An unethical idea to increase Spring's player base

[Forboding Angel]

Anyway, advertising spring would be a mistake. Advertising a single spring game would be a good idea. But seriously, you would want to advertise BA? Seriously??? BA looks like total and utter shit and is an embarrassment to this engine.

And yet advertising anything besides BA is a mistake, for various reasons. First of all, nothing else is played consistently, secondly, most(emphasis here, I know it's not 100% true) other games do not have very evolved or balanced gameplay, and more importantly, stable gameplay.

1. Yes that's correct.

2. That's not a very smart thing to say. Just because you haven't seriously tried anything else doesn't mean that all of a sudden it isn't balanced or doesn't have "evolved" gameplay.

Anyone remember EE? EE was a great game. Interestingly enough, it's unit count rivaled *A, had up to tech 4 iirc and was seriously more epic. But yeah you're right, it must not have been balanced or had "evolved" gameplay. Did I mention that it had 3 races, each with it's own DRASTICALLY different playstyle?

[nightcold]

It's utterly silly though. It's like going to chris taylor and asking him to mention sc2. LOLWUT?

HD is all about sc2, and so are all of his fans. He doesn't give a flying crap about other rts games. You have to realize that people like that live eat sleep and shit blizzards (and not the tasty kind from dairy queen). If you want them to give an informed opinion then you have to get them to play it. Otherwise, they would probably see ba, lol and get on with their lives. I wasn't kidding when I said BA was an embarrassment to the engine, all the *A's are (barring CA which I really dunno why CA is still even called CA, but whatever).

first of all, lets ask ourselves....what is the difference with us asking HD to mention spring and chris taylor mentioning HD(chris taylor has actually mentioned sc, but not for promoting sc)...well chris taylor is doing something commercial, HD gets no money from blizzard(i think).....spring is a open source game, no one is making any profit off of it....while sc and wtv chris taylor is doing is...please stay away from false analogies......asking HD is no different that posting a spring promo thread on a fan made sup-com forum, this is basically consumers communicating

don't get me wrong, I'm all on board in breaking BA's monopoly... but your going a bit too far mate...mods like nota and XTA have perhaps the most polished and enjoyable gameplay in spring....sadly alot of of new-er mods(IMO)(ehemCAehem) are making the mistake of making game play as fast and easily flowing as possible(i don't mean this as an insult 2 evo, just my opinion)...honestly i dont see the huge problem with using IP(other than the lawsuit), IP is bs(i mean theft).....

[luckywaldo7]

@Hobo Joe

Starcraft 2 is
1. Colorful
2. Not Balanced
and for a while during closed beta, couldn't really be considered stable, and yet was still wildly popular.

So while you have great reasons for liking BA, those do not necessarily extend to the large of the starcraft community.

[Forboding Angel]

Enjoyable gameplay for whom? I don't enjoy them. I don't enjoy BA. As far as *A goes, imo BOTA by far has the most polished gameplay.

HD does get paid. He gets regular donations from his fans and is a google partner which also brings in a substantial amount of cash.

Please stay away from using improper punctuation like "..." repeatedly, causing your entire paragraphs to turn into one massive run-on sentence.

The analogy was not improper. Stop thinking of advertising spring like you would an open source thing, and think of advertising in a commercial sense. Ubuntu is open source and has advertising, but look how far it's gotten. If it were to advertise in a commercial sense, many more people would have looked at it by now.

Still you're wanting to ask HD to spend airtime (and any broadcaster will tell you, 30 seconds of airtime is a lot of money) advertising a rival set of rts games.

Visually (in the gui side of things), most spring games are primitive in comparison to commercial rts games/ Chilligui has taken huge steps in the direction of fixing that little area, but the lobbies for spring are mostly rubbish (SL with it's incessant popups, SD with it's lack of hosting options and constant ringspam, tasc with it's delphiness and nearly constant unintelligible error popups). So what exactly are you looking for? He would take one look at spring as a whole and immediately write it off, and if he did stick around to see what it was like I can tell you exactly what he would say "Very rough/Unpolished".

Even so, the only visually half decent games in spring that I am aware of is Gundam (being the best looking of the lot), CA and Evo. Cursed deserves mention as well as s44.

But what would he see if he joined the lobby? BA. What w2ould he then proceed to play? BA. Would he lol at how primitive it is and think that you're an idiot? Probably.

Your opinion is your opinion. Doesn't matter what I think because it's your opinion.

That said, in what we are talking about, basically, I'm right and you're misguided (although with the best of intentions).

[knorke]

Visually (in the gui side of things), most spring games are primitive in comparison to commercial rts games/ Chilligui has taken huge steps in the direction of fixing that little area

huge steps in breaking compatility (different resolutions) and easyness to explain too:
-click blabla
-i dont have that button
-oh, you must have different ui
-...

why shoud HD (i think you mean the HDstarcraft account on youtube?) talk about spring? HDstarcraft.

Spring has its own people doing commentated replays, ie:
http://www.youtube.com/user/XtaReplay
maybe just support them?

[babbles]

They haven't been active for ages though.

[Hobo Joe]

@Hobo Joe

Starcraft 2 is
1. Colorful
2. Not Balanced
and for a while during closed beta, couldn't really be considered stable, and yet was still wildly popular.

So while you have great reasons for liking BA, those do not necessarily extend to the large of the starcraft community.

I wasn't talking about Starcraft.

