Spring RTS Engine

Warlord Zsinj wrote:Perhaps roflcopter can update his design to encompass a room for news and the other requirements raised?

I will update it, but which are those new requirements? I don't have time to read so many pages, and can't do anything at all this week.

Roflcopter wrote:

Warlord Zsinj wrote:Perhaps roflcopter can update his design to encompass a room for news and the other requirements raised?

I will update it, but which are those new requirements? I don't have time to read so many pages, and can't do anything at all this week.

The big ones.... We need space for a news column, and because we have so much mod space we need something unmissable to let new users know that you must download the engine before you play the mods (If I'm new to the site, I'm likely to go "hey star wars! I want to play that!" but it won't work if I haven't got the engine first)

I also really like sertse's "Player/Developer" subsections duelality. I'd like to run at least a mini development subsection on the site as well... That stuff won't need to be as pretty, but it's a major lacking of the current site.

AF wrote: Agreed, if anything these 'developments' seem to be moving backwards not forwards. By this time next year the new site will look identical to the current site, perhaps the squiggly orange sperm banner will have made a comeback.

Agreed again. No point in debating until the flames rise. Your project looks near completion so bring it to what you consider a final state before you ask for more 'constructive criticism'. As far as I can see, you're the person with the most chance of actually implementing this in the near future.

In my opinion, style wise, the best suggestion so far was this one by AF. That front page is nearly perfect in my opinion; enough to awaken curiousity with nice pictures, no wall of text and various intriguing links.

The only criticism I would echo is that 'Spring Engine' is a dull motif to repeat on every page. Personally I'd shorten it to 'Spring', leaving the header 'Spring RTS engine' on your front page above a brief explanation (as you've done).

As an aside, I strongly dislike the player/developer dichotomy on the front page suggested by Sertse. The people that the front page need to impress are those who come to it when looking for games, by accident or when sent to it by a Spring-playing friend. Developers already know the score and can find the forum button with ease.

AFs old site mockup

As a note to people working on things:

• It isnt possible to put full news posts in at the moment, only lists of headlines
• The design of the front page must keep the same top header and background as the rest of the site.
• the end user must be able to tell that they are on the same site and they haven't been shunted offsite, nor should they have to relearn the layout once they've left the frontpage. Consistency people!!
• The background must not be changed. You can change the units etc but it must have the same colours and style, aka if you removed the units the original and the new bg would be identical.
• Menu bars on the page itself are not possible without a huge amount of hackery and it would be much better if the menu was kept in the same place on every single page.
• Games has a games page, don't list games on the front-page, advertise the games page instead, it's much less annoying and allows much better usage of space for imagery

Any design that requires that any of those rules be broken is not a front page design it is a template design. If you want to make a template design please refer to the main dokuwiki website, which has a wiki full of how-tos, it is quite easy.

My colour scheme is red white and blue, with mainly blues and red as a highlight colour, although blacks or other very dark colours are allowed as backgrounds for the main divs, and its assumed that screen shots and media are used liberally.


If you have a suggestion or wish regarding the main template, make a mock-up and post screenshots.

Swiftspear wrote: ... and because we have so much mod space we need something unmissable to let new users know that you must download the engine before you play the mods (If I'm new to the site, I'm likely to go "hey star wars! I want to play that!" but it won't work if I haven't got the engine first)

I dunno swift, I think you'd be introducing a lot of redundancy onto the page.

There is already a huge "Download here!" button, and if you click the mod links, we can either have a spring-based wiki-style mod page which explains the mod, but still contains the big fat "download here" buttons. Alternatively, it could link straight to a modwebsite, which will contain explanation on how to get a game going (all of which will start with 'download the spring engine from here), if their site-based download doesn't already prepackage spring.

With the impact you need on the frontpage, and all the other pedestrian items that need to be conveyed (news, links, etc), you can't afford to have redundancy.

Crayfish

As an aside, I strongly dislike the player/developer dichotomy on the front page suggested by Sertse. The people that the front page need to impress are those who come to it when looking for games, by accident or when sent to it by a Spring-playing friend. Developers already know the score and can find the forum button with ease.

My perspective is that at some point, we would like to "showcase" Spring to more technically minded communities, and attract more development minded people into Spring. My point is that we need to move "Spring Development" away from expecting/assuming potentially useful people to us will know the score.

As SwiftSpear mentioned, one of the lacking points about Spring at the moment is the lack of a properly organised Development section. The current approach has been a mish-mash of forum posts and wiki articles that focus on the "how" technical aspects of the things that make the engine work, but nothing much on "what" the engine is about in the first place, and generally promoting the engine.

Compare against: http://source.valvesoftware.com/ which is all about promoting their engine.

As for the site design; This has progressed to be something beyond my abilities. I just want to ask, is there anything wrong with using roflcopter's basic design as the site's background/template (I don't know the right word...) for the site, in general? .

