Spring developer crisis

[Silentwings]

I think its better to have graphics from a selection of good looking mods on the posters - make the point that the engine is versatile and has many games relying on it.

But I agree that its best not to look as though you're showcasing OTA graphics; thats unlikely to attract developers.

[PicassoCT]

I think it would be also cool to have some sort of poster that drives home the idea, that there is still awesome stuff to do.

A huge battle scene with "Your Code for Melting Wreckage could be here" or " Insert your AI here" Placeholders poiting towards the field..

[malric]

Finally found some time to incorporate the suggestions. I will not do any further modifications so I uploaded to spring files all the files and added a link from the wiki.

Here is a (small) screen-shot of the final result.

[PicassoCT]

Come and have fun with us - is too long and not catchy..

Commandeering a steamboat, is allabout
hoping the engineers talk back to you.

Engineeroom to bridges, jump on our mark!

You learned coding to do officesoftware?
Look at me, with a straight face, and say that again!

Dont we all want to have a Killerrobot?

A mean engine dev can make a emperor knee,
sawing on the map.table.feet() . Join the guild today!

So my advice to you, if you’re trying to write an engine, is: Don’t. No matter what your reasons are — it doesn’t matter if you’re writing an engine so you can write your dream game, or if you’re writing an engine because you think it will be a good learning experience, or any number of similar reasons. They’re all wastes of time. You can sit down and write a game without writing a pre-written engine, and in fact this is very often the better approach, regardless of why you want to write an engine. The entire development process goes much more smoothly if you are focused on writing a game instead: a game is much easier to identify requirements for, much narrower in focused, much more rewarding when finished, and much, much more useful.
Scientific Ninja

Tl;DR: The engine you write on, allready exists,adding to (y)ours, gets you on blizzards list!

Gameideaguys: Infinite
Gameplayers: Some thousand
Gamedevs: Just a few
Enginedevs: We += You
//We want you for RTS_SPRING development!

Screw you! We are goin to make our own RTS-
with blackjack and hookers.

[Cheesecan]

But writing engines is so fun...

Write an engine.

Rewrite said engine.

Then write the next generation engine.

Besides, games are for kids.

I know, a pale comparison to Picasso's prose.

[PicassoCT]

You know, i know a lot of coder guys who thought the same thing about gamewritting. And yet, when they realized it had to do with cry.st(all).math() they kindly refused and offered to test. Although it is lua. Altough it is well documented (and it really really is. Search the sauerbraten engine for code documentation and starting tutorials - the last one i found is six years old- The engine src folders it refers to dont even exist anymore.)


So fun is a perspective thing, and yeah, if you have the freedom to comit something cool (can be small) than this is a good thing.

The trouble currently is, that wannabe enginedevs get robbed of there toys by the existance of lua. LUPS is actually something that should be part of the engine. No ifs no buts.

Same goes for other cool stuff. If you dont want it to eat ressources or dont want it in your game, deactivate it by not using it in your mod.
The policy of keeping the engine away from everything fun, has done damage enough.

[Tim Blokdijk]

Finally found some time to incorporate the suggestions. I will not do any further modifications so I uploaded to spring files all the files and added a link from the wiki.

Spring is GPL 2

[PicassoCT]

Great Panda League 2nd place is not first place.

[enetheru]

This is such a weird thread to me.

seems to me that people agree that marketing is an issue. but jumping up and down only gets attention, it wont get people to stay.

Has anyone really addressed *why* someone would want to become an engine dev, and then cleared a nice path for that?

what makes spring-engine something to work on as opposed to other projects?
what makes people turn away, and how can those things be addressed?

In other words, identify what would benefit a person to hack on engine level spring, advertise it.
What would detract people from hacking on engine level spring, take care of it.

All the small to the large things matter. discussing it can only identify it. work must be done to fix it. work takes time and effort.

So i'm going to direct this question to SpliFF since he started the thread; What are you working on to help resolve the issue you identified? whatever it is please promote the shit out of it. I think being seen to work on actively make new devs welcome and ease their burdens is a good thing.

[NeonStorm]

Good summary :)

[SpliFF]

I don't have any easy answers. All the obvious/cheap approaches have been tried before. My personal priorities don't leave enough time to act as a promoter or talent scout either. I was hoping this discussion would trawl up new ideas but it mostly focuses on the asthetics of a poster which is useful but not entirely radical or likely to receive widespread attention.

The best I can do is keep working on my game and if the game is popular draw publicity for the engine that way.

[PicassoCT]

So sumed up, we want the pages were c++ game-devs lurk, and post some screenshots from spring there?

[SinbadEV]

My opinion is that the "solution" is to make is less scary for developers to come in and easier for them to find a place where they fit and feel valued. Then Spring becomes a baited trap for Computer Science graduate students and those games programmers that work for companies who don't restrict them from working on personal projects.

Practically speaking... I'm totally not the target demographic so I have no idea how to accomplish this feat.

[jK]

So sumed up, we want the pages were c++ game-devs lurk, and post some screenshots from spring there?

We already got unexpected `support` this way, see: http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_ ... nals-r3143

[NeonStorm]

can't see - the page hates me

My opinion is that the "solution" is to make is less scary for developers to come in and easier for them to find a place where they fit and feel valued.

And this is archived with an engine change where units can walk into another to improve pathing but block shoting?

Or where bombers which attack a distant target after the one at which they should drop their bomb let the bomb travel accross the map?

Maybe the biggest problem is, that SL requires so much ram, the interface breaks from time to time and you can't let it switch engines automatically.

