Spring RTS Engine

nxain wrote:My point is that you don't need the support of the overall community (and shouldn't expect it). The community can be won over later by the results. You need a core group with a mission to go from start to finish.

This is pretty much exactly my point...if you don't consider, say, the S44 or IW teams to be such "core groups" then I highly doubt anything of the sort you're referring to will form within this community - as far as I've seen around here, the trend seems to be for groups to emerge from other areas (in both of the cases above, from pre-spring communities). Every group I've seen form from within this community has either been small, unproductive, or split up quickly.

Maybe it's time to go outside the core community and find some new blood. We should actually start a new thread on that issue.

Aha, so we aren't disagreeing at all

If you're alienated by me, then why respond? I don't really see what you expect to gain or communicate.

His point is that you're alienating everyone, which is pretty much the case from my point of view. You're essentially telling everyone to drop the projects which are their pride and joy, and join up with the other content developers - many of which have extreme personality conflicts - to work on a project which may or may not reach fruition.

Hoi wrote:Where do you suggest to go?

Places to recruit:

1) Communicating to projects that open sourced. It's time for some synergy!

2) Schools - students are paying a ton of money across the U.S to learn how to make games when they could be... making games. There are instructors looking for alternatives to UE and Source - considering the project ownership could be retained by the creators, Spring could have a big advantage there

3) The Government - there are a lot of simulation and game hobbyist in the government as well as a ton of academics looking for an engine to do visualization on. Spring has things to offer and they could offer plenty back to Spring.

4) The professional game development community. This is a sticky one, but I think there is potential here for non-commercial projects.

Take a look at these two websites:

http://www.gamasutra.com/
http://www.seriousgamessource.com/
http://www.seriousgames.org/index2.html
http://liquidnarrative.csc.ncsu.edu/

But really, the biggest recruitment method is to put out a finished project with a the message "you can do this too!"

- nXain

nxain wrote:If you're alienated by me, then why respond?

The hope that you'll change.

I don't really see what you expect to gain or communicate.

The fact that your assholish behaviour will cause people to be hostile to your suggestions not simply because of the nature of your suggestions, but the way that you present them. If you're seriously the business professional you claim to be, you should know this. The fact that you actually have no leverage over the community should make it doubly obvious to you. After all, "show me the code" came about for a reason.

The sense I'm getting overall is that there is a very vocal and hostile minority that seem to be afraid of something.

Do you work for the Bush administration now? Trying to play on peoples' fears, fantastic PR move. Everybody here is working on their own free time on projects they want to work on. Not everybody wants the same thing and this is made even more messy by the fact that people want to use different licenses, necessitating duplication of effort.

I'm not of what - perhaps that with attention to Spring the community will change or they will lose control.

In reality, the people in control are the people doing the work. Talk is cheap, results are not. If there is sufficient discontent with the current development process, a fork will be made and if it powers ahead, it will become dominant. A prime example of such a thing would be EGCS.

That possibility is just something that comes with success on the engine and isn't directly related to my interest in it. Even if I go away, it won't change anything other than you won't have a target to vent on.

You're not some god-sent prophet here to enlighten us with your wisdom, people have already known and realised the things you've said before, they've ultimately decided it's not worth it at this time for one reason or another. Let's have a quick show of hands, if PURE was declared the official Spring mod/game/showcase/whatever, who would drop their mod to work on PURE instead? Who would change their development priorities?

Capitano, last time I checked, you aren't developing ANYTHING here.

Forboding Angel wrote:

Or the internet will get off you.

El Capitano wrote: The fact that your assholish behaviour will cause people to be hostile to your suggestions not simply because of the nature of your suggestions, but the way that you present them. If you're seriously the business professional you claim to be, you should know this. The fact that you actually have no leverage over the community should make it doubly obvious to you. After all, "show me the code" came about for a reason.

What do I need leverage with the community for? I have no projects to push and you're already at least thinking about what I'm trying to communicate. I only have suggestions that could have a large impact on Spring in the long term. As far as repeating what you know, that is okay. Maybe if it's repeated enough times, solutions will emerge or be bumped up in priority.

