Spring RTS Engine

Are there widgets which give a large advantage to players with them, over players that don't have them?

Yes. Defense Ranges is the most obvious, since it gives players pixel-perfect ranges of static defenses.

The Custom Formations Widget allows for movement patterns that simply aren't available manually.

There are Widgets that will auto-track Commander sightings, auto-mark certain types of enemy structures to make information sorting easier, etc.

And I have thought up a few that aren't even real Widgets yet, but could certainly exist, like showing players the valid movement locations of a given Unit as an overlay to the actual map. Voila- you now know, instantly, which paths are valid for setting up a sneak attack / ambush, with any unit on any map.

All of these things add up to fairly significant advantages, frankly. People who don't get that are fooling themselves. The people who write these things know very well that they're providing information that isn't obvious or readily available, and even an expert player can't know all of the things that computer automation makes it fairly easy to present. It'd be nice in Starcraft, for example, to know where you last saw enemy units leave your Fog of War, but Blizzard rightly chose not to reveal that information. In Spring, these choices have been taken away from game designers, which causes a lot of frustration, hence the posts about this.

People say, "we don't have any Widgets that auto-play our game for us, therefore there is no problem".

That's stupid, frankly. RTS games are largely about information. When people have information that they couldn't normally have (or instantly get information that usually costs either game counters or huge numbers of hours of playing time), they have a major advantage. You don't need something to perfectly aim your D-Gun to have a fairly serious edge over opponents who aren't using the same things. Just knowing that you've successfully scouted the enemy Commander, instantly and with perfect accuracy, may be enough, in a serious game.

I suspect that the main reason that this isn't a bigger issue is that frankly most newbies are so boggled by Spring's UI that they simply don't know what's available to them. Otherwise we'd hear more about this issue, and how it's distorting serious play.

The problem that we face is that it's impossible to put a real limit on this stuff without being totally draconian about it atm. I'd like a more flexible response.

I like Smoth's idea, where people pick "safe" and "unsafe" modes, and that combined with a Widget-sharing software would probably be about as ideal as it gets. Since it's apparent that we're not going to have a secure executable in any meaningful sense in the immediate future, then it's best to simply try and level the playing field as much as possible.

Am I the only person here that would welcome widgets that provide advanced information to be inlcuded mod side?

For example in Evo, it makes sense to me that if you have had los on a unit, then even on radar that unit should be visible. Ghost units or whatever that widget is, does this but it times out after a while.

Personally, imo things like that are just useful tools to a meaningful battle. Course evo isn't the normal mod I suppose, and it's intended to be dead simple for newbies, and while all the advanced info gathering in it is extremely useful, nothing makes up for the experience as a player in knowing what to do in a given situation. I look at RTS games a a sort of chess game. You see what is happening on the map, it's up to you to think x moves ahead of your opponent to get yourself to victory.

I understand why a lot of RTS games like to mystify information, it's a neat gameplay mechanic assuming that your game is built with that purpose in mind, but evo in particular is focused on battles. There is a lot of strategy involved no matter how much info you have. How you use that info is the deciding factor.

Maybe I jsut have a different idea of what is fun in an RTS. I always thought that the blowy uppy part was the most fun, and find tedious info gathering to be a pain in the ass.

Ultimately I guess it all comes down to the way that your game is built as to whether advanced info gathering (automagically) is appropriate or not.

I understand why a lot of RTS games like to mystify information, it's a neat gameplay mechanic assuming that your game is built with that purpose in mind, but evo in particular is focused on battles. There is a lot of strategy involved no matter how much info you have. How you use that info is the deciding factor.

That's the whole thing, pretty much. Different game designs need different things... so why are we all being forced to use the same UI conventions?

For example... let's say I want to build a really accurate historical simulation of the Vietnam war. Obviously, it's a big deal, if it's literally hard for me, as the commander in my simulated helicopter command post, to see the enemy, just like it was IRL.

One Widget could easily destroy that gameplay, by simply highlighting all enemy units using gl.Unit calls, making them clearly visible through the game's foliage that would normally make them hard to observe. That's the thing about this issue- when you look outside BA, it's easier to see why it's a concern.

Argh wrote:

One Widget could easily destroy that gameplay, by simply highlighting all enemy units using gl.Unit calls, making them clearly visible through the game's foliage that would normally make them hard to observe. That's the thing about this issue- when you look outside BA, it's easier to see why it's a concern.

