Spring RTS Engine

Too bad the new release seems to be far away still.

Ok here are the big list of reasons

- Desync driving players away

- A large group of 'joke flamers lets flame and have fun' driven away by 'troll flamers lets cause offense and laugh when they blow up'

- People being literally driven away from the forums deliberatly by certain users, which si then followed by more users following the example and leaving.

- A release process that has gotten so longwinded and complex that the devs put it off and wait for big big releases. Release small, and often is no longer the norm here.

- Lack of innovation in the mod scene. TA based mods arent innovating, they're just fixing glaring holes when they come up and swapping out models and sfx, the mod still plays the same and theres nothing new. Players are getting bored.

- Popularity unrest. Some modders in the TA scene are adamant that players play their mods and go mad when players switch to XTA or nonTA mods so that the players stay with their mdo and get bored, or just get annyoed and leave anyway.

- Lobby, we have a terrible lobby GUI that is horribly unfriendly to new users. A lot of users take a look and uninstall before they even get ingame.

- For the last year we have failed to attract new developers and at the same time lost developers.

- Decrepit infrastructure, the entire setup is ancient and simpleton, this website is a prime example of progress that should e happening being left to the side. DIscussions being barbed and destroyed by trolls then locked or derailed.

- AA modding base confusion, BA making itself out to be AA replacement/continuation then AA 5 and AA2.3 confusing the hell out of them(is 2.3 an old AA from before BA? Which came first =s which one should we be playing =s), then CA announcing itself and then some people saying its the next revision and some people saying its a totally different mod.

Imo it was supcom/AA2.23/death of the 1v1 ladder all happening at once that drove a large amount of people away

AA v5.0 is beautifull but BA4.7 is better for gameplay ...

I have 13 exams in a week

I've been flaming pretty good.... c'mon now...

Ishach wrote:Imo it was supcom/AA2.23/death of the 1v1 ladder all happening at once that drove a large amount of people away

truth

pintle wrote:

Ishach wrote:Imo it was supcom/AA2.23/death of the 1v1 ladder all happening at once that drove a large amount of people away

truth

Yep, i can agree with that. Though i wasn't as much of a fan of the later as i was the weekly tourneys.

aaaaaaaaaaaand desyncs.

the AA/BA split, supcom and the fact its exam months mean the community sucks atm. it'll come crawling back in the winter

I don't play a lot because I don't find game I like unlike one year ago.
And I'm a lot stressed by school, but I'll certainly come back in July.

I don't think losing the ladder cost us more than two score people, to be honest.

more mod-independant autohost would be good, i often watch the lobby for more than half an hour to find a suitable game...that sucks

The simple fact is that a game needs to have critical mass for online gaming.

When I hop on the server, about the only thing I'm guaranteed to find is a BA game on Altored, Tangerine, or Speedmetal. Maybe an XTA game. Anythign else I'd better start myself, and even then I might get 2-3 players.

It's not really worth going online to check anymore. I know there won't be an EE or KP game waiting for me. BA on Altored is generally the best-case-scenario (as opposed to SpeedMetal or GreenFields).

So the problem of fewer players is self-exacerbating.

Is there any actual data that there is less 'action' around ? I mean for me it seems that the number of online players is fairly constant (ok, it could/should increase, but I do not see it decreasing).

And on the forums usually there is a lot of flamewars - at least in my opinion, so it doesn't seem that quiet.

It has gone quiet, but then it always has at this time. Im still here and doing stuff! Just Im taking my sweet time now a days!

aGorm

AF wrote:Ok here are the big list of reasons
- Lack of innovation in the mod scene. TA based mods arent innovating, they're just fixing glaring holes when they come up and swapping out models and sfx, the mod still plays the same and theres nothing new. Players are getting bored.

- Decrepit infrastructure, the entire setup is ancient and simpleton, this website is a prime example of progress that should e happening being left to the side. DIscussions being barbed and destroyed by trolls then locked or derailed.

Two biggest points IMHO.


i cant believe im agreeing with af

Relative wrote:@ThanatosNL

Well I can see you managed to pick up how to get everything running without any problems, but that isn't everyone's case. Just idle in the lobby for a few minutes and you get questions about these "basic" things. They either don't know about UF (not everyone bothers to join the forums if they are only just trying out the game), don't know what to do with the files, try unpacking the maps from sdz/7, or get sick of spring crashing even if the issue can be easily fixed.

Its not to say that these are spring only problems. Even commercial software has issues with "user friendliness". The underlining problem with this has to do with the nature of spring. Spring is free, open-source, and easy to access with a sub-30 MB file size with the regular installer. In this case this is not a positive trait as the user has not needed to invest into the game. Thus, the drive to get the software running will not be as great than if you just paid $50 for supcom. You have likely come across this in your own experiences. You buy a relatively expensive or exclusive product, but it doesn't work out of the box. You then invest hours and possibly over a period of a few days to get it to work whether you succeed or not.

Without the drive to repay your investment you give up and move onto more rewarding tasks. Therefore, to make spring go more mainstream it is important that things are as user friendly as possible.

spring's population is dwindling

Pxtl wrote:Altored

Snap! People are still playing that?

Why doesn't anyone play altored arctic? Seriously that's the best map I've ever made. It is PERFECT for everything in every possible way... assuming other AA-based mods didn't mess with AA's pure and holy slope values of perfection.

Just think, you can be playing AA on AA! :O

Regarding that innovation crap, I've got some good ideas - AND I HAVEN'T EVEN STARTED STEALING IDEAS YET!!!!