Maximum Annihilation?

Maximum Annihilation?

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SevenArm23
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Joined: 08 Mar 2013, 16:07

Maximum Annihilation?

Post by SevenArm23 »

I saw a mod for spring in youtube. Maximum Annihilation.
I think its a very interesting mod and a very complexe mod but the mod is old and works not with the current Spring version. Now I have a question: I wonder if there is still a way to play this game? And why was not developed further in this game?




PS: Sorry for my English
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smoth
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Joined: 13 Jan 2005, 00:46

Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by smoth »

[Krogoth86] stopped developing it. As far as I can see he was last here in 2009. You can try to PM him but I am not sure he will answer you.
SevenArm23
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Joined: 08 Mar 2013, 16:07

Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by SevenArm23 »

Was it a very good mod? I never play MA and I wonder if this mod good?
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smoth
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by smoth »

no idea, I am not entirely sure that it is much different from the other *annhiliations
SevenArm23
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by SevenArm23 »

I played yesterday and this morning with a old Spring version and I must say its a really good mod. Unfortunalety not compatible with this Spring version. And unfortunalety not further developloed.
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Forboding Angel
Evolution RTS Developer
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by Forboding Angel »

When you're dealing with alphabet soup, "Good" is a relative term.
Master-Athmos
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by Master-Athmos »

Interesting that I tend to look back into the forums just now while this topic is still around. I'm the developer of the MA mod (different name - same guy). I really should consider releasing the actual state of the mod as I actually put another 2-3 months of work into the planned next release which added quite some content like a complete symbol system for the radar dots with question marks for unknown enemy units and easy to understand symbols for all kinds of units types. I also started to work on the planned extension of the naval units which was meant to be the 2nd major milestone together with the 3rd one which would have brought T3 tanks in addition to the T3 mechs and planes which would have their own twists and usefulnesses...

Apart from freetime running short at the time the engine development sort of annoyed me. Lua seemed to change in a matter of weeks and there always was something that suddenly was meant to be done differently pretty much breaking old code (I still remember this thing where out of the blue the way you'd position your text changed which was quite a strange happening) and especially the fact that the lobbies simply wouldn't support multiple engine versions. When I last checked back here a couple of months ago I think this issue to this day isn't resolved (please correct me if I'm wrong as that would be a major breakthrough for Spring games). It simply sucks that when you've made a game you for "all eternity" have to adapt to new engine versions if you want your game to still be playable without quite a hassle on the gamer's end who with high probability just wants to install the latest engine and fire up his games and thus will perceive your game as "broken"...
gajop
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by gajop »

You can have multiple engines for a while now (on both windows and linux) but that only applies for newer engine releases (94+ on linux i think), old ones won't work.
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Funkencool
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by Funkencool »

gajop wrote:You can have multiple engines for a while now (on both windows and linux) but that only applies for newer engine releases (94+ on linux i think), old ones won't work.
Should be added that this is only with certain lobbies too, ie not the default springlobby.
Master-Athmos
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by Master-Athmos »

Well ... that doesn't sound too bad ... although I still don't get why lobbies still can't handle what should be about launching Spring from a custom directory depending on what game should be played. Reminds me of I think Aegis showing up like all 6 months saying "Well that feature actually pretty much is ready."... :mrgreen:

It's still nice to see that this engine and its lobbies still get some love from developers even if everything still seems to have its rough edges... :wink:
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knorke
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by knorke »

launching Spring from a custom directory depending on what game should be played
Well, it can launch correct spring version not based on game but based on autohost. So if the autohost is set up correctly it works.
Sadly for singleplayer or manual hosting that does not help players to choose correct engine version.
So I think for my next mod release instead of naming it
"mod v5.3"
I will name it
"mod v5.3 (engine version 94.1)"

And there is always the pro option of just having 2 springlobby installs.
Master-Athmos
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by Master-Athmos »

Well from my point of view this should have been managed just like how the chosen map / game is handled. When hosting a game the lobbies know which game gets hosted and which map currently is selected. From my maybe naive point of view everything needed would be the very same thing containing info about the desired engine version and inside the options of the lobby you'd just assign a directory to a certain engine version and that's that. The only disadvantage would be that one has to copy around maps & game files to every directory but to say the truth it still should be an easy task to generate sort of a central folder for maps all engine versions would look into. Just make future Spring versions look after a $Spring_maps_go_here folder that links to the respective position on the hard drive instead of using the executable's folder...

But oh well - those are things I never really understood when it's about Spring's development. You have guys doing amazing work on mulithreading, pathfinding, graphical stuff and other complex topics but when it's about simply handing over an engine version variable when hosting a game and then starting the correct engine via the lobby things seem to turn into unsolvable issues even if they should be oh so easy to solve in comparison... :mrgreen:
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knorke
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by knorke »

it still should be an easy task to generate sort of a central folder for maps all engine versions would look into.
already possible since a long time.
Well from my point of view this should have been managed just like how the chosen map / game is handled.
It kind of is like that.
Player can already say "I want to play mod X on map Y with engine Z."
Problem is, you expect player to know which mod version needs which engine version.
Master-Athmos
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by Master-Athmos »

knorke wrote:It kind of is like that.
Player can already say "I want to play mod X on map Y with engine Z."
Problem is, you expect player to know which mod version needs which engine version.
Well here we are at the "I don't really understand it." point again. After all means of e.g. what Lua related stuff a game developer has to wrap his head around it would be too much asked to simply add one single line to the modinfo file giving the games name etc. in order to specify the engine version needed? I guess the developer knows which engine version his games is meant to be played on. So after all the hassle a developer has when for example thinking of THIS why would anyone see a problem in demanding a single line of self-evident code which points out the desired engine version?