As was mentioned earlier, stripped down it comes to this. http://images.darkstars.co.uk/spring/po ... rGnome.jpg

The main change I'll suggest to that is to insert a consistent "Home, About, Download" link thing...

Crayfish wrote:As an aside, I strongly dislike the player/developer dichotomy on the front page suggested by Sertse. The people that the front page need to impress are those who come to it when looking for games, by accident or when sent to it by a Spring-playing friend. Developers already know the score and can find the forum button with ease.

Cool. We're not just a game platform. We're an engine. Players are at best of equal value to us as new developer.... and that's stretching "at best" alot.

I'm not sure what are you meaning about Valve and their engine, but if you're liking their design, realize that valve's and springs goals are different. Afaik the new website isn't supposed to spawn even more mods, it's for making the current ones get played more (all of them).

So comparing two websites with different goals != the way to copy.

@ SS: Ouch, but like it or no, I'm pretty sure way more 'users' visit the front page then developers atm, and that'll stay for a while.

That doesn't mean a developer player dichotomy is bad. It instantly stresses to new users the environment the site is centered around.

I'm not saying devote half the page to obscure, impossible to understand things that only developers need to know, but we DEFINATELY are promoting this project to new developers as well as new users.

Like saying the valve site vs the spring site that thier "purpose" is different... Well yes, it is different, but fundimentally it's the same too. Both are engine websites, and both would like to attract developer attention.

The current site is bad for players, but it's worse for new developers. The player developer dichotomy was brilliant. In one immensely simple bar across the middle of the page we set our project apart from every other website in the web with exactly what you need to know to know why we are different.

Yeah... I'm liking the dev/player separation... it lets the front page still be a "hey look" splash screen without being useless...

- Hey Look, We're Awesome, No pick what type of information you are interested in... or just click this here GIANT GREEN DOWNLOAD BUTTON

Cool then, lets hope the final result stays that way.

Hmm. Start to see your point.

To be fair, my only stake in this is getting more new people to play with, hence my gamer-biased opinions. Plus I was kind of supposing that a developer would need to love the game before they committed time to it, so would need to start as a player first.

There wont be a game to love if there are no developers to make it.

Crayfish wrote:Hmm. Start to see your point.

To be fair, my only stake in this is getting more new people to play with, hence my gamer-biased opinions. Plus I was kind of supposing that a developer would need to love the game before they committed time to it, so would need to start as a player first.

When smoth wanted to find a new engine to build his game, he looked at all the available free engines, oger, and what not. There are lots of developers out there who aren't involved with this project but will want to do RTS stuff. Our biggest features are poorly documented, our website doesn't give the indication currently that we want/need 3rd party development at all, and our wiki doesn't document the engine sufficently. At very least we could fix the first 2 so we'd be a better contender.

If you want to give two user's different views why don't you just implement it as a portal rather than a normal web page? You can then allow users to select their own views based on their preferences when they log in. Seems like a much more reasonable suggestion than to combine both of the content.

It's more work but it'll provide a much better solution for you. The default view should naturally be for new users to browse.

Thanks for explaining, I see why a developer site is needed now.

Still though...

Being faced with Player and Developer as equal options on the front page would put me off (as a player) because it would imply to me that nothing was as yet in a reasonably developed or playable state. This implication doesn't do justice to the gaming experience that several spring mods offer.

Swift, it is my hope that the FGJL forum can become a good place for developers to work from. I am working on making the specific project sections more distinct and since we are soon to lose the TAUniverse site thanks to trolls I am going to have to step up my time table.

With each time I begin to hate this troll pit I just get more motivated to make the forum more for developers then ever. I am still working on it, the only reason I do not house ta projects is that stolen content bothers me morally. I am not sure what else the site needs, I need to find a way to link the forums to a main page with news and calenders etc. Unfortunately, it may end up like a mini TAU but more for devs then players.

Feel free to make suggestions.

*note when I say developers, I mean content devs not the springdevs. I would not want to supplant this site.

smoth wrote:Swift, it is my hope that the FGJL forum can become a good place for developers to work from. I am working on making the specific project sections more distinct and since we are soon to lose the TAUniverse site thanks to trolls I am going to have to step up my time table.

With each time I begin to hate this troll pit I just get more motivated to make the forum more for developers then ever. I am still working on it, the only reason I do not house ta projects is that stolen content bothers me morally. I am not sure what else the site needs, I need to find a way to link the forums to a main page with news and calenders etc. Unfortunately, it may end up like a mini TAU but more for devs then players.

Feel free to make suggestions.

*note when I say developers, I mean content devs not the springdevs. I would not want to supplant this site.

What's the URL for your site? It sounds like a affiliation could be good further down the line. Feel free to contact me if you need any pointers / assistance, it would depend on what your forum database is i.e. phpbb3 / mysql as to whether I can give you any advise/help sorting it.

Smoth: You know I'm a fan... but fundamentally, your site is third party. I'm not saying that you should just close down FGJL and let us take over that role too... but this site SHOULD be a resource, if not for advice and tutalidge, at LEAST for information.