Promotion/Advertising for Spring

[smoth]

Same old ignorant rubbish from another person afflicted with dunning kruger.

This post could contain meaningful debate, it could be something productive. It isn't you trot out the same tired nonsense about spring projects being little more than unit packs and maybe to you xta and ba are but i don't see either that way. You and your ilk are a cancer of this community, your type derides the years of work people have produced for your free consumption. Your metric on what comprise a game consists of an ever moving goal.

Yet you decry a lack of interest from content devs while offering nothing useful!

[knorke]

A player describes his experience with spring.
Instead of trying to learn from that he gets called cancer.
Superb!

[luckywaldo7]

I was never convinced with the argument that: “we should not advertise spring as a whole because it is not a ‘game’ but a ‘game engine’, the concept of a ‘game engine’ is too abstract for the populous….therefor you need to advertise my game instead”.

People personally advertise their games themselves. There is no one to go to who will do it for them.

There is no central "Spring development team". There are the engine devs and various game devs that loosely cooperate, and some random forum posters/players. If no other reason, that's why it hasn't really worked out to advertise everything as a whole. There is no such things as a "Spring" person to do it.

So when you say "you could" or "we could" in your posts, you aren't really talking to anybody.

With that in mind, because the position doesn't exist it is completely open for you to take it, and put yourself in charge of the universal installer and PR. Perhaps other people might suddently show some interest in helping if they see you step up.

[Neddie]

I've never been convinced that we shouldn't advertise Spring as a whole because it is a game engine, not a game, but at the same time I recognize that it is a game engine, and nothing without the games that populate it. The fact is that when I advertised Spring titles aggressively, I found no effective way to advertise the engine and the titles on it as one unit to a mass audience. As I've mentioned elsewhere, advertising involves scoping your message for your platform and target; if you want players, you need to shoot for the swamp, not the stars.

I do agree that a simple installer with a direct flow to play is, in theory, a necessity. Not for these titles to be considered games, but rather, for most people to be able to access them as such. Remember, the modern PC gamer tends to install from some digital service, and in the case of Steam, through a seamless platform.

The caster idea isn't a bad one.

The thread didn't die, it just went home. Maybe a dozen people here have actual experience with digital or traditional advertising, and most of those won't comment in these discussions.

[nightcold]

regarding the developers not playing: I'am not gana name any names but there are at lest a couple of very vocal ones in this thread, in fact they play AAA games instead. Playing spring and having a hobby developing spring stuff may not be related at all.

i agree with Neddie

i don't think that advertising spring as a whole has been as disastrous people think it has been

remember these things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y5IMq6u4hc

showing off spring as "a free open source rts with not only one but many different mature and full mods that all have their own style and feel" works imo.

even in practice it is not that case that spring is just different "games" glued together. People jump between different mods all the time, that is the spring experience. A person might play ZK most of the time because there is always games, but then jump to XTA or CT when a few people have created a game for it.

@luckywaldo7:
actually i think the position that you speak of might already exists. In fact "Community Lead" might be a good name for it, just saying.(oh the irony). There are also a few other people oh this forum that have taken up leadership positions informally.

[PicassoCT]

Is this a sort of resentment, because those guys in the moddev channel do not want to play all the time? To be honest- yeah, i only look into other games from time to time to get up to speed whats new.
No, i do not play for fun, enjoyment.
For fun and enjoyment i hunt the infolocus for bugs. Strange entertaiment, you say? Maybee.
Reason to resent us?
Surely not. Without us, you wouldnt have any stuff to search players for in the first place.
This is work, and all work and no play, make billys game.
Get used to it.

[gajop]

I haven't played Spring games recently, mostly because I don't have much free time. The little that I have I use to actually develop stuff for Spring, and I think I can do that fine without playing frequently.

[luckywaldo7]

@luckywaldo7:
actually i think the position that you speak of might already exists. In fact "Community Lead" might be a good name for it, just saying.(oh the irony). There are also a few other people oh this forum that have taken up leadership positions informally.

You can be one of those people!

Just show what you can do.

[PicassoCT]

There is a hidden photo thread for lenght comparisons - so that leadership can be estimated properly. All hail abma, the man with the 42 cm snake.

