought this sliced cheese bread, but, it doesnt fit in my toaster, so... i never ate it

(you kidding me? i fried it in a pan and it was delicious. not everything is meant to be enjoyed and controlled in the exact same way)
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smoth
Posts: 22309
Joined: 13 Jan 2005, 00:46

Re: Zero-K

Post by smoth »

LulzLizard wrote:yeah we keep raging at dev ppl to get MT sorted but it seems the only person who can even do anything in this area is Zerver and apparently he only gives a crap about BA, he needs to read this thread tbh :)
yes because raging at VOLUNTEERS is a guaranty of work completed. You want to sit there and rage about zerver favoring ba? wake up, ba is favored by almost all the devs. the reason? Because it has the most players and thus the most feedback happens on changes. Not because of some inherent malice but because that is who they hear from the most.

Now do individual smaller projects bark louder at the devs? yes. Do they put in a good bit of time testing for the devs? yes. Do they do this out of the kindness of their heart? no, they do it because they have to. Does that mean the smaller projects yield more focused and thus superior feedback? NOT AT ALL.

conclusion: if you want to see mt happen you can help with it by testing that which doesn't work and working with zerver to see that it gets fixed/supported.

but but zerver is the only guy capable.. but but zerver doesn't work fast enough. Believe it or not, the devs are all busy with SOMETHING. Maybe it is a new pathfinder, maybe it is some really good optimizations, maybe it is fixes for the plethora of still existing bugs. it isn't that the engine devs are incapable, it is that they each have their own task and this is THEIR FREE TIME. So have some respect!
LulzLizard wrote:
smoth wrote: I'd give you a verbal lashing about the dev thing but I have to leave soon.
I wouldn't care anyway

why don't you go ahead and make a nice functioning MT spring instead of working on that garbage you call GundamRTS HMM?

be a giver not a taker. do a bit of contributing for once Smoth
You say you don't care but you make a personal attack anyway. That's fine, it proves to me that this post will sink into some part of your very likely teenage brain. I suspect you are a smurf to a known player otherwise you would not know me from adam. However, for a player who supposedly knows so much, you have so little knowledge of how much I do help around here. I'll not bother to toot my horn more than that. You want to tell me about contributing, let me ask, what have you done?
zerver
Spring Developer
Posts: 1358
Joined: 16 Dec 2006, 20:59

Re: Zero-K

Post by zerver »

LulzLizard wrote:yeah we keep raging at dev ppl to get MT sorted but it seems the only person who can even do anything in this area is Zerver and apparently he only gives a crap about BA, he needs to read this thread tbh :)
Well, I do read this thread. It is correct that I mostly use BA, but the slow progress with MT support for other games has several reasons. The most important being that Lua + MT has been a tough nut to crack. This has crippled mods that heavily rely on Lua, especially the Lua based rendering.

If you try some games now with the latest build from master, you will probably find that it *almost works*. Lua rendering no longer carries a significant performance penalty (rendering gadgets are still a bit of a problem though).

It never will be 100% compatible, some Lua scripts will need tweaking. I will try to make some kind of MT programming guide to explain why. If your game hangs or crashes, please mantis it.

Edit: I started writing the MT guidelines here
http://springrts.com/wiki/Spring_Multithreaded_Lua
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Pxtl
Posts: 6112
Joined: 23 Oct 2004, 01:43

Re: Zero-K

Post by Pxtl »

Anybody who doesn't realize how MT will completely screw up the existing Lua API and all the code out in the wild already (like that in Zero-K) has no business discussing these issues with those involved.

Lua code is user-provided code whose state must be synced across multiple machines. That means it must be deterministic.

Multithreading is not, generally, deterministic.

Obviously, converting Lua code from a deterministic architecture to a non-deterministic architecture while maintaining determinism in the code itself is *hard*.

So it's no wonder that nearly-Lua-less mods like BA are having no trouble with MT, while Lua-intensive mods like ZK are finding it very difficult.

This isn't about ZK vs BA. It's about games that add a lot of custom Lua to the engine vs. games that don't. I'll bet that if you ran *any* of the pre-Lua games on MT (well, after you fixed the bugs like modinfo and whatnot), they'd work just fine.

Smoth, does Gundam 1.11f run on MT?
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smoth
Posts: 22309
Joined: 13 Jan 2005, 00:46

Re: Zero-K

Post by smoth »

Dunno have not tried it in a while bigger bugs to worry about
se5a
Posts: 86
Joined: 25 Nov 2010, 20:47

Re: Zero-K

Post by se5a »

smoth wrote: ...conclusion: if you want to see mt happen you can help with it by testing that which doesn't work and working with zerver to see that it gets fixed/supported.
here's a crazy idea: give the lobbys the ability to see two different spring folders, the normal current stable one, and the latest test build.

With the new archive mover it should make giving maps and games a central folder easy - and throw in a line for it in the springsettings.exe (or just have them in the user profile - ewwwww)

Throw in a link to mantis, or hell give the lobby the ability to quickly create a bug report.

make it easy to test and battles will get created and played.

there's probibly other problems I've not thought of that will have to be ironed out with this idea... but maybe it might be worth spending a little bit of time here to get more testing done?
zerver
Spring Developer
Posts: 1358
Joined: 16 Dec 2006, 20:59

Re: Zero-K

Post by zerver »

Pxtl wrote:Anybody who doesn't realize how MT will completely screw up the existing Lua API and all the code out in the wild already (like that in Zero-K) has no business discussing these issues with those involved.
Actually, it is not anywhere near that bad. The synced Lua does not differ at all in MT, it is executed in exactly the same, perfectly deterministic, single threaded manner as before.

The problems with MT are only related to Lua rendering, as clearly stated in the guide I started writing.

But you are correct in the sense that Lua is an "obstacle" that makes it very difficult to multithread the Sim, if we ever decide to try that. Typical multithreading would mean executing synced call-ins in a random order, which is pure horror in terms of determinism.
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CarRepairer
Cursed Zero-K Developer
Posts: 3359
Joined: 07 Nov 2007, 21:48

Re: Zero-K

Post by CarRepairer »

se5a wrote:
smoth wrote: ...conclusion: if you want to see mt happen you can help with it by testing that which doesn't work and working with zerver to see that it gets fixed/supported.
here's a crazy idea: give the lobbys the ability to see two different spring folders, the normal current stable one, and the latest test build.

With the new archive mover it should make giving maps and games a central folder easy - and throw in a line for it in the springsettings.exe (or just have them in the user profile - ewwwww)

Throw in a link to mantis, or hell give the lobby the ability to quickly create a bug report.

make it easy to test and battles will get created and played.

there's probibly other problems I've not thought of that will have to be ironed out with this idea... but maybe it might be worth spending a little bit of time here to get more testing done?
Here's a crazy idea: Licho did this a year ago. It's called Zero-k Lobby. Put the engine version in your battle's name and any zkl user can join and play that battle seamlessly while zkl gets that spring version for them.
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