What I meant with that is that the general gameplay is always the same no matter what mods/maps you play. Spring is a game engine just like the Quake engine, Half-Life engine etc. There are a dozens games that use the Quake engine nowadays and if you try them out they all are the same, meaning the differences are so little that you know you are playing Quake even if the title of the game you play is different. Just because you tweak the game engine doesn't give you a new game. It would be a different story if Spring was a 3D engine or a more abstract game engine.AF wrote: The engine is an engine. Try and launch it with no maps or games and tell me exactly how much of the content is hardcoded.
*5 minutes later*
Yes there was no content! Well... there was a pretty picture of palm trees on a beach map somewhere, and some buttons that didn't do anything, but I'm sure Ataris lawyers will take care of this. Foilage is a legal menace that must be stamped out at all costs.
If after all this you still think the engine is a hardcoded game that lets you twiddle which direction peewees face, then the solution is NOT to bundle games
( but the engine is a game you say? We dont need to bundle the top 10 games, apparently it already is one so we're sorted no? )
The solution is to stop average players downloading the engine, and point them towards the games instead, and to make the engine more of an engine.
As of pointing some things that are hardcoded, here are a few: queue system, the commands, the unit formations, the game shortcuts, the unit properties, the resources, the weapons etc etc.
Then the community itself brand quite often themselves Spring as a game. A very visible example is http://springfiles.com/spring. Strictly speaking every BA, DA, SA, GA should be compiled with the engine and no user should ever know what the hell Spring is. That's something that only devs and people interested in the innerworkings of the game should know.
Thing is that the first experience for someone should be ultra simple and pleasing. Now he had his experience so he never playied the game again and he probably won't get motivated if I just start bugging him.abma wrote: next time let him (your friend) download the spring installer, setup a game in lobby and let him download with the lobby download system.
Most devs just aren't really interested in making the game user-friendly or anything like that. They just make the game for their own needs(like in all open source projects) and that's just fine. Just don't tell me of how easy it is to use it later because that's the same story with Linux people trying to convince dummy users of the easyness of Ubuntu.