As far as my behavior goes... perhaps you should review the thread. Although the initial hostile reactions from certain members of the community have been deleted, there is still plenty after that. In fact, I'd say there was immediate and irrational extreme hostility towards my original post (when the mature response would have been to ignore it if disliked) or consider it the same old message from someone new.

As far as not being an industry professional goes - you're right. I've been pretending and I'm a complete fake. Even if that was true, it doesn't change anything about what I said on this board, especially to those people that aren't interested anyway.

- nXain

My feeling is that most of the core multi-developer teams here (s44, SWIW, PURE, CA... hope I haven't missed anyone) have different goals and would not be able to coalesce effectively into a super-project.

While they'd no doubt welcome someone with very similar goals and skill, there's no point in trying to artificially combine them and they would probably be unwilling to substantially alter the direction of the project even in return for significant contributions. I may be wrong.

Most projects arise from shared personal interests (PURE perhaps being an exception, CA partly so) and concordance would be impossible to reach on the design aims of a project between WW2, star wars and TA fans.

For this reason, it requires a project to reach a certain stage of development where other people will look at it and think 'hey, that's cool, I want to help out with that'.

I agree that Spring would benefit from more active promotion among developer communities, which would insource more 'free cannons' who might be drawn to existing projects. Within the community, most people with ability are committed to their pet game.

Forboding Angel wrote:Capitano, last time I checked, you aren't developing ANYTHING here.

You're right, my contributions have been limited to balance suggestions in CA and if I'm giving the impression that I am a Spring developer, I'm sorry, but I got rubbed up the wrong way with the continuous arguments of "I'm a professional, I know what's best for the community".

I personally appreciate most of the general suggestions, however, as Peet mentioned, a 'flagship' project that involves people stopping work on their own darlings is fairly unlikely. Likewise, getting engine coders to work on features that they find boring is not super likely. This project is the proverbial herd of snakes, but it has worked out well enough so far, I think. Perhaps I'm just not ambitious enough on behalf of the engine.

As has been mentioned - by default, the Spring experience is a fairly user unfriendly one. The problem has been that it has been up to the game makers to make that experience easier, and it involved a fairly new and complex skillset (GUI design, Lua and OpenGL knowledge), so we've been slow on the uptake; most of us are already covering many aspects of game development (for example, I'm doing most of the complex animation in S44, along with all of the balance work/general design, various bits of Lua as I'm able, some effects work, and mission/scenario creation), so the time to hunker down and learn new skills is not readily available. This is of course a self-perpetuating problem by and large; you need to show off awesome projects in order to attract talent, but in order to create awesome projects in a reasonable time frame you need more people with more skills (or superhuman devotion/spare time).

On the whole, I'm not super mega concerned over the future of the engine - the fact that PURE could show up on Moddb and beat out half life 2 and GTA for most visited game profiles for the better part of a week tells me that we're plenty competitive. PURE had other flaws (like non-functioning multiplayer out of the box), but it provided an important learning experience for many other game devs around here.

I think that it will be the next generation (after S44/IW/PURE/ect are finished and released - the games that arrive after that) that we start seeing fully featured designs (more than tech demos) that are not rooted in TA. Those three are still powerfully influenced by TA - not in a bad way, but they've spent too much time in development in a situation where engine limitations often shape the design into TA forms to avoid such influences. But given that TA was a great game, it's hardly a terrible place to take your cues from.

Edit: also, there is already a fairly large degree of dev collaboration between teams. I've done some animation for IW in the past, and will likely do more in the coming weeks. Zsinj has helped me with balance on numerous occasions, ect, ect. Granted its not universal (Argh generally works in a bubble, CA devs have enough skills that they generally don't need to go outside of CA to ask for everyday help), but we're hardly working in isolation.

I've refrained from posting names or addresses, but lets hope I have the right guy.

