Spring RTS Engine

Well... given that there is no unified launcher application for Spring, that covers all of this stuff... and is skinnable... what else can I do, that would work? I mean... most professional games give you a proper front end. Spring gives you a collection of files and some instructions that are out of date

I don't develop applications, but I assume making such a thing is probably ridiculously simple. The only hard part would be to make it read from Registry keys somewhere, so that it can handle relative-path problems, etc., and the Installer can set that up...

where would you like bug reports? its unplayable on certain computers, gui get all jacked up and can't see the damn cursor, some crashes on certain SP missions and settings

2 lobby options will just confuse people choose one lobby and stick to it

That level of detail belongs in the start menu, not the desktop. Desktop should be one icon.

If I had the time, I'd whip up a quick .NET app that would be a simply a banner and a list of buttons to launch the various apps.

@BobtheDinosaur:

Most of what you're reporting sounds like Spring engine errors. I'm not seeing the same issues over here- I just re-tested the SP Missions, they're all running fine here, my cursor isn't missing, etc. I doubt very much that these errors are something in P.U.R.E. itself.

You need to make a detailed report on Mantis, asap, preferably with screenshots and details about what OS, system stats, etc.

As for workarounds... firstly, the no-cursor bug has been reported by Vista users. Turn "Use Hardware Cursor" OFF in SpringSettings, it will resolve that.

For people with jacked-up visuals... UsePBO is off by default, so I'm not quite sure where to go with this, I think that you probably want to try turning CompressTextures ON, but keep UsePBO OFF.

Users with older video hardware may simply not have enough VRAM to handle P.U.R.E., which can cause video corruption, because it's not handled terribly gracefully. The only real solution to this... would be an engine-side way to force mipmap levels up (i.e., lower details) until it all fits into VRAM. Other than that, there really isn't a fix, short of me making a Mutator with lower-rez versions of all of the skins.


Moving on...

2 lobby options will just confuse people choose one lobby and stick to it

Well, I don't see it that way. Spring is about Open Source solutions. And people feel very strongly about both Lobbies- basically, that's a lose-lose thing, excluding one or another, imo. I'd really prefer a better way to present that choice to users, but as I said before, this is not something I have any familiarity with.

If I had the time, I'd whip up a quick .NET app that would be a simply a banner and a list of buttons to launch the various apps.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I think we need (not just for P.U.R.E., but in general- I never really thought about how awful our presentation of Spring was, before this all started happening).

If I make the backgrounds of the various dialogs, would somebody find the time to hack this out?

Argh.
Can you uplaod ur mod on one of the spring websites?
I cant downlaod it from those websites in moddb.
1 doesnt work for me at all in the other i need to sign in.
I dont sign into sites i dont visit often and i generally dont liek signing in websites and giving out my email.

Gota wrote:Argh.
Can you uplaod ur mod on one of the spring websites?
I cant downlaod it from those websites in moddb.
1 doesnt work for me at all in the other i need to sign in.
I dont sign into sites i dont visit often and i generally dont liek signing in websites and giving out my email.

bugmenot.com

edit: over lunch I did a simple XML-configurable launcher. It's just a banner and a scrollable tree of buttons, each button can launch an app or walk into the tree. Not glitzy - they're plain windows buttons. It just needs a 384 x 128 image for the banner, and an icon for the window icon, and an XML file (I'll bundle a sample) with the text and tree of buttons. At some future date I might glitz it up, but for now it works and looks native to the operating system, which imho is better than half-assing an immersive look.

Anyways, I want to give it one last once-over, so I'll see if I can polish and pack it up tonight after I put my boy down to sleep. PM me with a place to send it.

Just to let you know, my new PC just arrived, so I'm going to be out of the game for a while setting it up, installing/redownloading stuff etc etc

Ok... I'm somewhat done with a complete rewrite of the Tooltip system.

Got rid of useless data in the standard unit Tooltip, for example- I don't have [TechLevel] stuff, etc.- it's nice to see that go. Same with the range of Weapon1, when that may or may not be all that relevant... we have lots of better ways to show that... etc.

