The Spring Roadmap (near term)

[Tim Blokdijk]

The ODT file is the source file (it's like a Microsoft doc) you can edit it with Abiword, IBM Workplace Documents, KWord, NeoOffice 1.2 Writer, OpenOffice.org Writer, StarOffice 8 Writer and Writely a web-based word processor (acquired by Google). More info on the Open Document Format
I use this format as it's the standard cross-platform format so both Windows and Linux users can edit it.

Anyway, everybody is free to edit it. (like Zenka did)

The disadvantage of a wiki based roadmap is the possibility of a edit war, if that would happen all (important) contributors would simply ignore the roadmap and move on to do more important things. (including me)

Gnome, new GUI and more (OTA) features.
Alright, but it needs to go back to the mailinglist as the devs need to code it.

PauloMorfeo, I have a few remarks on your feedback I will get back to that later.

[AF]

For metal, I think a slider in the lobby would be useful which would act as a multiplier for the metal values ingame, that way we can increase or decrease the metal on a map before we start spring..

[SeanHeron]

Neat idea with the roadmap :) . It´s good for everybody to see what the next goal is. While I agree whith Gnome that the GUI is important, I think getting Spring to run cross platform (meaning fixed Sync and crossplatform Lobby) is of higher priority. Not that I´m going to be doing any of it anyway, so I guess I don´t need to open my mouth to widely....

[Argh]

You don't even mention NanoBlobs, which is entirely free of OTA content, sans sounds, and demonstrates a gameplay model that is actually differentiated substantially from OTA, integrated with NTAI's development work, and the very first all-S3O mod

I've gone off in various angry ways about 10 times here, but I guess I'm just going to keep it short.

My response is that this Roadmap is very poorly conceived.

The conservative, boring games that are available right now are not the future- we are not going to see a break-out hit while options are limited and the tools that allow modders to promote themselves are so terrible- a one-liner on Spring's front page, no pictures, and a Forum thread are just not cutting it.

Where's Lobby support for new mod releases, with pretty graphics, ala Steam? Oh, but wait- since Spring's Open Source we could even have it randomize which mods show up on a list, so that no one mod is ever permanently favored, and have a "new release" area that shows new releases only, so that new mods have a serious chance to gain audience share.

Where is a "more MODS" button, that can take users to FU and get new mods?

Why should I support a Roadmap that doesn't understand that if you do not support new modders, then you will not see the growth in skillsets and talent you need to see really spectacular final products?

Oh, but wait... we have WD, and the other mods that are still vaporware, but have gotten mentioned in the Roadmap... they'll save us

was the flame here really nessicary? -moderator

[patmo98]

Where is a "more MODS" button, that can take users to FU and get new mods?

You can find it in the lobby.

I like editing topics more then locking them -mod

[Argh]

And here, for those of you who think I'm just being a truculant troll, is a good example of what Spring should be doing, if it wants to take off and grow audience share: Lancer's Reactor.

This is the modding community I was in before I came here. Those guys knew how to promote mods, allow modders to promote their projects, and support growing audience share. It's actually much less cool than it was at the heyday, which should also tell you something- in its heyday, when mods were being released daily, I could release the weirdest, strangest mod ever... and still expect to see 500 downloads. I have had my various mods for that game engine downloaded over 10,000 times- and I was releasing off-beat mods that radically altered gameplay, technology projects and demos, and other things of that nature, just like here. Only here, I am lucky if 100 people download a new release, even when it's as polished and well-designed as NanoBlobs is. That tells me that something is broken.

Get a clue. Spring's biggest problem, and most horrible, self-inflicted curse, is that it is built around a core audience that is small and conservative. Want proof? Look at the response to E&E, which is really just another OTA clone. In the Freelancer world, where I came from, it'd be just another ho-hum story, not a big deal.

This is not a successful model, folks!