There is a lot of mention of AA:SF(Overmatch) and this, curtesy of MobyGames:

Games Credited

Knights & Merchants (2007), Linux Game Publishing Ltd.
Timeline (2000), Eidos, Inc.
Asheron's Call (1999), Microsoft Game Studios
Malkari (1999), Interactive Magic
Shadow Company: Left for Dead (1999), Ubi Soft Entertainment Software
Ultra Fighters (1999), Interactive Magic
The Great Battles: Collector's Edition (1998), Interactive Magic
The Great Battles of Caesar (1998), Interactive Magic
iF/A-18E Carrier Strike Fighter (1998), Interactive Magic
iPanzer'44 (1998), Interactive Magic
Liberation Day (1998), Interactive Magic
Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries (1998), Interactive Magic
Spearhead (1998), Interactive Magic
Vangers (1998), Buka Entertainment
The Great Battles of Hannibal (1997), Interactive Magic
Seven Kingdoms (1997), Interactive Magic

Do I have the right guy? Assuming the names match up. Unfortunately mobygames did not mention the middle name which makes it harder to pinpoint. I also gleaned a picture as well.

I am fairly sure that I have the right person though.

nXain: I'm starting to wonder if it's time for a Spring Foundation that can get sponsorship for this type of project and manage it to completion while allowing the greater community to do whatever it wants. A foundation could also take a longer term view and enable things that can be done via the community. Offhand, I think there could be quite a few parties interested in seeing Spring be successful in the long term.

nXain: The sense I'm getting overall is that there is a very vocal and hostile minority that seem to be afraid of something. I'm not of what - perhaps that with attention to Spring the community will change or they will lose control.

Yes, there are two specific things to be afraid of:

1.) Someone will actually start this foundation you speak of, then like other projects before it, gradually mold the engine and its developers into a vision of corporate splendour. Pimping one or two copy-cat mods to the idiot masses while burning money discussing the cheapest way to manufacture Spring(tm) teeshirts at ritzy corporate luncheons (before quietly having smoth "disposed of" for being so hostile to investors). This is that "losing control" you spoke of.

2.) That Spring actually becomes the "killer app" you speak of and the developers spend the rest of their lives answering the same stupid questions over and over (I speak generally, like "I can't install it on my xbox! waaagh!" not about your questions/comments).

I agree with what others have said before. Your ideas are overly broad and mostly "unactionable". It reminds me of all those Dilbert cartoons where the pointy-haired bosses say things like "We need to form a quality initiative", or "Lets have another meeting to find out why the project is late", or "Why can't anybody make a decision?!!".

These are not the kind of comments that produce actual results (or even useful answers). At the end of the day somebody has to do the code and artwork. That's been said over and over again here. You're not going to do it, a bunch of MBAs and PR people aren't going to do it. If a company comes along to do it, more power to them. What I'm afraid of is the high probability that such a company/commitee/foundation will have a disproportionate amount of sway over the direction of the project; and that the sense of community and garage development will be lost (that's the "change" you were referring to).

A foundation may be useful in terms of promotion or whatever but frankly I'm sick of marketing anyway. If a specific mod is good enough it will acheive fame through word of mouth. The Internet is full of new celebrities that the business community overlooked. If a mod acheives celebrity then modellers/coders/promoters/whatever will be lining the block to get in on the action. Until then there's a certain amount of enjoyment and power that comes from going it alone, or with a small posse. I'm not ashamed of taking some credit and liberties as the payment for my hard work. Also I don't particularly care how long the project takes. As you hinted, perhaps to some of us the journey is more important than the results.

I leave you with a quote from a real corporate memo:

"Lucent Technologies is determined to promote constant attention on current procedures of transacting business focusing emphasis on innovative ways to better, if not supercede, the expectations of quality!"

Please forgive the hostility nxian, this community is primarily pet-project developers (who would be hostile to a flagship mod for obvious reasons) and BA players, who think Spring and BA are perfect and need no improvement.

While an 'official flagship mod' supported above others by the spring engine would be favoritism and slap in the face to all the content developers, we can still have 'flagship mods' in the sense that they promote the Spring engine.

