nxain wrote:
My point here is that without the flagship game, you're just rehashing TA over and over. Spring is in need a vision driving game play mechanics and innovation.
Dangerous statement on this forum. Have you played THIS, FIBRE or KP? Have you played EE?
Have you read up on what starwars will have as it's new way of handling resources? Have you read up on gundams? Have you read up on the way S44 is handling unit moral, resource and the aircraft?
Many projects here are more than a rehash of TA. Some projects are also in the works that are not even comparable.
You know before the game starts what their rank is. Making an issue out of it after the fact is just being a prick. Yes, you might lose, but you could at least lose with some grace. If you can't handle it leave the lobby and join a game with with a minimum rank.
Don't be a dipshit, ranks mean practically nothing thanks to smurfing, the only thing that matters is playerskill and if you suck at spring, don't join 5v5-7v7's and expect players to kind or nice to your newbie ass.
Nobodies going to argue that new types of RTS play are bad. However be aware it is extremely difficult to find players for new game styles. I don't think the majority of under 30's have the patience for learning new rules. Anything that isn't immediately familiar is too much trouble (try playing globulation). I know I'm sweeping a broad brush there but it's the impression i've had with many alternative mods. Spring's strong attraction is largely due to players being familiar with TA which in itself is largely popular because it was singularly the best RTS at the time it was released. This isn't an opinion, it's a fact and I can prove it.
Back in 95 or around then when the game was released I was up in Brisbane, Australia as Auran were unveiling Dark Reign to the public for the very first time. They had set up a Quakefest LAN party and were putting on a presentation of the fantastic new technology that was Dark Reign. At that point Dark Reign had never been seen outside of Auran and some magazine screenshots.
As the head of Auran was talking about its features and all the fans were paying rapt attention I noticed out of the corner of my eye that one guy in the room was sitting at his PC playing an RTS. Thinking it was probably Dark Reign I wandered over and saw TA for the first time.
As the minutes ticked by a large crowd gathered around this guy as his 3D tanks bounced around the terrain and rocked to recoil. By the end of the Dark Reign presentation more than 50% of the room had already walked away from the talk to shoulder surf this one guy. I think most of the remainder where just too polite or embarrassed to leave.
Naturally Auran were pissed.
The point is TA made a HUGE impression on players at the time and though its getting stale with age it has an undeniable appeal to people who played it at its height. It should not be so easily dismissed as a burden on Spring when in fact it drives its popularity.
I understand the IP issues but at this point no ex-cavedog lawyers or Atari legal team have turned up to shut it down. Even Chris Taylor who would arguably have the most say in it has been quiet on the subject, despite possibly losing Supreme Commander players to Spring.
I think the IP issue is a little overblown given the time lag involved and if Atari ever do come gunning there will likely be only a moderate delay before new content can be sourced.
@ lollocide
Smurfing can be solved by banning (by IP) players that play more than 20 rounds. If you play that many games you're not a n00b anymore. Also joining a big game is the natural path for new player because you think your poor playing will get lost in the "crowd". Joining a 2v2 is MUCH worse. The real issue is that too many games are on small maps so one player can cause issues if they don't start right. More games are wrecked by dropouts than n00bs.
And I called you statement bullshit, not you. Calling me a dipshit is just getting personal. Read the forum rules before losing your cool.
SpliFF wrote:
The point is TA made a HUGE impression on players at the time and though its getting stale with age it has an undeniable appeal to people who played it at its height. It should not be so easily dismissed as a burden on Spring when in fact it drives its popularity.
I'm not saying that TA wasn't a great game (although I had to play Starcraft for 2 years before even giving TA a shot), just that it's not the way forward. This may be a good time to take a cue from Chris Taylor himself and re-envision what TA could be today and add all the lessons learned over the last decade.
Also, Starcraft creamed TA because of accessibility and polish, not gameplay (both were good, so it was hardly a deciding factor). Anybody remember the Cavedog game after TA? It was a complete bomb (I bought it thought, based on TA gameplay).