To break that model, the front end of this website needs to become a news portal that is properly focused on the fun, cool games and ancillary software releases that improve gameplay (GroupAIs and Skirmish AIs) and not devote 90% of the page-space to the game engine itself. While the game engine is very sexy- which is why I, and other talented people, are here in the first place- making it the center of attention is a strategic mistake. Mods are, and always should be, the center of attention. 95% of the potential audience is interested in playing cool games, not in how it all works. Make modders the focus, give modders better self-promotion tools, and modders will thrive. If modders thrive, then big projects, like the Free Worlds mod for Freelancer, will become forces driving audience share upwards.

Ignore this basic reality, and hope that audiences will just arrive ad-hoc... and we're just going to stagnate.

And for the record, I should have stated, "where is a working More Mods button". Unlike the "More Maps" button, it does not bring up a browser, and for people like me, who have switched over to FireFox and disabled a lot of the security holes in IE, the "More Mods" button simply takes me to a blank page.

[el_muchacho]

I'd say one of the reasons why this is this way is, because the main engine developers don't want the Spring engine to be too open to other kinds of gameplay. The Spring engine has evolved around a TA style gameplay (plus a few variations) and will continue to polish it for a while because it is the one the Spring community likes most. You can call this conservatism if you want. Now the engine is sufficiently open to make an excellent Middle Earth mod if you want (I would love something like that), but the gameplay will be still close to the TA one.
Experience shows that when one gives complete freedom to modders, they quickly start to ask for more and more new features to implement their own gameplay, which gets further away from the philosophy of the Spring engine and risks to degrade its performance/architecture. I think it's just not possible to have one mod/week, let alone one/day in the Spring community.

The engine developers have enough work to make it evolve slowly but safely, adding regularly new features without breaking too many things on the way, to afford being bothered by too many requests at a time.
Another reason is, the more mods being played, the more broken the community becomes. I prefer to have 150 persons playing 2/3 very good mods at a time in the lobby than 150 persons playing 25 different mods. It's just not practical. And I don't believe the community would explode so much that we get 1500 players in the lobby because of the modding facility.

[Argh]

Now the engine is sufficiently open to make an excellent Middle Earth mod if you want

No, it's not. Otherwise, I'd consider building one. I don't have the engine features I consider necessary yet, though, and I'd really like to see a graphical animation preview available for S3O / BOS in UpSpring before committing the time/mental energy necessary to make that much content.

Maybe you just don't know what it takes to develop a mod. Look, NanoBlobs took me almost 3 months, of not sleeping very frequently, in between working to pay the bills and generally not having a life. That's what it takes, right now, to develop S3O-based mods. It's hard work and the tools available are still pretty primitive.

To put it into perspective, I think the time investment right now to get a new model with a truely new animation into Spring is about the same time it takes to make a fully-rigged HL2 model It's not a good situation, and until the tools for developing content improve, it's not likely to get a lot better.

That's what it costs, at least for me, to bring you folks really beautiful content.

You want me to invest a year of my time to deliver you the most kick-ass Middle Earth RTS ever? I could do it. I could rock your world.

But I am not going to do it if it's not going to be what I want it to be. And I am not going to do it, if at the end of the project, after months of gradually making content, snaring and seducing artists, scriptors, and other talent to bring together enough sheer talent to make it happen... I get a fricking ONE LINE NOTE on the main website, which takes people, if they notice and so incline, to a Forum post.

No sir, I am not going to do that.

I will do it, but only if on release, I have front-page coverage with some sort of picture to hook people, an announcement on the Daily News posted in the Lobby, etc. I am a game designer, not just some twink. If all I cared about was the "perfect game of OTA", then I'd just be a twink, ok? But I am delivering free games because I want an audience. Don't deliver the audience... and I am not making free games for your game engine.

The release of NanoBlobs was quite instructive. I'd start up games in the Lobby, and people would ask, "What's NanoBlobs?", which means that they aren't even looking at the Spring site's front-end any more, because it's mainly static, and contains little of immediate interest to a gamer, especially one who has already downloaded the game engine.

This is not how things should work.