[Forboding Angel]

Knorke, everyone refers to hdstarcraft as HD. Just because CA may be using chili wrong, doesn't mean that the rest of us will be ;p

[luckywaldo7]

@Hobo Joe

Starcraft 2 is
1. Colorful
2. Not Balanced
and for a while during closed beta, couldn't really be considered stable, and yet was still wildly popular.

So while you have great reasons for liking BA, those do not necessarily extend to the large of the starcraft community.

I wasn't talking about Starcraft.

Well, everyone else was, where were you

[PicassoCT]

I always wanted spring to be spread by a viruz, dl the game, installing dsd and ABBA, and if you hit solitaire or minesweeper, guess what microsoft brought you today, for free on your crappy pc.

[HectorMeyer]

A more ethical approach to attract a wider audience would be focus on basics like professional content and appeal of website and product. Don't neglect the problem of making people stay after they found the project via advertising.

Now lets compare Spring to another open source project, also based on a popular 90s PC - realtime strategy if you will - game:
http://www.openttd.org/

Take a look around the website. The frontpage has a nice, clean look, the wiki also looks nice (why not adopt this classic, design?), is well structured and well written, has lots of pictures, links and categories, covers all aspects of the game with very comprehensive info for newbies to developers, not just a fragmented, ugly text wasteland and collection of forum threads and useless links.

I could go into lengths about the wiki and website now, here are just a few aspects I want to point out:
The Servers link shows first time visitors an active community.
The wiki has a very comprehensive, useful development section, for engine and content. Actively used "patches" system, for anyone to make "mods" of the engine.

Some noteworthy aspects about the client are the nice integrated lobby and content downloading system. Everything works very smooth. The client does a clean, portable install, all settings/content/savegames are stored in one easy accessible folder under my files, easy to delete or to backup. To be fair, the whole OpenTTD project is probably not as complex as spring though.

Also notice that OpenTTD, despite copyright issues (which they seem to have solved recently with newGRF), clearly focuses on Transport Tycoon Deluxe, while Spring goes through great lengths hiding it's (current) main feature - an active Total Annihilation community. In it's current state, the only way advertising Spring would make sense imo is to directly advertise the TA based mods.

[Hobo Joe]

Well, everyone else was, where were you

I was just responding to what forb was saying about BA and Spring mods in general.


@ Hectory: Good link, I agree.

[Forboding Angel]

You mention focusing on professional content, and in the same breath talk about advertising *A...

Please explain to me how that makes any sense at all.

[Das Bruce]

He's a troll, just ignore him.

[KaiserJ]

i would be very surprised if HDstarcraft ran a spring video. mortage-my-house-for-the-wager surprised.

also note that for most of its existence the spring project has had *A mods as the "flagship", and the community has stayed about the same size.

also note that many game & open source websites will not cover spring or give spring any credibility due to the prevalence of stolen IP content. these are not rules we have imposed on ourselves, but rather the gaming community as a whole have imposed these rules on us.

there is nothing stopping any of us from opening our own sites, starting our own advertising and spreading the word. however, i would say that the majority of BA fans are not developers, but players... which leads to the question of "how is this advertising and content actually to be created and shared" if nobody is really willing to do it.

so no. advertising BA is a poor idea, not because it isnt fun, but because its a questionable practice frowned upon outside of our community (barring anything related to style and quality of the visuals) as well as the fact that its been going on for years already with no measurable gain.

edit : hector its a nice site and openTTD is a great game, but it's a single game presented as a standalone, rather than an engine overall. there is NOTHING stopping someone from making such a website to deal purely with BA or any other mod, other than laziness or lack of interest

[scifi]

Spring could benefict a lot from advertising thats a fact, but you cant advertise spring and its mods currently.

As kaiser said, if people want go advertise BA, or whatever no person is stoping you, but advertising BA as the flagship mod for spring i completely disagree with this line of thinking, BA isnt spring though it makes up of over 80% Of the playerbase.

BA is a nice mod to play, somewhat fun and interesting, but nothing so extraordinary that is worth mentioning, in a gamespot video review for example.

Dont get me wrong BA and other spring mods are way better than plenty publicitated comercial games, but problems sutch as ui, unfinished grafics, bugged lobbys and general disorganization and the lack of a premade package makes it harder to even mention spring as a game.

Most people wouldnt even waste theyr time, trying to learn the game and actualy have fun playing it and modding it.

Spring has more chances with google sumer of code project, and maybe advertising in blender and game artist forums, than in sites like IGN or GAMESPOT.

Believe me when i say this spring has a lot of potential but if at least 1 good package was made, a completely polished game with somewhat decent grafics, ui and with a decent gameplay i would consider using it as a flagship mod, until sutch a thing apears forget about it.

there are decent projects like evo RTS, gundam, s44, Damned, Cursed e.t.c..but they need to be finished

and tbh BA is no where near to be finished.

[Pxtl]

I still think that Spring could have been *the* killer F/OSS RTS game like 5 years ago if Fanger hadn't disappeared... and then reappeared... and then disappeared again.

[Forboding Angel]

Well, let me and kai finish evo, and maybe that will be capable of filling your heart with joy ;p

[Wombat]

to sum up, stop giving another ideas, over and over again how to increase player base, but just move ur ass and tell ur friends about spring. gg

[scifi]

I still think that Spring could have been *the* killer F/OSS RTS game like 5 years ago if Fanger hadn't disappeared... and then reappeared... and then disappeared again.

completly agree with this

EE was awesome, but then fanger left he said something like this, "my comp is broken, its hard to make a game that you cant play", then he got his new computer, never heard of him again.