Content Maladies

[AF]

Expand spring expand EXPAND!!! In to the cosmos of the tinternetz, clog up those tubes with weasels, no zakus, no armoured assault shells, no storm troopers yes storm troopers! On delta siege dry! Now wouldn't that be wonderful? Its hardly appropriate but its nothing compared to what is actually happening.

Read here!

[Forboding Angel]

bullcrap

Look at evolutionrts.info

[Warlord Zsinj]

*grumbles about having a website before s44*

At IW, we have been specifically avoiding advertising. It's the main reason why we've kept to a closed beta. The reason being that I agree with you regarding retaining users. Our game is nowhere near finished, and is in no state to retain users. Advertising heavily now and attempting to build up a following would be a recipe for disaster. We've produced enough to keep those who are already curious interested, but not enough to draw further in.

I believe IW has one big chance at getting a lot of interest, through the general star wars universe. But it's not going to do this until it is fully complete, has a fully working UI, has an extremely easy to use installer, some sort of single player mode (AI/campaign/even some sort of invasion chicken variant I guess) and perhaps some change to the lobby dynamic (which has been discussed before but I won't get into here). That might be a way off, but we can't afford to generate masses of interest without the ability to keep the 'well, I guess it's free so I may as well give it a shot' crowd.

I think many other mods are in similar situations. They're just unfinished products, and anyone that isn't already interested in an open source modding sort of scene (that is, competitive players, who don't have time for back-end fiddling and just want to play and win) is not going to be able to pick up and play.

[rattle]

Stop clogging the forums with your useless blog

[AF]

Your current website is newer than Spring 1944. Sure we could argue and be pedantic over whether the SWTA site counts but that would be pointless. Either way this is not a call for a community push for new users, this is a blogpost discussing how current efforts are inneffective, why, and what they should do.

And forb there's no point having a website if people aren't aware of it. But suffice to say I forgot about it.

[Cabbage]

Stop clogging the forums with your useless blog

Mind Reader

[smoth]

I like how af acts like the starwars guys have done nothing.

[Hoi]

enough talking, i now say that when the new site is up, and 0.77 is out we should (if other people dont help ill do it myself) advertise, and make better guides, we could have rewrote the engine and make a mod that is an exact copy of the world if we woudnt have wrote and talked/fighted but do something

[smoth]

timing is everything hoi and whether or not af wants us to move, we have a good idea where OUR projects are and when we should move. Plans already have been made and whole strategic goals are laid out. We, the content devs, are not moving on them because it is not the time yet.

[AF]

No, Im nto asking you all to build a site and start a massive advertisement push in the next 24 hours, Id give you credit enough to know when your content is ready to be released. A little website saying coming soon, a logo, and 2 or 3 screenshots would suffice until then. You guys already have the artwork necessary.

But, I am well aware that there are some content developers and projects in this community to which not all my points apply. I did not mention them all because I didn't want to be pedantic, and tbh Id rather they said "Hey look at what we've done" so that I could write a follow up blogpost praising them and going through what they've done. But alas that's not how they've interpreted my blogpost and Im sorry if I caused offence.

I know that not everyone is ready to release content and go out onto the internet to advertise yet, that's not my point.

As for the rest of the content in spring, there are some mods or games which are in a state where if they had a website and installer, it would be very easy to create a large independent community several times larger than what we have here. They would easily get onto free games sites, and they're much better than a lot of the freeware games magazines bundle with them. The acclaim those content developers would gain is enormous, far greater than anything this community could give them, yet all this potential, credit, is all wasted unnecessarily, and its saddening.

[smoth]

correct, I think that some of the minigames of spring should be showcased as a DEFAULT part of the installer. Fibre, KP and This all belong with spring.

[Gnomre]

Your current website is newer than Spring 1944. Sure we could argue and be pedantic over whether the SWTA site counts but that would be pointless.

He wasn't counting the SWTA site, and besides, we updated our moddb page throughout the years more often than that thing.

Our domain certainly is newer, there's no arguing that. But we did have an earlier revision of our current website and forum up in late October/early November 2007 on UF. The fact that its data was lost once in January once due to one of UF's crashes (prior to the big one about a month later) is irrelevant. If you want proof, go check the dates on moddb, the SWTA site, our old forums at TAU, and so on. From what I can see, S44's first forum opened at nearly the same time, but from what I recall the front page took them considerably longer to get online.

We simply had to push up our plans (a proper name and a domain to match) when UF bought the farm, otherwise we'd still be there. But apparently according to you, that doesn't count

The fact is, most of us making full games realized all of this a year or two ago at least, but content development has yet to catch up with anyone's grand plans.

[Pxtl]

correct, I think that some of the minigames of spring should be showcased as a DEFAULT part of the installer. Fibre, KP and This all belong with spring.

They should be included... but I don't think they'll get played anyways. If anything, including a glut of hard-to-learn mods in the installer will only encourage people to give up and just play BA.

The minigames suffer from the same learning-curve failures as the big mods. No bundled documentation, no single-player (though I know KDR is working on this) so the game is an opaque wall.

