Things that stand in the way of growth

Things that stand in the way of growth

Discuss the source code and development of Spring Engine in general from a technical point of view. Patches go here too.

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10053r
Posts: 297
Joined: 28 Feb 2005, 19:19

Things that stand in the way of growth

Post by 10053r »

I've been thinking, and I think there are 4 things that stand in the way of growth right now, in terms of the number of people playing. They all basically boil down to it being easier to get a game.

1) Auto DLing of maps and mods will help when we get the new client. Mods need to autoswitch, of course.
2) The "sync lottery" needs to be taken care of. Someone who doesn't have sync should try again and again until they get it, not just once at the beginning.
3) The clients need to connect to the server BEFORE they load everything else, which then gets updates on spring engine loading progress. This will solve lots of issues including precalcing of maps causing timeouts, slow computers causing timeouts, and everything else causing timeouts.
4) We really need to nail down in game crashes. I've played 4 games today, and not one of them ended in victory or defeat. I am having a bad day to be sure, but most days 1 out of 3 games ends in a crash. I haven't been able to pin down any specific problem, either.

I think that once these 4 things are taken care of, the community will really start to grow. Right now, though, a nube has to wade through a bunch of crap to get on. It's kind of like the Linux of RTS's. It is the very best, but you have to know what you are doing to make it work, which scares off people.

Note also that I am not in favor of growth for growth's sake. I just want to be able to get a game in one of the 3 top mods any time of day or night any day of the week within one minute of signing on. And to do that, we need more players. Also, these issues mean that in an 8 player game, only 5-6 will actually make it into the game on average, which sucks.
Doomweaver
Posts: 704
Joined: 30 Oct 2004, 14:14

Post by Doomweaver »

I agree completely.
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Ace07
Posts: 348
Joined: 21 Apr 2005, 20:46

Post by Ace07 »

I have support for 12 player slots in the new version. I might have to disable them until someone adds support for them though. The reason why it would be nice is that you could have 8 players and 4 observers. It would also be nice to have infinite observers actually.

The bugs will gradually be fixed. Hopefully the new lobby will help a little bit. This time, we have one person working on the GUI (me) and another working on the protocol stuff. It should be interesting to see what comes of it.
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Dragon45
Posts: 2883
Joined: 16 Aug 2004, 04:36

Post by Dragon45 »

I would strongly suggest against implementing auto dl'ing of maps and mods until better formats are created to store them (maps especially)... transferring a 50meg map via any sort of broadband will take a while, and that's assuming both parties have broadband.
Dwarden
Posts: 278
Joined: 25 Feb 2005, 03:21

Post by Dwarden »

My main interest is in "standalone" process running as server ...

how it will work ?

i explain it bit (windows):

- i'm host
- i start game with another players

in this moment spawn two processes client and server

my client is where i play and my server is where game is "controlled" from ...

what is good on this i can loose game and leave my client w/o killing gameplay for rest of players ...

i can even run multiple servers this way ... etc

of course fully dedicated server system will be better but ... this can be start
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hrmph
Posts: 1054
Joined: 12 May 2005, 20:08

obs

Post by hrmph »

Unfortunately observers tend to lag the game down. Lately I have been thinking about a system where the host has an option for observers; When this is turned on, the host sends game data to a server setup specifically for this. The server then posts this info (which would basically just be a stream from the replay file) to a website for anyone to watch in real time. This would be great! The only problem I can see arising is of course with bandwidth.
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[K.B.] Napalm Cobra
Posts: 1222
Joined: 16 Aug 2004, 06:15

Post by [K.B.] Napalm Cobra »

Maybe pick the watcher with the most bandwidth to be the "master watcher" to distribute the data, to lesser watchers.
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