I think it's just not possible to have one mod/week, let alone one/day in the Spring community.

That's not a supportable answer, based on the facts. Freelancer is a closed-source game whose developers, like Cavedog, tried to mainly ignore modders.

Lancer's Reactor was the result of pure hard work and sheer willpower from hundreds of talented people, from model-format hackers to artists to script developers. In short, you're wrong- Freelancer has a large and still-vibrant online-play community, using a wild variety of mods. OK, it's not as large as it used to be, etc.- the engine's looking pretty old now, and X3 drew away the audience to a large degree. However, it's still pretty impressive, and nobody there whines about "fragmentation"- instead, everybody's happy with the sheer variety available.

Another reason is, the more mods being played, the more broken the community becomes. I prefer to have 150 persons playing 2/3 very good mods at a time in the lobby than 150 persons playing 25 different mods.

This is a recipe for stagnation. Basically, you're telling me, and every other person who has the sheer talent, work ethic and time to build mods for people like you... that I should beg the existing mod developers for a spot on their bandwagon, because we don't want to "fracture the community".

I'll be nice, and just say, no way. And I believe that Caydr, Smoth, FLOZi and the others, while they might feel that I'm putting it more strongly than they would... am basically saying it for everybody.

Look, there would not have been a Counter-Strike if VaLve had decided to steer all modders towards improving Half-Life Deathmatch, ok? That's a nonsense argument. You get great games when you deliberately allow more game designs. With VaLve, they did so by releasing map editors and a modding SDK, that allowed people to build whole new game designs in C++ running under the aegis of the HL.EXE. With Spring, if I want to go that far, I'm in the position of having to release a new version of Spring, basically. Instead of going either route, I think that mods should probably have a list of Spring code functions that they call as dependencies, so that mods that don't need the 1001 features that will eventually get included don't load them into memory- they just load the core functions plus the sections they actually need to support their gameplay.

Can we do that, right this minute? No. Before getting there, Spring's code needs to be unentangled and rationalized in a very large number of places, so that code isn't so interdependent. Do I think it's possible to get there? Yes, I do.

[Tobi]

argh, I've basically only two things to say on this (but explanation follows)
1) The website isn't even covered by the roadmap, as Tim pointed out in his OP.
2) It's nice you want so much tools and features in the engine but they have to be developed and maintained. And what does the project lack at the moment? indeed, sufficient developers

IMHO, it's a bad choice to dedicate all our developing time on mods editors and 3d editors and texturers instead of on the engine itself. The engine needs A LOT OF LOVE and before I, personally, start even thinking about making editors, several years will have passed (provided I keep developing spring at this rate).

In any case, making various editors is not something for a near term roadmap (4-5 months as Tim pointed out). You'll realize that when you take a look at an early draft of my long term roadmap for the spring engine, for which I estimated the time it takes to implement on approx. a year (but heavily depending on the number of devs obviously), and that roadmap doesn't go any further then an internal restructuring of the code!

I'd say one of the reasons why this is this way is, because the main engine developers don't want the Spring engine to be too open to other kinds of gameplay.

I don't think this is true either. I'd happily make spring suitable for other types of games but it will be appended to the end of my todo list. So if you guys are lucky enough that I continue contributing for the next decade, then I might start on this kind of features after that. I'm pretty sure this applies to most other currently active developers too.

[SwiftSpear]

From my prespective, working with modders, there is several dozen engine side things that need to be fixed or modified to make real mods that break out of the TA cookie cutter.

There's a fair few workarounds to many of the problems, but even after the work arounds the vast majority of crap you just knindof think up remains impossible or unworkable on the spring engine. Modders need a much closer point of contact to the acctual engine workings if they ever are going to get the abilities that in the end we really want.

[Tim Blokdijk]

Well, it is a bit confronting but thanks for the input Argh.

I don't have the time to give an in depth response now (have to go to family for Easter) but I'm here to get "there".