[Rumpelstiltskin]

Spring mostly appeals to a tiny bizarre group within the gaming community.
It has to be someone interested in competitive multiplayer RTS games(pvp) while not feeling satisfied with playing starcraft or supcom or some other older "AAA" titles that are still around.
Spring does not appeal to most of the competitive multiplayer crowed, it does not appeal to those who want to play single player and i think it mostly does not appeal to people who enjoy working on a game engine since there are probably better and newer ones out there.
With Titles like PA(if it is successful) even more people will see the games on Spring as outdated visually and in terms of gameplay.

Who are the target audience again?Tech savvy People who can't afford to buy RTS games?
Spring games don't even appeal to players with old machines(or cheap laptops) since they are not that light weight...

[smoth]

Playing spring games for me feels like I am sticking my head in the sand and pretending it is the 90s. Mainly because a lot of projects are using the same ripped content and have certain dated gameplay elements.

The only AAA I play is borderlands which is what lead to the interest in the shader I am doing now. As a content dev, it is important to be aware of what is popular and why. You have to very forward looking as your project will complete years after it starts. So to that effect you must study industry trends and what is growing in popularity. To that effect content devs should be playing non spring games or at the very least watching let play's on YouTube.

S44, SWIW, were graphically interesting but SWIW is in purgatory and s44 has slowed to a halt. BAR looks to have a lot of potential but has slowed down for a bit, even still some of the modern rts features I like cannot be added to it because it is BA. There are of course limitations in the engine and the daily fight for many content devs is working around, within or trying to have these limitations changed. There is a great deal that can be done via lua and the amount of stuff being added can easily extend functionality and add clever features.

So of course certain people who can't see past the length of their nose think calling spring project's games is preposterous. What is a game really? Well, seeing what I have on xbox live indie titles there have been ones that make all spring projects look like superlative works of art. I have seen years of click and create games, years of people putting out ogre "games" which were little more than a few models plugged into tutorial games.

Spring is special, it is like steam only half assed and every game runs the same engine. We have more lobbies than we need and many users using that unmaintained piece of crap TASClient. We cannot move away from them because even if we did implement an ingame lobby the protocols for the lobby are not designed for it. The entire support toolchain is not designed for it and users stubbornly stick to it. So you have people from the outside who come into spring and get completely bewildered by it. let alone the confusion of trying to host. Our most user friendly client side lobby is NOTAlobby which is in violation of the GPL. Springlobby is great but I would not stick the average user on it. Weblobby is also great but you have to have internet connection to use it. The rest are either majorly incomplete or dated and unmaintained(tasclient).

To accuse the content devs of not playing enough? what the hell does that matter? they should be WORKING ON THINGS for you to play. Of course, I am not playing a bunch of AAA titles and I certainly can choose to play more gundam(because I still have a working copy) or I can continue to push forward doing things and helping other content devs.

or would you rather me just be another dsd player?

[luckywaldo7]

Mainly because a lot of projects are using the same ripped content

I guess this is kind of the elephant in the room also. Games with TA-content are "not officially endorsed" by the community. They are just of kind of around and a lot of people play them and everything is cool. No one is trying to sell or actively distribute or market with TA content. How would this be handled in a universal platform?

Would they be part of it, thereby basically becoming "officially endorsed", or would they be intentionally excluded, isolating half the existing playerbase right at the start?

[Rumpelstiltskin]

Really, it seems like PA is doing what spring so badly needs; A step up, a fresh start, while using all these cool control schemes and mechanisms.

[smoth]

I wish you lot would stop acting like PA will be spring2. It isn't even a similar game type and you are locked to that ugly round planet scheme.

Mainly because a lot of projects are using the same ripped content

I guess this is kind of the elephant in the room also. Games with TA-content are "not officially endorsed" by the community.

The OTA content is the community "moped" fun to sleep with but you are not going to brag about it. BAR has done so much already to rectify that issue. I hope it resumes soon

[PicassoCT]

Im sorry, but noone uses OTA stuff anymore... not even ATARI. Sorry for all you hollabackers to realize, that there is nooooo legal beaf between spring and anyone anymore. Guess you will have to find yourself some pirate bay forum to do that sort of stuff again.
So long.

