Spring developer crisis

[hoijui]

i like text from picassos last post.
title of knorkes bare poster has to be different (Open Source Project, Spring - Established, State of the Art 3D RTS?).

on the colorful poster: maybe add a strip with lots of small screenshots from differetn games (at least ZK, S44, KP, Evo, CT, SpringTanks, The Cursed and a zoom out view (from any game)), like the ones from the http://springrts.com/wiki/Games page?

[malric]

And I think a wiki page (or perhaps a sticky somewhere) for advertisement experiences and posters to be shared is a good idea.

Wiki page created http://springrts.com/wiki/Advertisement. I linked it under main page in "Playing and general". I looked around, but I could not find a better place. If anybody else has work done, please link it there.

Regarding the topic of this thread, I just remembered to check http://www.ohloh.net/p/springrts/contributors/summary. Although they should be treated as any statistical information (with care ), we can see averages and trends. My interpretation is that although there is a decrease in time, the decrease might be less than what we think.

[Cubex]

Also, 3 days ago I posted in a Lan Party forum where they are going to make a AI contest and I suggested Spring, as includes various wrappers... With 0K and Kernel panic videos, but no reply so far...

[Floris]

Contrair to you might think of spring is that the average person doesnt judge spring as "State of the Art 3D RTS" I believe.

But I m curious, what part of spring really is state of the art 3d rts stuff?

(ps. Fairly good != state of the art. imho)

okay... it isnt all spring's respondibility, but there arent any? polished games out there yet that can be tagged as state of the art based on the spring engine?

Just my 2 cents, it sounds kinda misleading. It is what it is. An open-source de-central cooperation.

[varikonniemi]

What spring needs is a kickstarter that would hire an expert coder to take what can be salvaged from spring, and write a new engine based on it.

Modern engines should be stitched together using higher level languages, and only use c for the performance critical parts.

[knorke]

title of knorkes bare poster has to be different (Open Source Project, Spring - Established, State of the Art 3D RTS?).

The reasoning is this: Break down what "Spring - Established, State of the Art 3D RTS" means to a random reader: not much.
Spring: nobody knows what or who "Spring" is, so having it in title is no use. Maybe if the ad is by the Coca Cola Company its worth having it as first word, otherwise it holds no value/informatin.

Established, State of the Art: might as well write "fancy", "cool" or similiar nice words. But they give no real information.

3D RTS: This is real info but will non-gamers know what RTS is?


Better to have the type of product as title, not the name.
If you sell a car you can put "FORD OMEGA FOR SALE" because everybody recognizes that is a car. But from "SABA SRI 16" nobody can tell what that is...
---
On b/w poster the background is grey so the other elements have no good constrast, no matter if black or white. Make background white it will look much clearer when printed.

[Cheesecan]

What spring needs is a kickstarter that would hire an expert coder to take what can be salvaged from spring, and write a new engine based on it.

Modern engines should be stitched together using higher level languages, and only use c for the performance critical parts.

2013-04-27:19:56 This just in: Super coder to join Established, State of the Art 3D RTS and save the world.

[hoijui]

i agree that "Spring" makes no sense in the title, but the rest does.
if you use car selling analogy, the equivalent to "Open Source Project" is something like "i am capitalist". would you read a poster with this in the title if you were looking for a car? no!
if a dev/other person does not know what RTS is, he will not want to work on/play spring.

i totally agree that "Established, State of the Art 3D RTS" does not accurately describe spring, but you know... this is advertisement.
it is not a total lie, and there is probably nothing else in the open source world that comes closer to this description then spring does, which means.. if you are a coder, and you are interested in "Established, State of the Art 3D RTS", you will not be mad to have your attention be turned to spring. anyway.. even if you expected something else, you wasted 1s for reading the title, and 5s more on looking at the images on the poster, and then you move on. i would say this is still pretty much morally acceptable, compared to .. 99.9% of advertisement today (including commercial and advertisement on personal level (breast enlargements, push-up thingies, makeup, general bragging, ...)