I mean the point you made was correct - the player shouldn't have to worry about which engine version might be correct. What I don't understand is why the solution for this problem (which in my opinion is both obvious and quite easy to implement) simply won't show up. I mean this is not a recent problem at all. This is probably has existed for over half a decade now. I also don't want to blame anyone for this but it just blows my mind that something so "mundane" and yet quite important doesn't get solved while messing around with pathfinders, Lua code, new map formats or shader stuff is business as usual... :-)
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knorke
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by knorke »

There is a working solution for the problem:
Autohost tells lobby what engine version to start.
Largest part of the popular games (ba&zK) are played via autohosts so that seems to be priority.
Some lobbies do not even support that.

So how likely is that that these lobbies will add yet another way?
The modinfo.lua idea is actually good but consider that all lobbies would have to use it, or it is the same chaos again. If only a few lobbies (and games) do it then you just have the same situation where various things all work slightly different.
So basically for that idea to work you would need to talk to:
-engine devs (i think?) to make unitsync read the new modinfo entry
-lobby devs, to make lobbies use it
-game devs, to make games include it in their modinfo.lua

Would need some community lead to bring all those groups together, maybe even dictate a standard way.
But such lead does not exist.

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=30376 is kind of similiar problem

That said, multiple engines is quite a fail idea anyway.
It requires players to keep track of multiple installs, or at least of the configs. I think if zK was not one of the 2 popular game but instead one of the smaller ones, no player would bother with the hassle.
Also if it was really widely used, there would all the time be bugreports about things that are already fixed in newer versions..

tl;dr:
Just make sure your game works in current version.
Master-Athmos
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by Master-Athmos »

knorke wrote:So basically for that idea to work you would need to talk to:
-engine devs (i think?) to make unitsync read the new modinfo entry
-lobby devs, to make lobbies use it
-game devs, to make games include it in their modinfo.lua

Would need some community lead to bring all those groups together, maybe even dictate a standard way.
But such lead does not exist.
Well my hope would be that at some point there is enough psychological strain to get everyone at one round table. I mean you mentioned that there already is this autohost solution which solves only part of the problem though and doesn't work on all lobbies. I think everyone would benefit if they just would figure out a common way to finally solve this like via the modinfo entry plus a variable for the lobby client passing this over...

In the end this would save the developers quite some headaches as it would be more easy to have a definite way its done instead of people doing freestyle solutions like that autohost thing which doesn't solve but just ease the issue and leaves other lobby devs at a "go figure" situation...
knorke wrote:Would need some community lead to bring all those groups together, maybe even dictate a standard way.
But such lead does not exist.
Yeah - that's probably the point where I as "outsider" can only scratch my head. On the on hand things like "This is how you position your text in Lua from now on!" is decided by one person and then gets shoved down people's throats but when it's about adding another variable that gets written into the modinfo file and which then is passed over to the lobby things turn out as "No can do."... :|
knorke wrote:tl;dr:
Just make sure your game works in current version.
True. In my opinion one of Spring's greatest fuckups though as it basically tells the game developers: You want to create a game using Spring and using its lobby system & stuff? Great - you'll just never be allowed to quit patching your game. You also better be an expert in all things because if you have one guy doing Lua which quits at some point in time and Lua stuff gets changed again you'd be screwed when not knowing how to adapt to the changes in the new engine version...

That's why I think this entire multi-version topic is extremely important for Spring as you then can finish a game and turn to other projects without having to do maintenance on your work in order to keep people playing it without quite some hassle...

With that said I disagree with your opinion of:
knorke wrote:That said, multiple engines is quite a fail idea anyway.
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NeonStorm
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by NeonStorm »

Master-Athmos wrote:
knorke wrote:tl;dr:
Just make sure your game works in current version.
True. In my opinion one of Spring's greatest fuckups though as it basically tells the game developers: You want to create a game using Spring and using its lobby system & stuff? Great - you'll just never be allowed to quit patching your game. You also better be an expert in all things because if you have one guy doing Lua which quits at some point in time and Lua stuff gets changed again you'd be screwed when not knowing how to adapt to the changes in the new engine version...
+1

But maybe only because spring has no static builds for 91. and previous versions...
And all these to-compile-dependencies where you can install only one on your system - for the new or old engine ...
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zwzsg
Kernel Panic Co-Developer
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by zwzsg »

Often I add code to make my mod compatible with more than one Spring version. The funny thing is that the line that perform version checking has itself been a point of failure, because the way the Spring version string is formatted change every two versions, and a couple times my version-check code crashed on new unexpected version-string formats!
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NeonStorm
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by NeonStorm »

Nah, you just need the new Artificial-Super-Roboter-Intelligence script to parse that string :D

Additional effect : increases AI strength to Godde-Player like efficiency mixed with the all-seeing distributed attention of computer opponents :p
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smoth
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Re: Maximum Annihilation?

Post by smoth »

Athmos you exagerate the severity of the changes made to springs lua Interfaces.The tex alignment issue was more about standards than actual broken stuff
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