Spring RTS Engine

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?la ... ding+angel

pwned

As for kats and Dogs

To the best of my memory:

SJ now works at Massive Entertainment, though since Activision's selling that studio, bollocks if I know how much longer.
Jouninkomiko works for microshaft as a beta dev/tester, if I remember right. Last time I spoke to him, he told me he'd not take Vista if they gave it him for free, he was that tired of bug-fixing it.
Tobi and Betalord are still around.
The rest, I don't think I've ever even seen alive, never mind posting.

joun is a TESTER for microsfot?O _o

Well, I thought Dragon45's post was quite insightful and entertaining.

AF's too.

> There is only so far the community can grow around 3D TA, and we long ago reached a maxima in influx. We are growing but not at a sustainable rate, and the rate is slowly decreasing.

Yes, I used to enjoy xpilot and stuff, but it seems that community is dead now. I suppose something will come along to replace Spring at some point, or rather that people will flock to in the same way that they flocked to Spring.

I kindof think that there is a market for someone to come along and make Spring really easy to use. That is a skill that is highly in demand right now.

My gf likes playing Age of Empires and so on, but she refuses to play Spring, because it is too hard to use.

PS it would be quite cool if someone figured out how to make linux and Windows sync so we could go back to building on Windows using Visual Studio. Part of me thinks that that is an obstacle that is putting a lot of people off participating in dev. Certainly both AF and I arent really into the whole mingw thing.

Random thoughts. Can it really be that hard to make the things sync?

Presumably it really is that hard to make things sync perfectly, but perhaps if one trusts the people one is playing with (a reasonable assumption for Spring in many cases?), or at least, if one trusts the host, then the host computer can be the master, and can resync its game state to the others every 10 seconds or so?

Edit: quick off the cuff calculation: if we have 4 players with 1000 units each, each with 1k of data, then that is 4meg of data. Quite a lot... still, there are almost certainly some optimizations we can carry out to reduce that; and most of the time there are less than 4000 units total on the map?

Meh. Dragon, I have to assume that your post was just intended to pull people's legs, or something- the intellectual version of posting those jackass cat pictures.

Because the whole, "omg, you're all living a lie" argument is one of the most ignorant things I've ever seen posted here. And given that we have more than a few truly clueless people come through here... that's saying something

Apparently, we poor, naive content devs, who are about as spoiled and pampered as is possible by the software engineers (meh, I've lost count of how many of my Feature Requests are in this damn engine, but it's gotta be somewhere over 100) don't understand that we make the devs look good... by making games that look good.

And then, if we're nice, we thank them. Because legally, we don't have to do jack squat. As a game developer, I damn well want them to know that the engine guys have been acknowledged, and to be able to show it to an employer and say, "I helped make this possible". And if it gets them a job, that's wonderful! Maybe they'll put in a good word for me someday, if they need someone to fetch them coffee or something

So, from here, it looks like a perfectly rational quid pro quo.

In short... nobody is being "fooled", who's not a fool. We're all here for different reasons, and that's part of why we all fight so much. That, and we're mean little people. But we're still here, which should tell ya something, if you can step away from your flawed assumptions and apparently silly view about the value of the OTA world, which was losing steam and players well before Spring showed up.

I think it's very telling that somebody like you, who has developed nothing worth mentioning for this engine, would write a post basically accusing the developers of running some sort of game on the game designers, when all of us who DO THINGS actually know that they're mainly supporting us, because helping us helps them. Compared to most "Open Source" game projects, where the developers also want to play God, and run the game design... Spring is practically Utopian, frankly.



Oh, and Hugh... I'm developing a Help system and trainer for P.U.R.E., if you and your Significant Other want to test it during the MP Betas, lemme know.

And Dragon articulates points I considered before I joined the community two or so years ago.

Spring is not a game, it is an engine. I'm not playing a lie, and I never did.

I've put things related to Spring on my resume myself. It's OS, you contribute, you benefit, you move along if you wish.

I think dragon ate a pot brownie.

indeed, this resume thing is a good idea, for i too have contributed heavily to spring

i remade the original FAQ and formatted and spellchecked it nicely; that took days of work

i made a patch for the engine that allowed configurable health via GET/SET

i also wrote sum guides and stuff on raep

i also wrote sum guides and stuff on raep

Come play 1v1 if your worth anything.