These hypothetical widgets are ruining our hypothetical mods ! We must put a stop to it.

Argh wrote:And I have thought up a few that aren't even real Widgets yet, but could certainly exist, like showing players the valid movement locations of a given Unit as an overlay to the actual map. Voila- you now know, instantly, which paths are valid for setting up a sneak attack / ambush, with any unit on any map.

And in what way is this different from selecting a unit and pressing F2? No widget needed. Was there right from the start.

We have no idea what various people may be building, or contemplating building with this engine.

That's just one example of how big of a problem this can be, when things go outside a fairly narrow box in terms of "what's allowed".

Let's take another- if we build a FPS game with the engine, where LOS is a very long distance, but players don't know that because they're limited to what their eyes can see, it's trivial to make a wall-hack, since that information is available to you constantly. So, no walls using Features or Units can possibly be used (that's one of the reasons I want that LOS proposal implemented with a raytest to kill LOS, it would actually close that loophole).

And in what way is this different from selecting a unit and pressing F2?

Because it would be contextually smarter- it would just show blocked areas, still show while looking at the metal-map POV, etc. IOW, there it's not replacing an existing Spring feature but is enhancing it in ways that aren't possible otherwise, giving the user an advantage in terms of efficient time-management.

Obviously, some people would embrace this as a way to reduce their micro. That's all well and good, but the point is that if people try to play seriously and one side doesn't have these advantages, it all adds up pretty fast. Try playing BA without any Widgets at all, see how that goes against anybody experienced using Widgets (I'd suggest Google_Frog).

Then reverse that test, and see how the player using Widgets plays when they can't use them. It'll require some really honest people to test this, but my guess is that even if an experienced player like Google still wins, the replay will show a significant difference in how well he was able to determine where you were and what you were doing.

Better yet... heh... convince TheFatController to release a "tournament version" of BA, that only includes the most totally-harmless Widgets and is otherwise locked down with AntiCheat, and see the level of complaining that comes in, primarily from vets who are used to their little "player aids".

I suspect that would be pretty decisive, but I really doubt TFC wants to annoy his core playerbase with a social-engineering experiment

Niobium wrote:No.

zwzsg wrote:

Niobium wrote:widgets that give a significant advantage

The last six monthes I have been using a widget that plays the entire game for me, allowing me to win over half of my matches, without doing anything beside picking the start pos and activating the widget.

Do you think he's joking? All it takes is to modify a lua AI, and you can't tell me it's even physically possible to micro 5 distinct attack groups at the same time to get each unit in the best firing position, lining up attacks to predict movement intelligently and flanking enemies, while also keeping a handle on base building, scouting, and ally situations.

Personally, I think the widget system is great. Simply banning them and putting a stop to this area of development seems like a crazy thing to do... but some sort of 'tournament' mode does sound sensible.

Despite WOW pioneering (popularising?) user interface modding, I read that Starcraft 2 certainly won't include anything like that, purely to keep the game fair and competetive.

On the other hand, I once played a game of nota with some noob in my team that insisted he wanted an ai bot (RAI?) comshared with him. He said it made him much better. Together they were the most useless ally I ever had. lol. I can't help feeling there's some serious untapped potential there though...

I'm not too concerned about people using AI's in BA, if anything it sounds awesome. I also doubt that an AI can be written for a *A mod which uses best judgement all the time, it's too complex to realistically pull off

They don't need to do that, man. That's one of the big illusions here.

They just need an AI that can run a Flash / Gator rush for them while they do econ to keep the spam coming, or a defensive AI that can place hordes of DTs to block a zone quickly. Those two things, which are both pretty easy, could really change BA gameplay. Having watched some replays, I can see that building such a thing should be fairly possible- just emulate Day

For me, personally, AIs that automate unit behaviors sound like a very interesting area, and I would like it if zwzsg would just release what he's got so that we can see it and apply it. If nothing else, I'd like to play around with such things in the context of World Builder, where I already have autonomous non-aligned agents on maps, but haven't had time to do more than give them pre-built patrols atm.

World Builder is a synced gadget, right? So I don't have to give my widgetified version of it, but simply point you to KPAI (as well as Craig).

To make more lively maps, I also recently coded a Lua AI that doesn't play but just rebuilt and reassign orders to lost units, and some more Lua files that spawn units and assign them order with a syntax similar to .ota's one (Note: Yes, I do now about your WB). But then I'd rather have these used by Gundam or EE or even EvoRTS than Pure.