But the spring community is not a cohesive entity (I think you've learned this by now). We arent going to all drop what we're doing (and playing) and work on one project. Each mod should work towards promoting itself, as a single product and game, as its own flagship. Not as a flagship for Spring, but as a self-contained self-promoted standalone game.

We need these sorts of games, games that can recruit from outside the community, games that are self-contained and complete, for the health of the engine. But while one game might be more popular than others, there is never going to be a 'Spring: The Game'.

Still, what should the proporties of a flagship mod that is ideal for promoting itself and the engine be?

1. Open-source development. This cant be any one persons private project. Everyone should be able to contribute and everyone should be able to take from it for their own projects.

2. Origional IP. You've already made the case for this.

3. A playerbase. In a multiplayer game, if you have no players, nobody can play your game!

4. Single-player content. This increases your playerbase dramatically (Which leads to more word of mouth ditribution) as well as offering a bridge into the multiplayer aspects of the game.

5. Up to date features, content, graphics, gameplay, and a full exploitation of the engine etc.

CA is working towards all of these goals. It is open source and has a large development team. Its already produces most of the LUA enhacements in Spring (which is duly taken by other games, such as BA). It has replaced a lot of the OTA models and is working to be completely free of OTA IP. It is the second most played mod in Spring. It has singleplayer and cooperative multiplayer game modes (which, again, have been taken by other mods such as BA) and we're currently working on a mission editor to make missions and campaigns.

We specifically developed CA to be this sort of flagship project that anyone can contribute to and which contributes everything in it back to the community. Our major stumbling block right now is art- we have barely any artists and we need them if we're to be free of OTA content.

PURE does not have an open development model, it is Arghs pet project with some model contributions from the wider community. We couldnt all band together to get PURE finished if we wanted to. Even the people who submitted models signed over their copyrights to Argh. He has spoken about putting it under a semi-restrictive open license in the future. PURE has no playerbase or single player content to my knowledge. It is not a flagship project, though perhaps one day it might be.

P.S. - Cue BA players and pet-project devs saying 'CA sux'.

Please forgive the hostility nxian, this community is primarily pet-project developers (who would be hostile to a flagship mod for obvious reasons) and BA players, who think Spring and BA are perfect and need no improvement.

No thread would be complete without crying about BA players ey?

P.S. - Cue BA players and pet-project devs saying 'CA sux'.

Erm, no thread would be complete without a post crying about BA players twice.

I agree with what others have said before. Your ideas are overly broad and mostly "unactionable". It reminds me of all those Dilbert cartoons where the pointy-haired bosses say things like "We need to form a quality initiative", or "Lets have another meeting to find out why the project is late"

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde

CA sux

There now that that is out of the way...

Pure does have singleplayer btw. It's not very extensive, but it is there. Just thought I'd point that out.

BA players think BA is fine and Spring is fine and see no reason to change it. Disagree with that if you like Slek but isnt that your point of view? I dont think i misrepresented you. I am not complaining (though i disagree that BA is all spring needs), i think there is space for every Spring mod, including BA.

Im just trying to explain to nxian of why you and many others do not think some new flagship mod (Be it CA or anything else) for Spring is necessary- it has one, BA.

The flamers in this post can be divided into two main camps, both basically buying into the same folly:

1. People who are afraid of the commercial success of things associated with Spring.

2. People who think that success for any particular game is essentially a zero-sum operation, taking away players from everybody else.

The folly is that what we have here is a zero-sum game, where any winners take away from the losers. Instead, we have a positive-sum game here, everybody wins to some extent.

The fact of the matter is that success would cause huge numbers of new developers to arrive here, would drive huge amounts of interest in all of the games that looked worth playing, and would basically be a good thing.

Nxain... instead of wasting your no-doubt valuable think-time arguing with these people, some of whom will argue for months with you if you let them... sit down and learn enough of <insert your specialty here> and how it can be implemented in this engine to do something useful for everybody.

For example, if you're a graphics-engine guy... I'd like to see a lot of shader code written for this engine and implemented in Lua that was not poisoned with GPL and could be used by commercial games. I know next to zero about that area, and due to time constraints, I am unlikely to figure out how to do that. And that's one of many example areas where we simply need people think ahead, see the future of the engine and the relationship between what's available and what's possible, and make useful things happen.