[jcnossen]

argh is right about one thing though: mod news should get more space than just a couple of lines on the news page.

but the comparison with freelancer is unfair. Freelancers dev team worked for a few years on that game before anyone started modding it. While developing, they didn't have to keep compatibility with mods, they could break their own mod if that was needed for a big improvement in the engine itself.
Those are things we can't do, we can't break mods for big improvements in the code, we can only make things modulair and extend the functionality.
I know you were talking more about mods, but still, you have to see things in perspective. On the other hand I have a feeling you're just putting your energy in posting these rants every now and then because you can't (yet) use it in modding spring because of inflexibility

[Nemo]

*applauds Argh*

I realise how much work he's suggesting, but man...its so true. Nearly every mod is based around the limitations of the OTA Engine or the limitations of that engine which were carried over into Spring.

But for now I'd settle with being able to remove the silly green nanospray.

[Argh]

Sorry for being an arse, Tim. You didn't deserve the butt-hand comment, and I am glad you took it with reasonably good cheer.

Zaphod is right, my rants are mainly me venting, although my comments about mod promotion are entirely serious- I think it's counter-productive to build a fancy, ultra-cool Open Source game engine, and then not give the people who show up and use it a fair way to compete with existing, established mods. The Lancer's Reactor people totally understood that modders were the chief draw, and made their site around us. I'm not asking for somebody to regularly edit news submissions, etc.- I think that the current, self-serve model has thus far worked very well (I kind've expected that to get abused, but it appears that we just don't have enough bad apples here to spoil the punch... yet). But pictures and a lot more room to actually describe what our mods are about would be nice.

I have been chomping at the bit to build things that aren't yet practical, and NanoBlobs is just the warmup. I am fairly constrained by the engine in various important ways, but so long as I'm willing to build near-future or futuristic games, I can do what I want to. The Middle Earth thing set me off, though- it's exactly the sort've thing I cannot do justice to yet. To make it work, I need controllable particle effects (bloodsprays, magic FX, etc.) and a better way to build content- I don't want to do a mod involving guys with swords vs. orcs with axes, and not have fancy death animations, attack animations, etc.

Developing detailed animations for S3O is even more painful than building them for 3DO, which was nasty enough. Even a parser that simply interpreted a chunk of BOS and showed me animations running in UpSpring without having to fire up Spring would be a big improvement to where we are now, let alone something allowing me to set positions, hit a button, and have any object moved/rotated spit out a new script section with "now" set up, ready for me to put into an animation sequence- the dream behind Servo, that was never quite realised (sad that that program was almost useful, but so bug-ridden).

As for Freelancer... that was in development for nearly five years. From what we modders eventually discovered, their project was on the brink of cancellation twice... and they rebuilt a great deal of their content at least once, and I personally think three times (I became something of a development archeologist while working with that game).

And the main reason I quit modding Freelancer and came to Spring, after becoming one of the resident experts there, was that I was building huge projects, with tens of thousands of lines of script code, dozens of models, skins, etc., and was just generally getting tired out, after more than a year of solid slogging.

That, and there were a number of file formats we never really cracked into- the particle FX system, some of the sound system, and a few important areas of the 3D model format, having to do with hitboxes and animations. While we could build new ships and space stations, new asteroids and new guns and cockpits for ships, new sounds and other things, there were certain limitations that made it very difficult to make a mod entirely believable, or really perfect. Being a game designer, I am just fine with settling, or slight-of-hand approaches to problems- after all, players don't care how things work so long as they do, and look right- there were a number of problems in making certain things work... and I got super-tired of working mainly on games involving Outer Space of a certain, very limited kind- Freelancer was a very closed game design, despite the relative freedom of content creation.

Spring has many of the same problems right now, due to the way it was coded for XTA, which I imagine will eventually get sorted out. Some of these things are already getting fixed in the next version, which I am very eagerly awaiting, all ranting aside.