How do we want to get devs if SL has bugs, NOTA breaks GPL law, WebLobby from only 1 dev and in beta-phase, ZKL only on windows or with huge downsides?

What does that say about Spring^?

[Silentwings]

@Neonstorm, please check what you're writing before you post, I've come across many posts recently where I felt almost everything you said was somewhere between misinformed and completely wrong.

And this is archived with an engine change where units can walk into another to improve pathing but block shoting?

Or where bombers which attack a distant target after the one at which they should drop their bomb let the bomb travel accross the map?

None of this will happen in a properly written mod - see most mods.

Maybe the biggest problem is, that SL requires so much ram.

Just tested, with a big map loaded up it used 100Mb memory - this is not much.

SL has bugs, NOTA breaks GPL law, WebLobby from only 1 dev and in beta-phase, ZKL only on windows or with huge downsides?

All software has bugs, for me SL rarely shows any. Lobbies are not huge pieces of software, having one dev is not an issue. ZK lobby is not windows only. NOTA lobby, meh what can you do... (and that one really does have bugs...)

[Anarchid]

, WebLobby from only 1 dev and in beta-phase, ZKL only on windows

Weblobby has 2 developers, and recent zkl works on linux fine enough :)

[dansan]

Or where bombers which attack a distant target after the one at which they should drop their bomb let the bomb travel accross the map? :P

Low gravity map? xD

[AF]

Progress of sorts...

Notes:

• Zaphod was an AI dev, he then took up his IRL name Jelmer, released JCAI, then became project leads after SJ stepped down. AI devs haven't just contributed to engine dev, they've lead it. If that isn't enough, I used to submit patches myself ( notable example being coloured & team coloured nanospray )
• This site is, and always has been awful, and the atmosphere actively discourages change to it. This is why most change has been done out of sight on GitHub incrementally, or via wiki edits. People say 'just build it', past evidence shows this happening and the it all being for nothing, or shot down by community minorities and devs fearing controversy.
• AIs are not documented enough if at all. I should know, NTai documentation focused on configs, Shard docs are low on the ground, and the competition had no docs or very minimal. Same with the AI interface. This discourages AI devs, and acts as a warning to potential engine devs. We should fix this.
• People don't play spring, they play BA/ZK/etc
• The tools for individual games to build on for self determination are not enough.
• The lobby situation isn't that great, and advancements have always been in the wrong areas ( I should know, for a longtime I was the one making them ). Only ZKLobby made meaningful steps in the right direction, not counting NOTALobby
• Youtube is far more powerful than any marketing poster you photoshop

Now that article that was posted, was a far, far better explanation of the engine than I have ever seen on these forums in all my time here.

So rather than me just complaining, let me offer practical goals and steps:

Documentation

Your posters tell me nothing of use. Lets put somewhere:

• What the engine supports very well, list ASSIMP, link off to it and demonstrate, bullet point it even, point out we have a lua environment, that we're OpenGL, we have a synchronised simulation model.
• What the engine does not support. This is your feature wishlist for passersby who might know C++, and warning signs to those unrelated. Inverse kinematics, DirectX, we don't have a built in lobby, etc
• High level docs, a UML diagram, a basic description of the main logic loops. The last one is already on the forums in several places hidden in long forgotten threads. A wiki page with links to forum threads is not good enough, as demonstrated by this thread.
• An explanation of the lua docs. I see this:
  

  Code: Select all

  Spring.SetActiveCommand (needs ModUICtrl)
   ( string action [, string actionExtra ] ) -> nil | boolean
   ( number cmdIndex [, number button = 1
     [, boolean leftClick, boolean rightClick,
      boolean alt, boolean ctrl, boolean meta, boolean shift]] ) -> nil | boolean
  

  That's jibberish I have to parse. What's this -> notation, are those args prior to it? Why is there another set after the boolean? Are those overloads? Why couldn't they put the word "Takes these parameters" and "returns X if successful, Y if not".
  
  How come they're arranged via their internal layout? If I'm new I don't know the difference between Lua_UnsyncedCtrl and Lua_ConstCOB. How well documented a function is, is irrelevant if I cant find it.

AI

• Congratulations, they can be made in lua, this doesn't mean that native AI makers should be villified, and that's how it's been taken. The people most able to intervene and help with pure lua AIs have been driven off. This needs fixing. Ai devs dont just turn into engine devs or bugger off, they can put down roots and turn into content devs too
• It should be made clear the stance on student AIs. When I built Shard and I started receiving aggressive ultimatums because of the conflict between open sourcing and keeping my course supervisor happy it wasn't nice. Simply having the stance clarified to begin with would have enabled me to have sorted the situation out beforehand and prevented angst, or not released binaries.

Lobby

I still see no brandable lobby that does the basics and isn't utterly compromised.

I tried weblobby out recently and ran into issues, for which some were polite and helped, improvements were made, others attacked purely on the basis that i have a 2 letter name that included the letters A and F. Wether it is the panache that some people make it out to be or not, An online service is not a foolproof means of starting a single player game, nor should I have to sign up an account with the lobby server



Otherwise if you're looking to attract people with what is already here, the BAR stuff and Smoths work are very nice, it's the main reason I still visit this forum these days aside from the odd check of the Shard thread.

[CarRepairer]

Don't listen to anything this man says. AF stands for Alantai FOOLstar. He couldn't program his way out of a paper bag. He brings shame to the good name of Java. If you see the letters A and F in that order, turn around and run the other way.

Reasons why AF is not a very good thing:

• He speaks lies, untruthitudes and falsities.
• He just hangs around to increase his postcount.
• Makes endless bulletpoint lists.