Anyway, this is another subject.

Z, could you go into more detail about how that works (even if it's in another thread), and how to player fits into the grand scheme and stuff? That sounds really interesting.

World Builder is a synced gadget, right?

In all practical senses, World Builder is a Gadget that's done before actual play starts. It doesn't take an active role in anything past level design- the rest of the behaviors, such as knocking trees over, are various gameplay Gadgets.

More information game or mod side is a game or mod developer decision - it may be fine to give every bit of information over in CA or Evo RTS but it can be damaging to many other games.

Niobium wrote:Are there widgets which give a large advantage to players with them, over players that don't have them? No.

Why use widgets then?

momfreeek wrote:most useless ally I ever had

Ever? I mean, I once had an ally that made a couple mexes, energy, and about 15 factories by the time he ragequit midgame (with the excuse that he had been on the phone). I'm not sure if he even made any units in those factories at all.

lurker wrote:

momfreeek wrote:most useless ally I ever had

Ever? I mean, I once had an ally that made a couple mexes, energy, and about 15 factories by the time he ragequit midgame (with the excuse that he had been on the phone). I'm not sure if he even made any units in those factories at all.

Ok, maybe not the worst ever.. but the fact that he appeared to be doing ok, expanding, taking mexes etc, building up econ then when I needed help all he seemed to have were a bunch of hovers (on a dry map) and he couldn't even get them to engage the enemy. An air of competence underpinned by complete ineptitude. I could chat with him, tell him what he needed to do and I'd get responses like: 'I can't, they keep going over there'.

Kloot wrote:No matter how many times you harp on the "we can't make cheating impossible, but we can make it hard" point, it's Not Going To Happen at least as far as engine development is concerned

Ok, I will fix it myself through the power of sparkles and snowflakes, since that's a much more practical idea.

The argument that "it isn't happening NOW, so it will NEVER HAPPEN" is... geez, if you can even say something like that, it's not worth the trouble to explain it to you.

Widgets and the potential for exploitation shut the door on possibilities, like that Vietnam example or the FPS example. Sure, for *A mods it's not necessarily a huge deal to have these gadgets. But do you think that I should just not care that the engine itself is being buggered by its own developers like this? LUA is great, I know that just by looking at the ways that BA uses it. And CA uses it to even greater effect, from what I understand.

I'm not against LUA, and I'm not against gameplay. I don't really care that much what gameplay-altering LUA you're using as long as everyone knows you're using it and they have an equal opportunity to take advantage of it.

The argument that "nobody's going to tell a mod developer that they want a widget included in the whitelist or included in the mod by default" must also be being made by someone that has never seen AA's level of community-involved development. There are thousands of posts across half a dozen 100-page long topics where people made these sorts of requests. As long as they weren't utterly insane I gave them a chance. Even when they WERE insane I gave them a chance sometimes.

Get the image of scary BIG BROTHER out of your head. Developers make their games because they want people to enjoy them, we're not here to force you to play them a certain way, we just want to make sure that when everyone is playing a game they are playing the SAME game.

Spring engine developers. You have every major game/mod developer here, telling you what seems to be only obvious: that some kind of countermeasure against this should be developed BEFORE it becomes a problem. Smoth tells you that as Gundam's developer he feels that widgets can potentially be a serious problem. Argh, as the engine's first commercial developer, tells you that he has had to develop a separate program because he recognizes that this will become an issue. I'm here representing AA/BA, the game that the majority of Spring's player base plays, telling you that this is going to inevitably become a problem.

We all know that there's no such thing as perfect security. That's hardly a reason to not even try.

there's no point to try. circumvention of any security measures in this regard will be much easier than implementing them, thus making any time spent on this simply wasted effort.

Caydr wrote:The argument that "it isn't happening NOW, so it will NEVER HAPPEN" is... geez, if you can even say something like that, it's not worth the trouble to explain it to you.

Moar like: "It is happening NOW, so it will NEVER STOP"

Thanks to the power of Lua technology, we can turn an average newb into a gozu player, with unparalleled reflex, APM over 9000 and pixel perfect memory. This is making the players better. Why would anyone not want to become a superior player?

A new breed of cybernertically enhanced players are taking over Spring. Resistance is futile. You will be widgetified.