[Hoi]

timing is everything hoi and whether or not af wants us to move, we have a good idea where OUR projects are and when we should move. Plans already have been made and whole strategic goals are laid out. We, the content devs, are not moving on them because it is not the time yet.

okay, i am trying to rush things, not good, but i'm not talking about tower defence, iw, gundam, lolimod, brutal spray unitspack (lol) or whatever mod, i am talking about spring, you can continue saying, lets wait becaus we will have x feature soon, its just time to bring in more people, which will result in more devs/modders/mappers/lua people/whatever, one little article on the fileplanet homepage is enough, if we make things less complicated, eg: just make a lobby shortcut on the desktop after install, this results in much less confuseivness (lol word)

[AF]

Id forgotten about the UF hosted starwars site

[LordMatt]

Moved to offtopic, as promotion of a personal blog doesn't seem to fit general discussion.

[AF]

This is directly relevant and intended for the spring community, whereas off topic was created with the intention that non-spring related discussions would be moved there.

[KDR_11k]

The minigames suffer from the same learning-curve failures as the big mods. No bundled documentation, no single-player (though I know KDR is working on this) so the game is an opaque wall.

I do disagree with this to some degree. The mentioned games were Fibre, KP and THIS. Fibre has a limited singleplayer mode and a bundled manual (few read it though), I do agree it's a learning nightmare still but these parts aren't at fault I think. KP doesn't have a manual, true, but it does have a skirmish mode with its LuaAI and is pretty easy to learn since there's not many unit types in play (the evilless mode is practically the same as KP1.0 which had players learn everything about the game within half a match and able to play at full strength in their second match). THIS is designed to be user friendly with big messages explaining what is expected from the player and a small text giving a short hint at how to do it (e.g. "Not enough money - capture more planets" and even, if the player lacks planets early on, "You have no planets - capture them by moving ships into their radius"), tooltips and everything. Plans included a large tooltip listing all weapons on a ship with their properties (e.g. that plasma is deflected by shields, that lasers suck at DPS, ...) so the weapon properties are easier to see. They're consistent in their behaviour so knowing what the types do should allow the player to know what the units using them do. The Luaed buttons were supposed to get labels too ("pick X perks" over the perk selector, "global build system" next to the large ship stuff, "carrier build queue" and "global build queue" on the queues). Eh, that's all a lot of work I'm probably never going to do but you can probably see where this is going.

[Forboding Angel]

Before I finish I want to heap praise on the Spring 1944 people. While a few people have made tentative steps inching a little towards what I have proposed ( gundam CA and evolutionRTS for example), they have not gone anywhere near as far as they need to, but spring 1944 has gone further. They built a website before anybody asked, bought a domain, and set everything up before they even have a finished release. Theyve populated the site and maintained it all on there own with little or no help. Its this sort of initiative we need to see.

Such BULLCRAP!

http://evolutionrts.info

Do a whois, see when it was registered. FEBRUARY! When was the site up? APRIL!

Grrr, do some research please.

[SwiftSpear]

I really don't see how more spring related websites is beneficial at this point in time. I see a plethora of down sides and very few redeeming factors with the community at it's current size. Every project needing it's own website and comunity base will massively increase the workload on already overstrained mod and game development teams. It will scatter the community, which is bad with a community so small... tight knit is a better target to aim for, and I really doubt it will improve our hitcounts at all.

You can definitely advertise spring and specific projects for spring, All you need is a spring forum thread, or wiki page, and instructions for how to get your project running on the spring engine contained within. Ya sure, it's not going to look super streamlined and professional... but frankly, anyone who would download a free, nonprofit, open sourced game developed by hobbyists, won't care massively about a polished website anyways. Alot of that kind of content you find dumped on crappy file portals and stuff like that, many indie and opensourced gamers are used to not even ever seeing the project website often times.

I have nothing against any project that wants their own website and their own webspace, there's certainly good uses for it as well. And I'm definately not against projects advertizing, but that's generally an issue ENTIRELY up to the development team of the project, it'd probably be good for spring in the immediate term if IW started advertizing hardcore right now, but it would be bad for IW because they aren't ready to show their work en mass, and they don't have a release ready now/soon. In the long run, what's best for spring is strong, fun, and finished mod/game projects. It's best for spring that mod teams cater to their own best interests first, and the best interests of the spring project second.

There's a plethora of factors that are directly and indirectly responsible for spring's current population figures, both retirement and lack of new blood. Relitively slow development for player relevant features, poor advertisement, lack of dominant and full quality third party mods. Complicated install and run system for new players, lack of tutorials to explain absurd interface setup in most of the mods. Blaming one factor is both unfair and pointless. Spring needs to improve on all fronts, not just one. Mod advertizement and mod exclusive community development is virtually irrelevant as a factor right now, it's massively overshadowed by the many other factors, because the reality is, right now the community is small, and it really doesn't need to be split up into easier to handle parts for the benefit of the player. It's easy enough to digest all as one unit. If we come to the point where there's an average of 2000 players on at any given time, then absolutely I'd say the mod teams need to step it up, but right now, the playerbase is small, so the mod teams don't need to be huge to compete for them. It's easy enough for a mod developer to have regular conversations with everyone who acctually plays their mod.

The reality is, ultimately the issue is not simple. It's basically just flame baiting people to call them out at this point in time.