promote spring engine

[losbellos]

Hej guys,
why dont you have facebook and twitter and other links, buttons etc to promote the game/engine?

[smoth]

spring isn't a game.

https://www.facebook.com/springrtsengine/?fref=ts
http://www.indiedb.com/engines/spring

[gajop]

facebook

https://www.facebook.com/springrtsengine/

[losbellos]

wow... great
why dont you put on the website too? That would make lot more people. I believe...

[smoth]

put on what? Game projects often have websites.

[AF]

wow... great
why dont you put on the website too? That would make lot more people. I believe...

Which game? Usually when people say promote spring, they have a specific game in mind that they play, for most of our history "Advertise Spring" has meant "Advertise AA/BA".

The problem is, even though they both aim for the same eventual goal, people don't want to play a game engine, and it makes for awful marketing persuasion. When was the last time you heard somebody say they wanted to play Cryengine or Unity instead of GTA or Starcraft.

As for why the social media profiles aren't on the site:

Trolls decided to spend their time deriding the system that fills them with content rather than trying to work with me to set them up appropriately. They insisted only a perfect unreasonable set up would work, that would require the full attention of a person and time, neither of which are available.

Because it's the same system that posts the tweets and fills the FB page, they were seen as unofficial

So What Were The Problems?

By the time somebody tried to make reasonable suggestions it was too late, the problem was no longer content but political. One or two people had made several suggestions, for which I made several changes and had others planned, such as removing ZK videos from the feed, but by this point the community news forum had been suggested.

The people in charge here are famously averse to anything remotely controversial and will pander to a consensus to avoid the drama ( ironically this indecision while they wait for a consensus is the prime cause of drama, there's nothing stopping them appearing and announcing "X is now Y, we've made our minds up, put up or shut up", and yet despite being the only people who can do this, they're terrified of it, even with good reasoning ). So community news was made official.

Now instead of a regular stream dominated by the 2 projects that actually bother announcing news, with others interspersed, that we can trim down and tailor, we have a deserted forum that one or two forum goers post to with very limited discoverability, awful SEO, no sitemap, no open graph tags, and an RSS feed you have to open view source to find

That's why we have community news, then we have the social media sites with their separate content. That content is automated, nobody here has the time to collect all the news and present it, so I tried to find as many news sources as possible and put them all together. The people on the forum however were unwilling to entertain the idea of curation, and stuck to the mental model of there only being a single feed, which was incorrect.


How do we fix this and what should be posted?

In terms of what should go on these profiles, the only person who has offered reasonable suggestions aside from myself is Gajop. For example, he suggested that some items should be pulled in, but not published to the feed, and discussed compromises, such as:

• Disabling a ZK feed temporarily
• Writing code to hide posts that were videos from the main feed
• Code to prevent videos being published to profiles

There's also the idea that the profiles should only post the official news for new releases. I'm flabbergasted that nobody on this forum ever thought of that as an option.

In the mean time, the ZK problem still persists. No matter what you do, you can't escape the fact that ZK is miles ahead of the competition when it comes to advertising and generating newsworthy items, so much so that it's a problem for everybody else. The community news solves this by pretending ZK doesn't exist.

My suggestions:

• There are several people who post in the random Art WIP threads, where are the Instagram links? The tweets? Why is there no facebook page? Where's the WordPress/Tumblr blog? There's a significant amount of potential value that's being thrown away. Other people outside are community do it, look at Arne who posted the TA redux artwork. There's a reason the only JourneyWar content ever posted was from Youtube
• Community news shouldn't be mixed with official engine news, it's great that Forb released a new map and it should be celebrated, but it's not a new engine release. It must be separate
• If only 1 project in the community is active it'll push everything else out. Censoring that project is damaging though. Find a solution that allows it to be throttled or rate limited instead, or be more active in discoverable sources
• Stop announcing things only on the forums. Posting here is ok, but posting only here is not
• Actually ask me for access.

The irony is, a year or two ago, I offered free sites that would automatically create posts based on forum threads, tweet out, post to Facebook, etc, allowing all these things to happen without ever changing the posting patterns of the people here. But when I offered it, nobody took it up.

Who currently controls the profiles?

• Google+ - Forboding Angel and several others
• Twitter - Myself, and by proxy anybody with access to springinfo.info
• Facebook - There are 5 admins, myself, Tobi, Gajop, and 2 others who don't post here anymore and are inactive, springinfo.info can be used to post there
• Tumblr - Myself, and by proxy anybody with access to springinfo.info

SpringInfo access allows for posting, only people mentioned by name have moderation or admin access rights. I'm the only person who posts to these, and always via SpringInfo automation. I have no access to the Google+ community, which is ran differently, contact Forboding Angel for details.