Also, the other huge benefit of a flagship game is that if focuses tools on content production. Content is the game to most people, but with such a fractured community and being behind the times tool-wise, Spring could really use a boost on that side. The big trend right now is to move tools into the runtime (I don't mean AI and debugging, but rather terrain creation, geometry placement, resource painting and etc.)
SpliFF wrote:
And I called you statement bullshit, not you. Calling me a dipshit is just getting personal. Read the forum rules before losing your cool.
Still a dipshit
Last edited by [TS]Lollocide on 28 Sep 2008, 17:19, edited 1 time in total.
where does this newb 1bar get off running his mouth?
A) if you dont like the style of gameplay,then gtfo.
B) you havnt been here long enough to have a opinion. so shut ur mouth.
C) if youreally dont liek the gameplay, make your own mod. Not all games are ta based. you could create whatever you wanted. and wtf did you expect when you downloaded taspring? that it wasnt going to be ta? obviously its going to be a ta based game, so why run your mouth about it?
nobody is making you play or wants to play with you so go choke on a rope.
sefi wrote:where does this newb 1bar get off running his mouth?
A) if you dont like the style of gameplay,then gtfo.
B) you havnt been here long enough to have a opinion. so shut ur mouth.
C) if youreally dont liek the gameplay, make your own mod. Not all games are ta based. you could create whatever you wanted. and wtf did you expect when you downloaded taspring? that it wasnt going to be ta? obviously its going to be a ta based game, so why run your mouth about it?
nobody is making you play or wants to play with you so go choke on a rope.
Sorry I disagree with everything you just said EXCEPT that Kingdoms was a bomb.
Spring IS a revisioned TA. It has at least as many features (epic zoom, air transports, pretty nukes, large units) as Supreme Commander except for the change in factions and artwork. Since good 3D modellers who can complete the whole process (model -> texture -> UV map -> animate -> script) are about as common as martians it goes without saying that content will probably be the last thing to adapt.
Which is the main issue. If something LOOKS like a peewee then players expect it to ACT like one. You can't use the TA models and change gameplay without totally confusing and annoying players. Rebalance is one thing, but re-invisioning is a tall order. There are mods that do that but I don't think any are ready for the primetime spotlight just yet. Given more time though and EE, PURE, KP and others will probably acheive what you ask.
The main thing is the ENGINE can handle new things, and the reliance on TA assets does not appear to be slowing or limiting engine development.
Finally tools might be fractured but at this stage that is not a bad thing. Each tool may have an approach that appeals to certain people. In the case of TASClient vs. SpringLobby there is a large appeal in SL's Linux/Mac compatibility. I'm not sure that one tool to rule them all is really possible at this point.
[TS]Lollocide wrote: ranks mean practically nothing thanks to smurfing, the only thing that matters is playerskill and if you suck at spring, don't join 5v5-7v7's and expect players to kind or nice to your newbie ass.
I have heard that they are going to make it harder to smurf. Personally, I think ranks should be reset and smurfing should be much harder. By reseting the ranks and adding a few more, making smurfing harder, it would first level the playing field again for a little bit and give rank whores something to work towards. You guys would have better way to know the guy you are playing with.
Also the lower ranks need to have a larger expanse of separation. I'd love to chat with you about it more.
Spliff, spring does not require TA assets. Many projects do not use them. Spring is more than the TA mods.
sefi wrote:where does this newb 1bar get off running his mouth?
A newb at what? Certainly not game development of usability. Nor project management or building content. I'm only a newb on this particular forum offering expert advice and opinions. If the term "newb" applies, I would say it's probably the reverse of what you intended.
It's your right to tell me where to stick my opinions or to ignore me. If you're smart (which is questionable), you'll really think about what I'm saying, whether you agree or not, and the future of Spring. If all you care about is tweaking a few lines of code and changing an old missile launcher into a newer missile launcher, then this thread should hardly matter. The people I'm talking to are the ones that really want to do something cool and interesting and actually have people play it and enjoy it.
Of course smoth, I just mean the gap between perception and the reality. Spring can handle things nobody has even done yet (hand-to-hand combat, vehicle handling physics).