Ill let you all in on a secret.

Most computer games are made to make the developers and publishers MONEY! Not to make good games or please the end user, but to sell copies!

I am glad to have enlightened you all. You can now proceed to never purchase videogames again, armed with this sage knowledge as to the REAL motivations behind game developers.

If you want to challenge the nature of open-source games and discuss 'content creation in a GPL world' or such, this is all quite interesting and you make some good points: IE that these GPL hobbyists only do this to 'get real jobs' in the industry and if everything was GPL or copyrightless there wouldnt even be an industry for them to get jobs in.

But as far as i am concerned, its prettymuch irrelevant to the playing of or working on spring. Its open source, and it is wonderful, and it is fun to play.

My comment about Dragon doing nothing was unfair, I retract that.

Ignorance is my only excuse, and it's a poor one. I use the GET/SET HEALTH code in P.U.R.E., and I just assumed that was one of FLOZi's many additions to COB functionality. And fixing manuals, etc., is non-trivial work, and boring scutwork, at that. I apologize for being an irritable asshat, unaware of those contributions.

At any rate, if I ever get to talk to the gaming press, the first thing I'd say is that I've seen a lot of different development communities... but this is the model I'd hold up before the world, frankly. Most supposedly Open Source projects consist of a few key developers, who are wanna-be game designers. They make crude demo games with terrible content, then try to rope people like me into "joining" them- a one-way relationship. Spring's greatest strength, imo, is that the engine developers aren't in that role. We've done more with this than any other project that I know of, frankly, and everybody who's contributed in some way, no matter how small, has been a part of that.

Argh wrote:Oh, and Hugh... I'm developing a Help system and trainer for P.U.R.E., if you and your Significant Other want to test it during the MP Betas, lemme know.

Cool! Sounds good

why end something great when you have achived so much?

Not all people do it to get "real jobs in the industry"..
Afaik many spring-related devs are pretty old and have normal daily jobs. Also many are students studying stuff not directly related to IT. They are just highly intelligent and highly motivated to do their part in this project. I do my stuff in free time because I like to play the game and I like making games. I used to work in the game industry but now I'm occupied by dry business stuff and miss game/content creation feel.

Also Spring is becoming more user friendly over time:

- 2 major lobby programs now download mods and maps automatically.

- Spring now has cooperative multiplayer vs "AI" (chicken style) which helps newbies who are afraid of MP games.

- LuaUI enables empowers some mods with easier to use GUI and ingame help tutorial - this will be improved over time too I bet

- full SP support is wip on both lobby and mod side

- there are many great features planned (like easy support for automatic SVN spring updating and paralell "stable" + "svn" spring install - this will speed up engine development, intelligent quickmatching - this will speed up annoying waiting in lobby/game setup and help rare mods = motivate their devs)

Licho fix your registry hackery

Argh, it may seem as if content devs are being labelled naive but you must get clear this distinction in what is being said and what is being heard.

What is being said:
Content projects have gaping wholes in their responsibilities, fix them

What is being heard:
You have gaping wholes in your responsibilities, fix them

This is like the supermarket manager refusing to hire employees because their paper work is hard work and to suggest going onto the shop floor is an insult. Suffice to say the supermarket is never opened, nobody can buy anything and the shop goes out of business.

Now lets imagine we have a new store called 'spring' dedicated to selling the spring engine. Developers come here and go away with a shiny spring engine to develop for.

Now content developers are currently putting their games next to spring engine on the shelf in the engine store. Most of their target audience is avoiding the engine store and going to the games store. But there are no spring games in the game store, theyre all in the engine store with the other game engines, and end users dont like coding, ew engine store, I want games not SDKs.

Of course there are people who go in for a nose about and happen upon spring engine and go 'ooo look at those'.

This is currently how it works.

AF wrote:http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?la ... ding+angel

pwned

As for kats and Dogs

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?la ... ding+angel

PS: http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?la ... ding+angel

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?la ... e&word2=AF

ya all know im the nick winner here.

and no, we dont count nicks less than 3 letters >_>

The spring is a lie.All go home please.now.