The use of Power and Materials reads correctly (thanks Quantum- I ended up actually solving it in a very different way, but studying that Widget gave me a good start in the right direction).

Oh, and one other happy accidental result of all of this is that the main UI draws a lot faster, now that I don't have that giant mask running all the time. Screenshots when I've made myself finish dealing with a few of the less-fun things

Lucky for you my lovely korean lady is sick with something so I won't be seeing her this weekend, and other than a party tomorrow night, I'm free for the most part, so I'll get some mappage and viddage done.


One thing tho. I need an executive decision regarding metal spot patches (are they required?). I need to know asap before I do anything else. It's no big deal one way or the other, I just want to know.

Also, ideally, how much should a mex spot put out for overmind? Currently riverglade outputs 1.2 per spot. I have no idea how much it "Should" be though.

Pls let me know.

One thing tho. I need an executive decision regarding metal spot patches (are they required?).

Yes. Noob-friendly and all that.

I'm also making the new Tooltip display really clearly tell people, "hey, there's metal here!", etc.

As for values... I use a value of 2.0 corresponding to 255 for the demo maps, but meh, whatever. Just bear in mind that the doohickey that performs the ratio for Resistance tends to break if the metal patches aren't your standard 2-pixel 255 value patches.

Here's one of the different displays with the new Tooltips, which is completely Lua-driven. It's fairly "smart" and shows / hides only the information I think that people absolutely need, in nice big text. Only bad part about it is that I haven't yet figured out how to display Widget or special-command Tooltips. That said, Help O' Matic already does, so it's not terribly important- most of Spring's commands are documented, I just need to make Help O' Matic documents for any Widgets that I decide will make the final cut, should be sufficient, I can say a lot more about them there anyhow.

At any rate, if anybody wants to use the source, it's attached. Nothing fancy- this isn't rocket science, it's just drudgery, like most of the things required to polish a game, but I said anything I got help with would be PD, so there ya go. Sorry it's not something more interesting, and it may get altered somewhat by release of the next RC, dunno, depends on whether I get any ideas before then.

http://www.wolfegames.com/TA_Section/NewToolTips.jpg

*squint*

You might want to make that unit notes text readable for people with <80/20 vision.

Er, that's a 1600/1200 screen, shrunk to save on filesize. Help O' Matic auto-adjusts itself larger, if you're using a small resolution- GMN had that problem before he got a new PC, so I made it all auto-adjust for people on the low end performance-wise.

First promo video is ready. I've found that I really, really hate making videos. More when it's finally uploaded and on YouTube, etc., in another 45 minutes or so.

I guess I'm not sleeping much this morning- I really hope this feeds the media monster for awhile, or I am going to need to recruit a full-time promotional person (hint- if anybody is qualified to do that job, and will really actually do things, now would be a great time to get in touch with me, I am getting really tired of juggling this particular chainsaw).

My SP problem:

Well, as I said, it did not load what th SP mission described:
Overmind vs Overmind, ended up Resistance vs Overmind.

My OS is Vista business 32bit( does it matter?)
Radeon X1050 (and the rest below just incase)
2 GB RAM
1.8 GHZ
Keyboard (from MS)
Mouse (from MS)
The rest:
????

I installed PURE not in Program files, but on my desktop. I deleted all the shortcuts, does that matter btw?

And another thing: that TASClient can't connect Guess I'll just keep playing CA

Meh... I just tested that... connection worked fine. You sure you didn't do something odd when you installed it?

Promo video's up... going to sleep now...

you did some really good things, your help widget is nifty and you do a neat job introing the player to the game but as an impatient player I just clicked end because I didn't care about blah blah story and wanted to get to smashing things so I was shocked when my base was completely over run with little warning.

Not going to really get into my dislikes but there you have it a positive statement from me

Ideally you would read up on the side you were playing as (I did). It was really helpful tbh, because I never did know a whole hell of a lot about each particular side, so when I read that it was an "OOOOOOOOH!". But meh that's just me.