Spring RTS Engine

One of the main points is totally lost on you entirely.

It wont be a strain on modders/content devs at all, the reason being because the content devs don't have to do any website work at all if they don't want to. That doesn't mean they cant have a website.

You see we have a community here full of talented people who are currently doing nothing. A project can advertise for a 'web master' role or a 'site designer' and 'site maintainer' role. Sites don't have to be complex or filled with regularly updated content on a daily basis either.

Its not a question of fitting website creation and maintenance into an already packed schedule, its about removing ignorance and admitting there are positions on your team nobody is occupying that nobody on board has the skills to do, and that you need to ask for help or new team members. I said the project team should do the work, I never said the project couldnt expand to include new capable members with the necessary resources todo the job if there weren't already.

When a supermarket opens and theres nobody to man the tills, do the managers ignore the tills and tell customers they're too busy to open the tills as they have forms to fill in and people to manage? Or do they advertise for new employees to man the tills?

For example, lets take BA as an example. I doubt Noize has the time to build a BA website. But that doesn't mean someone in the BA community cant ask noize and coordinate a BA website. This way Noize does not loose time and resources in a field he is unexperienced in, and BA gains a brand new website. No voerloaded schedules and stressed content developers.

When a company needs a website, what do they do? They hire web designers!

While I see where you're coming from, I feel its not yet time to get advertising into high gear and worrying about player bases. (rereading the previous posts, i'm rephrasing alot of what SwiftSpear said but meh, i'll put my 2 cents in anyway)

The Spring engine is still undergoing major development as far as I can tell, and there aren't really many games or mods that are 100% done and ready for the critical eye of the general public.

If you look at it from the perspective of people new to Spring, what they're going to see is an RTS engine that's still WiP, with alot of WiP games and mods, and a couple of *A mods which, (aside from CA maybe) look very similar.

People who see advertising and come here will expect a polished engine and polished games, not a ton of stuff still in Alpha or Beta phases regardless of how many warnings and disclaimers about the stuff being unfinished plastered everywhere. They will still bitch and moan about its bugginess and unfinished state.

Modders used to commercial engines will expect support for things like Normal/Parallax Maps, full skeletal animation support and deformable meshes, polished modding tools and so forth.

Without 'basic' things like these, they'll just lose interest and go mod or play something else.

That being said, I agree that mods and games around here all need a site of their own, as a well-designed site adds legitimacy to the project (e.g. "we've been regularly charting our progress for 3+ years, we know what we're doing").

Here is a list of games which I think could give many freeware/shareware games that are already in distribution a run for their money if marketed with a standalone dedicated installer and website:

• Kernel Panic
• THIS
• Those 2 mirror games (kdr and noruas right?)
• EE
• Nanoblobz

Here is a list of games which would benefit enourmously from a good pre-release website aimed at potential players (note they may already have a website but not serving this purpose):

• CA
• P.U.R.E
• The unreleased version of Gundam

Games that have websites (that I am aware of)(that are aimed at the intended usage I outlined):

• Starwars
• spring 1944
• EvolutionRTS
• The old gundam site

Likelihood I missed someone out: 70%+
Likelihood it matters: 0%

I mention gundam twice because smoth started a site but at the moment is relying on moddb.Im unclear as to the status of things.

For a pre-release site, it could be as simple as a single webpage.

For example:

http://battlehub.darkstars.co.uk

Very simple, took 5 minutes to make, somewhere for people to keep checking back.