Spring RTS Engine

Make them svg, then lobbies can render it to the size and format they want.

Making an svg that can scale well and look as good at 16x16 as a hand-tweaked bitmap sounds very difficult.

See some of the icons that rendered my desire to make icons null. I refuse to work in SVG for a purpose which SVG is not ideal for. SVG is excellent for things intended to scale up, like maps, signs and logos.

I would assume that if they were 16x16 originally they would look better.

As if vet stars already didn't have it hard enough.

Really now, is there any need for more ranks? What's the current top 100?

Teutooni wrote:Really now, is there any need for more ranks?

There really isn't, besides e-peen. It would just encourage more smurfing because the ones that reach it would have impossibly hard teamgames due to time-based balance.

Would it be easy to reduce the weight of the differences between higher ranks, like bring the current vets weight to 5,5 and the new hc vet rank be 6?

And what account has the most time on it? I know many people who probably have the 3k h altogether, but not sure about how many have it all on the same acc.

Regret wrote:

Teutooni wrote:Really now, is there any need for more ranks?

There really isn't, besides e-peen. It would just encourage more smurfing because the ones that reach it would have impossibly hard teamgames due to time-based balance.

thats a flaw with autobalancing, not the concept of further ranks

if there is going to be extra ranks after veteran then they shouldn't make any difference in the balance, they should just be for looks only. because anyone who is veteran isnt exactly going to get any better.

Warrior wrote:if there is going to be extra ranks after veteran then they shouldn't make any difference in the balance, they should just be for looks only. because anyone who is veteran isnt exactly going to get any better.

I agree.

Is there no way of reporting game stats to the server?

For instance, things that could be indicative of skill regardless of the mod/games/WhateverSmothCallsGundamThisWeek, like whether they were on a winning team? Whether they continued to play until the game ended? Total number of games rather than number of minutes?

I'm guessing I can leave my computer running over vacation and come back with a bajillion minutes... tbh the only way I'm ever going to rank up.

Or how about the number of times they committed friendly fire on an ally's starting unit, causing it to lose more than 75% of its starting health? This would not necessarily need to be all at once, it could be a few nuke near-misses with opportunities to heal in-between and still qualify.

The lobby could still use the same ranking system, but block further rank progression of abusive traits are demonstrated, like spending a ridiculous amount of minutes in a small number of games. Or, when you mouseover another player's name, it would show you their stats.

And then in each mod's descriptor you could indicate whether these sorts of statistics should be reported for that mod. For instance, a mod which frequenly involves tons of friendly fire could disable that type of reporting.

Open to abuse, yes, but not as much as the current system. These are the sorts of changes that, I think, would convince people that the engine was still making big noticeable improvements, rather than just under-the-hood things that nobody can take advantage of until someone builds a mod around it... and even then it's like how great DirectX 10 was compared to 9.

3000 and 10000 hours ftw. remember, no one's ingame minutes are ever going to go down or reset to zero. since they are only going to grow, it doesn't make sense to put small intrevals.

Caydr wrote:Is there no way of reporting game stats to the server?

like whether they were on a winning team? Whether they continued to play until the game ended? Total number of games rather than number of minutes?

huge can of worms here thats been discussed ad-nauseum in older threads.

if anyone wants they can up their rank by logging two accounts in to a game and leaving them running - this has always been the case. if someone cares SO MUCH about their rank to do this, let them. i think its more interesting to use as a metric for how much of my life has been wasted on spring!

If you are still able to gather gametime by just being afk and speccing then i see no reason for a new rank.

Gertkane wrote:If you are still able to gather gametime by just being afk and speccing then i see no reason for a new rank.

I agree. Spec time also shouldn't count towards "Ingame" time.

I think it should but not at a 1-1 ratio.
Every minute of speccing should be translated to 1/5 minute of gametime.

hunterw wrote:i think its more interesting to use as a metric for how much of my life has been wasted on spring!

the only thing truly worth ranking

1000: silver star
2000: gold star
3000: bronze cross
4000: silver cross
5000: gold cross
(cross is something like this: X)

I had a system in the original AFLobby using rank images provided by 1557 clan, allowing me plenty of ranks, with 4 or 5 individual special ranks on top.

First rank would be given a vertical bronze bar.

Second rank would be the vertical bronze bar with a single horizontal bar branching off to the right.

Third rank would be above but with a second larger bar above it branching to the right, all the way until the length of the vertical bar had horizontal bars (5th rank). At this point it would start over but in silver, than in gold.

I think spectating is as valuable as playing, but server could also track singlplayer, replay and spectating time to seperate sum and reduce it if it's more than the actual playtime.

I predict that after 30 years there will be multiple players with over 10000 hours of gametime but unitl that let's go with these ranks:

1k
2k
3k
4k
5k
6k
7k
8k
9k
10k