Meanwhile, for everybody hiding under a rock, or using P.U.R.E. as an epithet instead of really grasping how fundamentally I'm rewriting the rules here....

I've already completed a working level editor and SDK for World Builder, and I'm going to tackle making single-player missions next week. In short... things are going to change, whether you guys like it or not. Between the magazine coverage and other plans, I have a feeling that we're about to see an explosion of interest in this engine, and yelling at this guy is basically like shouting into the wind.

Instead of being so negative and fighting with him over the stuff that he's saying that we can all agree is entirely impractical, such as making me game-design dictator and founding some improbable uber-team, which is not happening, since I have no time to manage a larger organization right now, frankly... why don't y'all talk a little more proactively about how Spring's success can be channeled into positive activities.

For example, I need as much help as I can get for World Builder, which is free, Open Source, etc., and can be used by anybody for any project. Other than minor contributions of content, nobody's doing anything except for me. There is a lot of work that could be done, right there on that project alone, that would make a huge difference in terms of how this engine is received, and nobody gets screwed by it being better and better- we all win, basically.

Quit seeing everything as a zero-sum game, folks. Instead, think positively about growth, think about how we need to change things to encourage growth, feed growth and promote player retention.

Argh wrote:not poisoned with GPL

Here is another schism in the community that just makes us all working on one single flagship mod impossible, but we really should not get into that.

World builder isnt a game. It enhances the engine (and ill leave the lua to the lua guys, you should talk to quant and jK if you havent) but it doesnt offer the kind of flagship content package that can be used to promote the engine, which is what this thread is all about.

Spring has atrocious marketing, and doesnt have much to market in the first place, and that hurts it.

World builder isnt a game. It enhances the engine (and ill leave the lua to the lua guys, you should talk to quant and jK if you havent) but it doesnt offer the kind of flagship content package that can be used to promote the engine, which is what this thread is all about.

No, it's not a game, and that's why I said that I think it could be a good point for all interests to converge, if one exists. The whole point of World Builder is to finally give Spring a good level-editing environment and a lot of good content for maps, packaged in a way that runs efficiently. I have most of the major technical goals met, the issue I keep running smack into is that I simply need a lot more content, so that we have something roughly equivalent to the old "map pack" collections of Features to put onto maps. Right now, it's maybe 25% of the amount of content I think that we need, at roughly 80 objects.

Argh wrote: Nxain... instead of wasting your no-doubt valuable think-time arguing with these people, some of whom will argue for months with you if you let them... sit down and learn enough of <insert your specialty here> and how it can be implemented in this engine to do something useful for everybody.

I'm a Producer. This is what I do. :) To clarify, a producer manages the budgets and teams on a project to meet a list of requirements - technology, schedule, design and etc. The most important thing that I do is keep an eye on the big picture to make sure products are completed successfully and everyone wins (the consumer buying the game, the developers making the game and the people paying for development of the game).

I have no intention of joining a Spring project in any capacity as that gets too close to a conflict of interest for me. I would like to see the Spring community go into the future with it's collective eyes open though.

- nXain

Ok... lemme take another whack at this, then. Do something that a Producer would do- bring us into contact with some money, so that people like me aren't struggling to keep food on the table while we finish our games.

Call your backers, tell them they could have a significant equity stake in my operation for a fairly low up-front investment, with the potential of very good returns over an investment period of a year.

Sorry to put it so bluntly, but money would speak a lot louder than words. If you're a Producer, then you know that's just the reality here. If you want to do something broader in scope in that regard, then get venture people to take a look at what's available, and get us in touch with people we can actually pitch to. Because people like me don't know anybody in that area, and have no idea how to get our work in front of those people, other than just trying to attract as much media as I can in general and hoping for the best.

It'd be a lot more useful than arguing with these guys.

At any rate, I've gotta go, I'll be back to read through more pointless flame-wars on Friday. But if you're looking for something useful to do, that'd be useful, and it's not a resource we currently have.