New User Impressions and Suggestions

[Crayfish]

It's been an interesting thread. Got me thinking a few thoughts (achieves nothing) but hopefully it might also have been stimulating for some developers.

[Neddie]

It is interesting, some of nXian's motivations appear similar to those which caused me to act as I did/do for as long as I have. The initial scope is not that different either. With sufficient will, there is potential for success in many endeavors, and I'm of course willing to help.

[El Capitano]

How many have they won inside?

Every single one where the accused didn't back down.

[nxain]

I thought this article on Slashdot had some interesting crossover questions for Spring.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/03/1547256

- nXain

[ralphie]

why do you take the time to add -name after your post when it's blatantly obvious who is posting. It's not usenet anymore.

[nxain]

why do you take the time to add -name after your post when it's blatantly obvious who is posting. It's not usenet anymore.

It's a good usability practice to put you name at the end so the user doesn't need to scroll back up on a long post. Being redundant isn't a bad thing. Also, it keeps it consistent with other forms of memo writing I do each day. And... the convention changes from forum to forum. On some sites it's still done quite a bit. If I was planning on being on this forum for the long term, I'd add an avatar graphic as that is the most effective way to note who's talking.

Besides, I'm old.

- nXain

[Non0c3]

This is not the same, if the name is put on top, it link you to what is being said, if it's put at the end this is linking what has been said to you.

[KDR_11k]

All this talk about reworking Spring for e.g. mobile phones is pointless, Spring is massively CPU hungry, you'd have to massively rework most if not all core parts of the engine anyway so involving Spring at all is pointless. Same for a console port, saying a traditional RTS port won't work isn't useful, we know that but the issue is how does Spring figure into that? If you're going to make something that only shares the genre name with Spring why the hell would you start with the Spring code?

As for a flagship mod, yes, that is CA. It's driving (at least some of) the engine development and consists of a large number of team members. However, looking into #cadev shows that even at their current number they have massive coordination problems, if you tried to upscale that you'd get a mess that would be completely unproductive because all the effort is spent on fighting against the conflicting views of other team members. Yes, sure, a hierarchy would help but CA still hasn't established one (that gets obeyed, I think they theoretically have people in charge of the various things but others don't respect it).

Talking about funding in contexts other than donations is silly too, we all know noone's going to use Spring for commercial development (it's too damn outdated, you won't be able to make a game that can compete in the marketplace without major rework anyway!), long discussions about the hurdles are just pointless.

Claiming PURE has the potential to go commercial is the result of myopia, you only see Spring, see Pure and consider it the prettiest thing around. Sure but have you looked at the real market out there? Pure is approaching the entry level requirements for a modern RTS, if it gets there you can sell it on the 5├óÔÇÜ┬¼ bargain shelves, even the 30├óÔÇÜ┬¼ bargain games have standards beyond anything we've seen on Spring, never mind the 50├óÔÇÜ┬¼ AAA titles! You may claim Spring's mods play better but do they really? They may have more depth for the top players but is the experience really better for the 90% that aren't?

[Crayfish]

I enjoy playing Spring (well, CA) more than any RTS I've played.

The most recent game I have is Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, which sucks ass only marginally less than Supreme Commander.

I haven't seen any other commercial RTS that looks promising enough to buy. Starcraft 2 is the only one that might be worth playing...

[Hoi]

(it's too damn outdated, you won't be able to make a game that can compete in the marketplace without major rework anyway!)

We are catching up

[AF]

Competing in the market place isn't exactly about the tidyness and state of springs internals, its about how the game that uses it is put together polished and presented.

[KDR_11k]

Yeah and if you look at even a B-rate game these days you'll find it looks way better than anything Spring can do.