[FLOZi]

The people in charge here are famously averse to anything remotely controversial and will pander to a consensus to avoid the drama

tar, brush, same, etc. Sweeping generalizations about any group are inappropriate.

[raaar]

I'm a game dev. Currently I only post about MF releases on the this forum, on springfiles, and sometimes on a TAUniverse thread. I also have an external web site.

In my opinion, there should be clear guidelines for what can go into the news section on the springrts website and how to contribute. I also dislike the formatting somewhat : there should be a clearer separation between items.

Automated news posting seems interesting, how did it work exactly?

It's important to have a distinction between minor news "items" which shouldn't be forwarded by the automated system and the ones that should.

[Silentwings]

In my opinion, there should be clear guidelines for what can go into the news section on the springrts website and how to contribute.

Did you look to see if it already existed? viewtopic.php?f=38&t=32596

[raaar]

Thanks, I'll try making a thread too.

[code_man]

I dont see the point in promoting the engine at this time and the general public.
As it has been often said, we should promote games and not the engine, while it would be beneficial we share certain channels media and such sort, the main weight will lie on the game devs.

A major downside is the lobby cannot be shipped to be game specific preconfigured, for example some guy wants s44 and ends up playing a game with robots, wtf right.
Not that it want to restrict a single game to be played, after all in one base is what makes spring so great, but some restraints need to be there to not overwhelm people.

It is good if we can throw and ship news from a common source for all spring games, but outside of techincal/gamedev stuff there is hardly a point with promoting the engine itself.
If someone would want to setup some system to allow contend developers to relay news to outside sites, that would be great to have for sure.
If games will be successful, so will the engine.

[Forboding Angel]

The way Evo is distributed is probably the best way to go.

[jivvz]

A major downside is the lobby cannot be shipped to be game specific preconfigured, for example some guy wants s44 and ends up playing a game with robots, wtf right.

It doesn't need to be preconfigured very heavily either. The battlelist could have filtering and preconfigured default filtering.

[code_man]

The way Evo is distributed is probably the best way to go.

Not to be rude, but you dont exactly have the playercount to back up that statement.

And from what i understand swl is set up by default to only show evo.
Now i dont know you did to have it that way, im not in favor of swl itself doing that by default.
If you distribute your game with it as an evo exclusive flavor, by all means do it, but others should have the same chance.

It doesn't need to be preconfigured very heavily either. The battlelist could have filtering and preconfigured default filtering.

Yup but it hasnt happened so far, im sure there are good reasons why abma didnt.
In my view a simple commandline switch ought to do.

[Forboding Angel]

I was talking about the way it is packaged. It contains itself. The lobby is launched with a custom parameter to show the Evo specific version. Feel free to clone my SwL fork and use it as a basis to make your own.

It uses it's own data directory to house everything it downloads, but it also reads from the common folders which allows existing spring users to play their existing games and maps from it as well if they choose to do so.

Perhaps it would have been better to look beforehand.

[Google_Frog]

Have you made evo only look at the maps and games in the spring data folder while ignoring settings and other config files? Is it possible? I think that would be the most reliable.

[Forboding Angel]

You are literally the only one who has ever had an issue. Perhaps you should consider that your setup was simply screwed up and evo had nothing to do with it.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with reading springsettings from the common spring folders. This means that existing spring users will have their normal settings (less any that have been explicitly set in the cfg provided with steam).

However, I DO think that all games should have game specific springsettings. it's absurd that we all use the same config. That's just asking for problems to happen.

That said, if someone did want to close off that install from everywhere else, adding an isolated.txt should do the trick.

[8611z]

for example some guy wants s44 and ends up playing a game with robots, wtf right.

This arguement is as old as it is dumb.
Do you think players have so bad short-term memory that they see a video of Spring1944, and when they have installed springlobby they have already forgotten the game's name?

This mantras of "spring is an engine!" and "we should not promote the engine!" are misleading:
Spring is more than an engine, it is a plattform consisting of lobby & server & engine & players & content, that allows players to player a variety of games.

If games will be successful, so will the engine.

Such promises have been made often, usually by modders who wanted others to help with their mod so that it would become some sort of flagship-game for spring. Other mods are then supposed to profit of their success by some trickle-down-economy style of some sort.
None of these projects ever had any success with their campaigns.

[smoth]

It is not a game either though. Players typically think spring is a game because the game files are called mods and players do not read mod(ule) they read mod(ification).

[Forboding Angel]

This arguement is as old as it is dumb.
Do you think players have so bad short-term memory that they see a video of Spring1944, and when they have installed springlobby they have already forgotten the game's name?

Normally I would agree, but that actually happened with a few steam people. Came in, thought s44 was evo. Played s44.

When I found out about it I was rather amused :-D

They quite liked s44