I do think dumping the TA assets at this stage might be premature. I like what other mods have done but it just seems like they're not done yet. CA is close, but still.
@nXain, pls ignore him, he's probably 15 or something. It's obvious you're experienced in these fields and it's a pity there's never a moderator around when you need one.
SpliFF wrote: Since good 3D modellers who can complete the whole process (model -> texture -> UV map -> animate -> script) are about as common as martians it goes without saying that content will probably be the last thing to adapt.
.
The strange thing is, artists are far more common than programmers (I can fill an art position in 2 weeks, but it may take months to find a qualified programmer, especially in AI). What's that tell you about who Spring is drawing in? You should have good artists coming out of your ears, able to get tons of cool content into Spring, yet they aren't here. This is because Spring is not friendly enough for artists and designers to want to contribute to.
Sorry I wasn't clear enough. Modellers are a dime a dozen. Unfortunately in every mod I've created (Supreme Commander: Advanced Tactics and Dawn Of War:Epic Legions) the modellers dumped a bunch of raw, untextured, non-uvmapped, non-animated and non-scripted files on me and expected them to magically appear in game. My experience has been that creating the base model is about 5% of the work required to get a working unit into the game.
@ Hoi
By getting some experienced users and tutorials to guide users from the static model stage to the ingame stage.
Last edited by SpliFF on 26 Sep 2008, 19:34, edited 1 time in total.
SpliFF wrote:Sorry I wasn't clear enough. Modellers are a dime a dozen. Unfortunately in every mod I've created (Supreme Commander: Advanced Tactics and Dawn Of War:Epic Legions) the modellers dumped a bunch of raw, untextured, uv mapped, animated or scripted files on me and expected them to magically appear in game. My experience has been that creating the base model is about 5% of the work required to get a working unit into the game.
To get a good model, you need to do alot of work, however a bad model does not make the unit bad, a bad texture (on a good model) does though.
The people who want to do something cool... are doing it. We don't need this to get there, we've known what you were talking about for quite some time now. Moreover, we're getting plenty of support from the Spring engine developers. Pretty much all I have to say on that front.
While I agree that in-game editing suites and other things would be a really huge deal, it hasn't been a focus of developers. If you want to spend "spare time" on any one issue... get with Quantum, see whether you guys could make a nice Lua mission-design tool.
I am really hoping that P.U.R.E. will get everybody to see Reality here- a reality where I had to beg for a proper front-end, because none existed, and where I desperately need a way to make campaigns with triggers, but I'll probably have to code all of that myself, as well as make all of the content. Spring's actually really close to reaching the point where everybody will have to take the engine seriously... the number of awesome things in the next major release is huge. What people need to focus on, though, are the "little" things- content-development tools and better integration of workflow with output. For example, jcnossen half-finished animation code stuff in UpSpring. It doesn't work right, it's hard to use, and I've just kept coding animation sequences by hand, for now. A WSIWYG editor for BOS animation is long overdue.
On the "next-gen content" front, we have people working on MD5 support, which is something I broached here months and months ago (to lots of jeering, I might add, from various people). It appears that this is finally heading towards reality, although it remains to be seen how we're going to go through integration and optimization tasks, etc., as the solutions working their way down the pipe are still very rough around the edges. A lot of people think it's going to be a panacea, of course, although I think they're in for a shock when they realize how complicated it's going to make the modeling and animation process. On the other hand, it'll finally make the engine friendly to conventionally-trained artists, which should be nice.
At any rate... if you want to do something more constructive than be heckled by this crowd... there are a ton of small projects that need doing that need a coder-hat type who understands content development. Trying to talk these people into some giant uber-game is utterly pointless, though, imo.
Not meant as an insult but if stages 2 to 6 were easy why does nobody ever do them? Just look through any mod forum for any game and see how many models never get past the first forum thread, even when they look awesome. I think an Md5 importer will help somewhat but the real show-stopper tends to be animation.
@ Hoi
He's pissed at me for implying modelling is easy, that wasn't my intent. Modelling is hard, animation is just harder (IMHO).
Last edited by SpliFF on 26 Sep 2008, 19:41, edited 1 time in total.
