Spring RTS Engine

Dragon45 wrote:By god this is the stupidest idea i've heard in ages, why the F.U-K do you need a fsking animated banner? How much horsesh.t have you numskulls been swallowing? You don't need a fsking animated banner BECAUSE THERE's NO POINT.

Christ ive heard some bad ones, but this takes the fsking cake.

Hope that wasn't aimed at me...

Now... on to teh no point thing... Whats the point in reflective water? The point in alowing sky boxes? The point in imporving the unit moddels? There is no point. They dont change gameplay one jot. However they look a darnsite better and so people want them.
The sperm in teh title has been romved so I'm happy and my work is done, however having a discussion over maybe making a flash one should not generate some bollaks like what you just spued.

I'm nither for or against an animated banner, I'm mearly pointing out that if it does get animated it should be flash not gif.

Thanks

aGorm

Suffice to say 90% + of all computers have flash installed, and flash would eb better than a GIF, for one a flash file can dot he same thign as a GIF with sound at a fraction of the filesize in much better quality. And for those of you who dotn ahve any flash plugins installed flash does all the exporting so it'll show a substitute image instead of a freaky error code.

And for those who think flash is always high bandwidth, I say try using flash and you'll see it is dependant on what is in the flash file. What I was suggesting was something that used nothing but vector graphics in 2 colours, that looked more like asteroids than the streets of baghdad. Mind you the ay you've reacted I should suggest we use a live video feed from a webcam somewhere of someone playing spring, the sort that needs an 8MBps connection to play smoothly.

And I dont remember this when aGorm presented a suggestion earlier that was ironically made in flash! Why did nobody jump on him then?

And even if it was a high bandwidth flash file, I'm sure a preloader and a snippet of code to switch between a high and low bandwidth version would be wanted, afterrall fnordia wouldnt be happy if every visitor munched up that much bandwidth on every page hit.

Well... i understond most of that... bable fish needs a new language "Alantai".

http://www.onebob.co.uk/darren/pics/title.html
Thats what hes talking about btw...

and yes ok, its 190 k, but i didn't bother to compress it or anything.
And also... even if your on narrow band, surly everyones on teh "pay 10 quid and get as much as you want" sort of narrow band. So the actull file size only matters in teh respect of how long it takes to come up. Seeing as you can have flash load up a loding while its waiting for the full flashyness, that means the downsides are infact nill. Apart from teh fact that some people dont like things moving at the top of there page... which can be defeted by simply scripting into the flash that it will stop on a click.
Finaly it can dynamicly load in different background images, which would mean you could showcase more images than just the 1 current one, without people having to look around.

And In all honesty, it only would need to be a flash banner on the home page, the rest can do without if thats what people would prefer.

Just my thoughts on teh subject.

aGorm

mwha

Summarize in bullet speak:

GIF loading times > flash loading times

GIF + Sound == impossible

Flash filesizes < GIF filesizes (unless you have video to play)

Flash can select high and lowbandwidth versions to load based on internet speed

Flash can display a substitute image if flash isnt installed

Flash can have preloaders

Flash isnt choppy, and doesnt loose quality in most cases like GIF

Flash can display random images

Flash is present on 90%+ systems, including a selection of mobile phones and PDA's.

In some cases flash can be turned off, a GIF cannot without all other GIF's on the page going.

edit:: as pointed out by min3mat the item in question has been corrected.

oh and yah Flash > GIF

LOL!

GIF >flash

This means that GIF is GREATER THAN flash!!! the text you wrote suggest otherwise!!!
u mean GIF<flash

Just want to point out although Alantai is harpin on about sound i will kill anyone who puts sound in a bit of flash...

aGorm

aGorm wrote:Just want to point out although Alantai is harpin on about sound i will kill anyone who puts sound in a bit of flash...

aGorm

amen to that...

The current Spring logo at the top is awsome... aGorm's little thing, while annoying, does have potential... I think having the screenshots at the top cycle (if it can have the whole thing under 50 K) would be a good plan.

Sound would detract from the spring experience outside the game, and I am in no way insinuating we should use it.

Good!

aGorm

I registered just to say this...

Animated banners are the dumbest idea since sliced wrists. Regardless of whether you choose flash or .gif, an animated banner serves only to distract from the actual content of the webpage being visited.

That's a matter of opinion.

You see this thread is dead and served its purpose a longtime ago, as can be seen by the banner as shown at the start of the thread and as seen above..

Dead or not, it was near the top of the forum.

I've just downloaded Spring (Huge leap in graphics from TA, of course, but cumbersome interface puts me off it. ) and I was just going through the forums.

Its not actually that bad, just takes a tiny bit of getting used to.

[K.B.] Napalm Cobra wrote:Its not actually that bad, just takes a tiny bit of getting used to.

All the features that make it not bad are impossible to find by just screwing around with the game, and basicly compleatly undocumented in any easy to find source. The new GUI is DESPERATELY needed in order for this game to get any more professional polish.

WIKI --> http://taspring.clan-sy.com/wiki/Using_Spring

If anything needed to know how to play isn't there, or linked to from there... add it yourself or ask someone in the forums to do it... it's almost "complete" documentation...

Admittedly the new GUI does need to be added to get the game where it needs to be (especially for people with ATI radeon 9200 video cards)...

If Zaphod or Betalord or whatever sees this they might want to concider adding a link on the help page of the TASClient to the wiki documents pertinent to the game...

suffice to say i did create a small app and tied it into NTAI through .help that uses paulomorfeos mini spring help.

But then I found out that any transparent widnwos or windwos at all I made using C# or VB .Net where simply made 100% invisible when I ran spring.

Can I say... OFF TOPIC.

Open a new thread and leave this master peice be.

aGorm

Jack Lavender wrote:... (Huge leap in graphics from TA, of course, but cumbersome interface puts me off it. ) ...

Do you know about how to change camera view (Ctrl+J)? The game starts by default with the camera style FPS which is, in my opinion, unplayable. You have +3 camera styles and one of them, the ... can't remember the name, feels quite similar to oTA.

Of course, it still takes some getting used to.

I think i shall add and test my original populous camera mode, maybe figure if I can change startup to overhead camera, and make rotatable overhead point downwards on start, maybe add an option in the settings so that you can select what your startup camera mode is.

Eitherway I think settings.exe is in need of a cosmetic make over and I shall in time implement my option profiles idea.

But this may take me weeks to do as I have a busy schedule.