[nightcold]

I don’t think you all understand what my criticism was about

You bitch about how you don’t care if spring gets popular. But spring getting popular is not necessarily for you, but it is in fact for the players(whom some developed are not). If developers do or don’t want the fruit of their labor to get popular that does not justify not doing anything. This is one of the few discussions here that developers should not get priority over average Joes, and that might anger some developers that are used to getting a certain treatment.

I was hoping some of the core community members would gather and decide on what to do next, assign tasks among themselves, then do it….like how things are done with the engine developers.

BAR + a host cycling only high quality maps = acceptable by modern standards

I don’t even see why there needs to be a second fraction, that it simply an artifact of TA and not needed in spring. If things were up to me I would have taken the BAR models and made the gameplay something similar to TA and SC(a professionally designed gameplay, not a mod styled one), paid strong attention to realism, when out of my way to make sure things flowed(units did not disappear when they died and dead animations or big explosions to cover the death), scaled things down a lil bit to make things epic, animations, used the quality fx used in XTA and nota instead of the shity Ba ones. All of which can be plausibly to be done is a very short period of time(relative to how long it has taken so far).

[Silentwings]

BAR has done so much already to rectify that issue. I hope it resumes soon

It's not stopped! But it takes a long time

[FLOZi]

I don’t think you all understand what my criticism was about

You bitch about how you don’t care if spring gets popular. But spring getting popular is not necessarily for you, but it is in fact for the players(whom some developed are not). If developers do or don’t want the fruit of their labor to get popular that does not justify not doing anything. This is one of the few discussions here that developers should not get priority over average Joes, and that might anger some developers that are used to getting a certain treatment.

I was hoping some of the core community members would gather and decide on what to do next, assign tasks among themselves, then do it….like how things are done with the engine developers.

BAR + a host cycling only high quality maps = acceptable by modern standards

I don’t even see why there needs to be a second fraction, that it simply an artifact of TA and not needed in spring. If things were up to me I would have taken the BAR models and made the gameplay something similar to TA and SC(a professionally designed gameplay, not a mod styled one), paid strong attention to realism, when out of my way to make sure things flowed(units did not disappear when they died and dead animations or big explosions to cover the death), scaled things down a lil bit to make things epic, animations, used the quality fx used in XTA and nota instead of the shity Ba ones. All of which can be plausibly to be done is a very short period of time(relative to how long it has taken so far).

You know nothing, Jon Snow.

[Funkencool]

This is one of the few discussions here that developers should not get priority over average Joes, and that might anger some developers that are used to getting a certain treatment.

Devs get what they want because basically THEY are the ones doing it. If YOU did it you would get what you wanted.

BAR has done so much already to rectify that issue. I hope it resumes soon

Things seem to be resuming ever so slightly. Beherith made a couple of appearances lately and began merging it with the current BA. All the while, I've been steadily working on the interface. It might be rough around the edges but I play a game or more of it just about daily. Actually, I personally prefer playing it in its buggy state over playing BA. tbh it wouldn't take much to get to a one faction (core) release although it probably wouldn't be very balanced or play much like current BA.

[luckywaldo7]

I don’t think you all understand what my criticism was about

You bitch about how you don’t care if spring gets popular. But spring getting popular is not necessarily for you, but it is in fact for the players(whom some developed are not). If developers do or don’t want the fruit of their labor to get popular that does not justify not doing anything. This is one of the few discussions here that developers should not get priority over average Joes, and that might anger some developers that are used to getting a certain treatment.

I was hoping some of the core community members would gather and decide on what to do next, assign tasks among themselves, then do it….like how things are done with the engine developers.

BAR + a host cycling only high quality maps = acceptable by modern standards

I don’t even see why there needs to be a second fraction, that it simply an artifact of TA and not needed in spring. If things were up to me I would have taken the BAR models and made the gameplay something similar to TA and SC(a professionally designed gameplay, not a mod styled one), paid strong attention to realism, when out of my way to make sure things flowed(units did not disappear when they died and dead animations or big explosions to cover the death), scaled things down a lil bit to make things epic, animations, used the quality fx used in XTA and nota instead of the shity Ba ones. All of which can be plausibly to be done is a very short period of time(relative to how long it has taken so far).

Spoken like someone who has had everything in life handed to him on a silver platter.