[edit]

And, if we're talking 6 months to clean up and seperate the sourcecode out before new features can be put in, but having the ability to procede relatively quickly with new feature areas afterwards... I'm just fine with that. I plan fairly long-term, when I get into a new engine, and with Spring... it has so much more potential if it's done right that it'd be worth waiting for. I can build lower-complexity gameplay demos for fun and to demonstrate concepts in the meantime.

[/edit]

Oh yeah, and I just sent email to one of the developers I worked with on Freelancer on issues of 3D hitboxes and file conversions. He's really quite nice(unlike me, lol), and I hope he gives this stuff a looksee and joins us here- he might be what you guys need for certain issues, like un-tangling 3DO from certain areas of the source, and making hitboxes practical.

I would offer to develop myself, but I just don't think there are a lot've areas I could contribute to that would be worthwhile. I am non-lazy, but I have zero C++ experience, and I am really terrible at math. While I can script in BOS ok, and BOS is pretty much C, so I am familiar with the basic concepts, I'd probably be more useless than useful, and utterly useless for anything involving serious math. Otherwise, I'd help on that end- reading through the source for the weapons was very instructive. However, when I got into the sections about the 3DO format, I got lost very quickly

[Tim Blokdijk]

Sorry people, Been Busy®
I had no time left to continue this discussion last week.

Anyway first things first, in reply to PauloMorfeo:
For hundreds of people to play Spring a lobby is needed I don't know if you mean that with a match making service?

As for the Linux support I think it's best not to limit the documentation to only a few distributions.
And Gentoo and Debian are far from "somewhat out of community"
The distributions will probably include a Spring version in there repository's.
That would help people to have easy access to Spring but for them to realy join in they would need the latest version.
For that we need to make documentation.
I would say you/we start with the general Linux SetupGuide and add instructions for specific distributions if the general Linux install won't work.

For the drivers it's good to know what the versions are (of the binary drivers Nvidia and ATI make) that are working with Spring. (For Linux mainly as for Windows it's just "use the latest drivers".)
And for cards, some cards won't support a feature needed by Spring so identifying them can help out with questions.
Having requirements like DirectX 8.1 or OpenGL 1.2 can help out indeed.

And about the Community Guidelines, it realy helps to spell things out.
Mainly because we need community members to tell others to keep things friendly.
I know that this will lead to a large amount of group pressure that can backfire (like with Azu*) but I consider that preferable to no correction from the community.

* Yea about Azu and some other people that start of on the wrong footing.
(Talking in general here not in reply to PauloMorfeo)
If your new and if 10 people burn you down for something stupid you won't feel that happy any more.
I know that can be hard if someone realy gets on your nerves but give them a chance to blend in after an initial f*ck up.
If they can't blend in they will drop out real soon anyway.

Running out of time here, Argh you will have to wait some longer.

[AF]

Worse is other new people see what happened and think it'll happen to them.

Although from what i saw of Azu he did seem a little dirty mouthed, not that the burners werent clean as a whistle either.

[PauloMorfeo]

...
For hundreds of people to play Spring a lobby is needed I don't know if you mean that with a match making service?
...

I mean that there is a server running with it's domain name registered (so it is accessible from the Internet, obviously) and a client for that server.

I said that because the roadmap didn't left clear if it was intended to suport that «match making» service or not. The game is actually playable without it, although very workfull.

[Tobi]

Don't we already have taspringmaster.clan-sy.com for that? Or do I not understand it?

[PauloMorfeo]

Don't we already have taspringmaster.clan-sy.com for that? Or do I not understand it?

You mean the domain name? There are other things as well. There must exist the phisical server (the hardware), the software server, and, at least, one maintainer that will restart the server when it fails and et cetera and people to fix some bugs that may arise or create some feature to protect the server from possible abuses and Denial of Service attacks.

I am just making sure that the project oficially has that, also, as an objective.

[Tim Blokdijk]

Yhea, your right.
The servers that Betalord and Fnordia manage should be included in some way.
I know that Fnordia pay's a large bill each month to have this all up.
FileUniverse is taking a large hit to..