Spring RTS Engine

BA's learning curve is what keeps people hooked in my opinion, I have little patience for most other RTS's as I get bored quickly, it's the mystery that there might always be some hidden winning strategy hiding in those 300+ units that keeps BA interesting for me.

TheFatController wrote:BA's learning curve is what keeps people hooked in my opinion, I have little patience for most other RTS's as I get bored quickly, it's the mystery that there might always be some hidden winning strategy hiding in those 300+ units that keeps BA interesting for me.

Yeah, the depth is really appealing. The question is how do we get newbies into those depths without scaring the death out of them in the first 20 minutes? A tutorial mission laying out the techtree? A PDF manual with unit descriptions and a tech tree flowchart? Making the in game unit descriptions cover more in depth information about what units counter and give some tips?

tutorial _missions_. plenty of them. as in, a whole 10-15 mission campaign. applies to all current *A mods, not only BA; they're all very deep.

You can start making those with mission editor already.

imbaczek wrote:tutorial _missions_. plenty of them. as in, a whole 10-15 mission campaign. applies to all current *A mods, not only BA; they're all very deep.

A collaborative project between mods would probably be the best way to do this since most of the *A mods still have roughly the same tech tree right?

Licho wrote:You can start making those with mission editor already.

Yeah, but they're not playable in every lobby yet which should go on the list. Maybe we could build support for campaigns into Spring like the existing start scripts already are implemented to make it even more newbie friendly.

Tutorial missions that aren't extremely simple are very time-consuming and need to be updated often. IMO chickens as a learning tool are a better option. We'd need a 1-click chicken shortcut that just works.

el_matarife wrote:*A mods still have roughly the same tech tree right?

Certainly not at all for CA.. I dont think shared tutorial could ever work, units also look and are named differently :)


Regarding chickens and campaign support - planned for winter for sure.

But even tasclient already has campaign support. There is nothing you need devs to do atm, you can already start making campaign afaik.

you're screwed

Not at all, CA is likely to make tutorial faster than BA, since we also made the editor itself so you are screwed!

CA is likely to make tutorial faster than BA

CA devs are busy with various project, I don't think we'll have a tutorial any time soon (other than the existing tutorial widget).

learn 2 read the whole post + if BA was so great the playerbase wouldnt be stagnant/declining.

BA cant advertise outside of spring because of its legality issues so right now it cant really do anything for the community other than retain the people who play it.

Also the fact there are still a ton of noobs prooves to show that the majority dont want depth in there game they just want to blow up shit with huge robots/armies without having to wait for a game im pretty sure that alot of players dont understand the true depth of some of the RTS's on the engine but just go LOL KROG.

the hope lies within the IP Free Legal projects and improvements to userfriendliness/stability/optimisation.

I know of alot of people who havent given spring the time of day or have quit because of *A being the only thing you can play on a regular basis.

but end of subject i dont want this to turn into a BA vs CA thread just because some people cant take comments in context and see it as a personal attack on there mod.

If there was some decent AI it would give new players an opportunity to train up without getting called newbs in online games. Also, if there was AI for every mod, players could play a good game on any mod without having to wait for a dozen players or so...

Instead of introducing shitloads of new features we should tidy Spring up, fix some stuff that hasn't been fixed in a long time like saving/loading.
Then, when it's polished, we can try and get it featured on some popular gaming sites like IGN or something.

Otherside wrote:I know of alot of people who havent given spring the time of day or have quit because of *A being the only thing you can play on a regular basis.

They quit because they could only play *A on the spring engine, as opposed to nothing which would certainly retain them?

Note we have a bug tracker for website and engine/unitsync.

Such a thing essentially functions like a big TODO list, and compared to the forum there's a much smaller chance your issue is totally forgotten about. (On the forum this chance is 100% IMO.)

As you can see there, the website is pretty much finished, as there are only two open issues in the website category, and at least one of them would be fixable in a few hours by anyone knowing CSS.

Also, it's not too hard to set up a clone of the website in a virtual machine and start improving the (small) parts of custom PHP/CSS.

Also the wiki can be improved by anyone, you don't need programming skills for this. (Or is this underscore bug still present maybe?)

In other words, it's nice to talk about this, but let's first actually start using the tools we already have, and only replace them when we reach their limits, instead of just keeping replacing tools without ever using them.

There are so many newbies that are confused by the process of installation till actual gameplay as it is now
That we have to change something.
Projects that are games and not mods have their own installers and websites however for mods there needs to be a way to have them all right away with a big set of most played maps and other quality maps.

My suggestion for making spring easier for newbies by a tons:
Make 2 spring installers.
1)A barebones one like what we have now.
2)A big one,several hundred megs or even a gig big.
The second one will be the first link on the website saying this is all you need to play.
The barebones will be under it saying that its a minimal install with the option to download more stuff during the installation.

We all know that legaly it cannot hurt spring and the most that will happen is someone sending an email telling us to stop distributing the ota mods.

Too many noobs are coming in and than have to understand the entire system of mods maps and the different websites before they can actually be amazed by the game,this is Vbad.

Another thing is that most games today,like free MMOS or even commercial game demos have download sizes of gig-several gigs.
This is standard and acceptable by now and there is nothing wrong with it.

el_matarife wrote:Spring's learning curve is like running into a brick wall. There's not many RTS that have 200+ units, and that definitely confuses people, but I'm hoping in game Lua tutorials or unit guides can help a lot.

Done and done.

spring has a lot of people talking but less people actually doing things ...

the main thing spring needs is SINGLE PLAYER campaigns, tutorials, missions etc

new players come to spring join a BA game (with luck), people yell at them cause they suck and they leave, the normal way to join multiplayer is to learn the game through the campaigns and then play multiplayer

it also needs a REAL ingame menu and a real customisable and nice interface ... to make it look like a real game and not like a beta for developpers only

except the coop mode, playing BA on spring 0.75b2 was as fun and stable as playing spring 0.79.1.2 ... i can't see any real big improvement for players, i mean it's still not userfriendly (im talking about the engine, not the lobbies)

Satirik wrote:it also needs a REAL ingame menu and a real customisable and nice interface ... to make it look like a real game and not like a beta for developpers only

Done.

CarRepairer wrote:

Satirik wrote:it also needs a REAL ingame menu and a real customisable and nice interface ... to make it look like a real game and not like a beta for developpers only

Done.

screenshot ... don't show me some lua crap awful and intrusive pls, spring should have a xml based interface with event linked to lua functions or something like that and not in lua