Lobby Picker

[Satirik]

Hey, don't get me wrong, that's a great feature.

And I'm not here to flame everybody working on the Lobbies or whatever. I just want to see a more seamless product that feels like a part of Spring, not a third-party application, and is oriented primarily towards making sure that newbies have the easiest experience possible.

None of those goals are incompatible with SD or with SpringLobby overall, and they aren't meant to be some massive attack on anybody- like I said, I'm neutral on this, and I've seen how much work has gone into these things.

I just want to see the Lobby folks and the Engine folks see that basically the end-user experience is a whole, not just two disconnected parts with different areas of responsibility.

SD is just what you want ... try it and love it

[Argh]

OK, I will spend time testing it when I am available to start testing Spring in general sometime this week. From the way you're talking about it, I'm looking forward to seeing how it works

[AF]

Argh you obviously haven't properly gotten the point of this thread and what I'm asking, enfact a lot of what you say is contradicted by points you make yourself 2 or 3 lines further down in the same post.

Add to this, the fact they your trying to lecture 2 lobby developers on how to develop lobbys, while derailing this thread and making sly digs.

Z, it was an example, you have to admit if you were to add such a button it would be a problem, and you would either have to resort to listing and bundling them all with the installer or picking one.


Why the lobby wasn't been built in the engine? Its easier to build it externally, if we were to do it internally, we'd have to mess with spring code, we'd have to build a UI kit from scratch, and we would have to sort out lua interfaces, whereas other toolkits are far more portable. There have been recent additions by Ausw before he officially left for greener pastures, but if a new lobby project begins, its likely to be external.

This also ignores the fact that some people join the lobby to chat, and would rather not have channels in a fullscreen app, or even have chat open at the same time as spring via alt+tab.

You also forget that a lot of commercial games did it this way, even TA did it this way once boneyards was down, all the games that relied on game spy did it this way, supreme commander did it this way etc


All in all, you've just waltzed into my thread and denounced my idea as unnecessary, and instead of saying why, you've descended into a generic rant at lobby developers. I'd think you would be more responsible than that as a content developer who regularly dispenses to others what they should and shouldnt be doing.

[Argh]

if we were to do it internally, we'd have to mess with spring code

Not really. I'm not talking about Z's front-end here, but the Spring front-end. It's just a simplistic UI and a static image. It'd be nice to allow something like Z's front-end to send players directly to a Lobby area (without leaving the Spring context) but that isn't anything like a requirement- technically what we have right now is meeting all the end-users' needs.

we'd have to build a UI kit from scratch

Erm, why can't a standard UI kit like FLTK be used? These are entirely different areas of Spring, and Spring doesn't have to fire up any of the gamecode at that point (and doesn't).

we would have to sort out lua interfaces

If the Lobby were in the engine, that might only be necessary if we wanted Lua to be able to pass new things to it, or to perform OpenGL functions like changing the background image.


Lastly, as Satirik pointed out, I obviously need to take a look at SD and see what we've got in terms of "idiot-proof" before I can have an educated opinion here. There's nothing "sly" about this, AF- the last time I spent much time looking at the Lobbies, they were still very complicated and were chock-full of features that were mainly made for the long-term Lobby crowd, not aimed at newbies- if that's changed a lot, then I need to see what that looks like.

[Neddie]

Locked on request of original poster.