[Cubex]

Yay my AI contest proposition is now waiting for opinion of organization team
Looks promising... and would attract some AI devs

[NeonStorm]

zk is a mess to configure even if i think it may be the easiest game to configure
make sure game defaults are good (icon view distance comes to mind)

If you could inherit basic units or separate generic weapon blueprints, it could help too...

Or maybe put flight behavior into move defs ...

Some projectiles could be separated too (you can still adjust rate of fire, launch velocity (thus range) or burst)

[FLOZi]

zk is a mess to configure even if i think it may be the easiest game to configure
make sure game defaults are good (icon view distance comes to mind)

If you could inherit basic units or separate generic weapon blueprints, it could help too...

S44 does this already.

[malric]

As, inspired by Firestorm, I said I will modify the poster, here is my version. It is more or less made from scratch, including some comments in this thread. Probably should not be used where I live as Firestorm already put posters around and another poster on the same subject might be a bit too much.

I had in mind students when I made it, and just tried spark their imagination about what they can do with the project. Did not want to go too much in detail (like programming languages, what is needed, etc.).

I will upload the complete sources on the wiki, but thought to post here first, maybe somebody has (constructive) suggestions.

[hoijui]

ehhh nice malric!

i would say, i like it a bit more then firestorms even, in general.

critisismsz:
- i would replace "Real Time Strategy" in the title with "RTS Game". this is both better for savy and unsavy people. for savy people, it spares them from reading 3 long words, that they recognize even easier as acronym then in their full length. for unsavy people, they understand that it is about a game. there is nobody at a university that could be interested in working on a game engine that does not know what RTS means. if you don't know what RTS means, you also don't understand what it means if you read "Real Time Strategy"
- the 3 lines/arrows are kind of cool, but i don't see the logic behind them. for example, the line from "AI" to the screenshot with a circle around two buildings.
- showing the path-debug overlay in the screenshot is a bit confusing/ugly

what i like:
- the general design
- the slickness
- the symbols on the bottom
- not too much info
- not too unorganized; the eyes do not get crazy, trying to find something to look at

edit:
for showing AI in a screenshot, maybe show two peewees flanking a tank from two sides, by showing a few waypoints for each of them. this way, the viewer will think: "cool, i will make units so smart and fastly reacting, that no user can beat my AI, HAR HAR!"

[Google_Frog]

Also the scene should not use OTA content.

[PicassoCT]

Sorry i liked FireStorms better.. but then thats taste.. cant argue about that..

[dansan]

Doesn't spring run on Macs now too? ...or is it so experimental that you would not advertise it? Lately I see more CS students with Macs... Maybe one of them could stabilize it? :)

[Silentwings]

Lately I see more CS students with Macs...

Oh. God.

[Cubex]

We are doomed...

[PicassoCT]

Seems that all that "We are nerdy too" fashion wave is just a little foam, dissappearing once discomfort of beeing one is discovered. Back into the app-gated comunity. Its for the best for all of us.

[malric]

i would say, i like it a bit more then firestorms even, in general.

I made it to be different, so I expect different people will like either one or another .

- i would replace "Real Time Strategy" in the title with "RTS Game". this is both better for savy and unsavy people. for savy people, it spares them from reading 3 long words, that they recognize even easier as acronym then in their full length. for unsavy people, they understand that it is about a game. there is nobody at a university that could be interested in working on a game engine that does not know what RTS means. if you don't know what RTS means, you also don't understand what it means if you read "Real Time Strategy"

Was indeed in doubt. You convinced me to put RTS.

- the 3 lines/arrows are kind of cool, but i don't see the logic behind them. for example, the line from "AI" to the screenshot with a circle around two buildings.

Not much logic, just graphical elements.

- showing the path-debug overlay in the screenshot is a bit confusing/ugly

Wanted to link the AI development to "pathing" - maybe an exaggeration, but want to show it is more than just "play". I might use your idea with the tanks.

@Dansan: will put a Mac icon then, if it is not a too big exaggeration.

@Gajop: will use zk then, just used xta out of reflex.