some future BAR ideas

[ShockWave]

Split from viewtopic.php?f=16&t=33201&p=570316#p570316. (Silentwings)

For BAR: i suggest a bit of promoting after we have:
° a working matchmaker
° an easy installer with games and most maps included (who try the game wants to start it immediately, or will be uninstalled)
° an easy lobby with 4 buttons: Singleplayer (training mission, BOT fight), multiplayer (matchmaking FFA mode), custom battles(actual rooms), settings.
the "custom battles"(or another name) button should bring players to the actual lobby and rooms, rooms locked to who has an unstable TS.

The installer is a pretty realistic an endeavour. What do you mean by a matchmaker? A "quick game" button?

yes quick game which catapult you into an FFA game, you face players and you don't have to worry about teammates
disconnected / not placed / trolling...

Lobby changes are a different thing. SL isn't a breeze to develop from what I've seen of its code. Making a fully new lobby is beyond the resources at this point, unless someone steps up for it. We'll see..

i just mean a "mask" for newbies that hides the real lobby, first you have an easy interface, with few buttons
that everyone expects to find(singleplayer, multyplayer, settings, another button), another button will launch the actual lobby.

send children and who try the game into a dedicated sandbox; skilled players will directly find best efforts with the current lobby.

[tzaeru]

Well, I personally don't play games to sandbox in them. I loathe games that force a long tutorial on people or have you spend hours just to unlock all the basics of the game.

Forcing new accounts to anything more than maybe 10 min tutorial is excessive in my books and not fun for the new player. New player doesn't necessarily even like FFA to begin with.

[ShockWave]

Well, I personally don't play games to sandbox in them. I loathe games that force a long tutorial on people or have you spend hours just to unlock all the basics of the game.

Forcing new accounts to anything more than maybe 10 min tutorial is excessive in my books and not fun for the new player. New player doesn't necessarily even like FFA to begin with.

as a interactive tutorials with progressive missions unlocking units is awesome.
First you learn basic commands, like how to move, how to attack,
how to build units / stuff, basic of economy. then you unlock all t1 units, then t2...
not necessarily a lot of hours.

The ffa at beginning avoid problems of who "tries the game", you haven't to deal with allies
random placing, random dgunning stuff... The FFA is a perfect sandbox for newbies, everyone
with his timing faces others newbies, those games will be a general noobfest.

this is a wall against newbie's flow, like happened with evoRTS, tons of newbies joining rooms,
none able to start a game (i'm not kidding) To start games they had to constantly control those rooms,
people joining, people disconnecting, people quitting after 2 mins, people roaming across the map,
tells everyone to download stuff, everyone calling random commands....

Do you want to play now, put him into a FFA game with other newbies at the same level, they'll build a little
fortress in their own base and first attack will happen at 14 min.. maybe progressive levels like:
total newbies = t1 only without air and ships torpedos aa hovers...
newbies t2 only, no air ships uberweapons
when their ts is stable, they have full access to all units and rooms, FFA games
and team games against everyone (out of the sandbox)

[Silentwings]

So, finally a response...

For BAR: i suggest a bit of promoting after we have:
° a working matchmaker
° an easy installer with games and most maps included (who try the game wants to start it immediately, or will be uninstalled)
° an easy lobby with 4 buttons: Singleplayer (training mission, BOT fight), multiplayer (matchmaking FFA mode), custom battles(actual rooms), settings.
the "custom battles"(or another name) button should bring players to the actual lobby and rooms, rooms locked to who has an unstable TS.

Matchmaker is kind of independent of any project, it just has to wait for Spring + lobbies for this.
Same with "easy" lobby, its really something best done for all projects together, viewtopic.php?f=23&t=33238.
Installer is pretty easy (as in LD), but imo not worth it before the singleplayer is complete/packaged.

[Jazcash]

Probably a controversial opinion, but I feel BAR should have its own lobby. An extremely simple and robust one, built from the ground up. I tried my hand at this a while back, but had no idea where to even begin as I couldn't find much documentation on building a lobby.

[tzaeru]

Probably a controversial opinion, but I feel BAR should have its own lobby. An extremely simple and robust one, built from the ground up. I tried my hand at this a while back, but had no idea where to even begin as I couldn't find much documentation on building a lobby.

Well, while I could agree to this being the ideal scenario, my personal main concern really is that creating a lobby which was more suitable for BAR than SpringLobby is not a task that can be taken lightly. It's really quite a big endeavour to execute well. It might be a better plan to try and improve SpringLobby and supply a modified or pre-configured SpringLobby to go with BAR installer, though to be fair, SL code seems a bit complicated.. Why all the current workable lobbies are C++ I don't understand.

The lobby development docs are here: https://springrts.com/wiki/Lobby_Development

[Jazcash]

The lobby development docs are here: https://springrts.com/wiki/Lobby_Development

I saw this, but the only thing that's documented is the protocol. I was looking more for a very simple guide of how to get started on developing a lobby, as I don't even know where to begin or what to do with this protocol information

[tzaeru]

Ah, well, in principle it's quite standard GUI application development really. I know it seems pretty confusing at first, but more in-depth tutorial is probably not Spring's turf to have; Creating a lobby is quite a general programming task.

After coding up a few GUI-heavy, networking applications, the protocol description should be pretty decent. I guess some general resources (in the case of Python) could be the likes of PyQt resources ( https://wiki.python.org/moin/PyQt/Tutorials ) for GUI stuff and some general network tutorials ( like http://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/py ... orking.htm ). Links would vary depending on the chosen language and frameworks, though.