Spring RTS Engine

You are wrong on that iron king.

if visuals were 50% of what gamers care about we'd all be playing rise of the robots.....

Ok, now that I have time to type something.

IVORY_KING, you have no idea what you are talking about. FIRST and foremost games and mods in spring are mostly 3do which is NOT modern at all. Many mod makers are s3oing their units as you dismiss the graphical appeal of spring. Custom explosions are just staring their use and frankly I like the reflections of spring over that crap bloom that supcom uses. Don't get me started on C&C 3's method of bloom.

In all honesty my uv maps are better then the dawn of war ones and the ones in generals. I have more detail on a per unit basis and when they are all uvmapped it will be impressive. IF I was a whole team it would already be done but I AM NOT. I AM NOT GETTING PAID for this.

I am but one person of MANY people in spring doing a mod. You have not seen 1/10 of springs graphical potential yet.

Uhh, a better website is the big thing... first impressions are important


Get the website fixed and spring will finally look OK. It looks like garbage. The actual game is actually quite alright :)

Even when tobi, the desync slayer, wins the great war against spring desyncs I don't think this community is ready for a mass influx of of new players.

Moderation could be problem as has been cited before; simple obligatory requirements such as the FAQ and Wiki are in very poor shape; the ingame GUI has yet to be completely formalized; Linux support isn't all the way there (almost); installation of mods and maps needs better implementation for novice users; and the popularizing of non-TA/copyright mods such EE is lacking, thus creating the possibility of legal problems if spring were ever to become high profile.

One thing I recommend, and I think is very possible to solve in short term (relatively speaking), is the documentation problem. In a community effort, not a single dev as that is too much of a workload, an organized revision of the Wiki and FAQ might be effective. Yet you never know, that could be just crazy talk

I've got the Wiki on board, and may be able to get it all sorted out in time.

I don't think advertizement would be intelligent by any stretch until NO OTA content is packaged with spring..

LathanStanley wrote:I don't think advertizement would be intelligent by any stretch until NO OTA content is packaged with spring..

agrees... i think this is allready like poking a sleeping bear with stick

LathanStanley wrote:I don't think advertizement would be intelligent by any stretch until NO OTA content is packaged with spring..

uhh, have you not seen the download page lately?

I doubt it, spring is a major player in making sure Atari's TA rights are actually worth something.

IMO the biggest thing missing to really sell a large scale advertizement push is a decent gameplay video tutorial/ingame tooltips. Speaking from experiance, it's really a nightmare trying to teach someone who's never played OTA how to work spring. I've had lots of people interested in what spring has to offer, a free game with gameplay argueably on par with any current commerical RTS... but many of them have just given up in frustration with trying to figure out the interface. Things like how self D and dgun only really being usable with a hot key that isn't listed anywhere during play make the game a nightmare to try to figure out, and if your alt tab is broken, as it is for many spring player, it really isn't plausible to figure things out with the wiki while playing. You'd have to memorize the whole thing before you started up the game...

Ivory_king: Most spring mods still use OTA models. How can you argue that spring is "graphically passing it's prime" when it's still primarily using models more then 10 years old? Spring still really hasn't even started to touch it's graphical potential, and it's graphics aren't static, new devs will continuously come in every now and then and add some new graphical feature or option. Spring won't really ever pass it's prime graphically, it will just sort of always be a reasonable bit behind the top tier. The fact that spring looks graphically passible at all right now is astonishing considering how old some of the content is...

Lathan & KDR:

It would be fun to adress that as an arguement... but both of you just spouted opinion with absolutly no actual evidence or argumentitive defence... IMO it's not really an issue relevent to this topic anyways. Why does some random guy looking for a high quality free game to play care what kind of modding features there are compared to a 10 year old engine? On the other side, for the hardcore designers and modders out there the limitations of the current spring engine are quite restricting, hence the push behind the command engine project...

There is no legal threat to fear. If Atari ever sent a "omg you're using our intellectual property please suicide immediatly" letter, which I'm 98.7% sure they will never do, then it's no big deal, we've got not one, but several fully developped and playable high quality mod ready to replace the TA content.

Oh and I agree fully about the lack of ingame help tips. Very often, even seasoned player ask for a feature only to be answered it's already here, just well hidden under a secret key combination. This is normally the place where I link to my Automatic Tips Dispenser idea.

Also, to attract a large crowd, having single player would be a must. I know there's a single player battleroom, but it's not shipped with the default installer. I know theorically there can be LUA scripted mission, but I've yet to see one.

A tutorial could be made through Lua?

Tell the player to build some buildings, and spawn some peewees to make the player use dgun.

Then spawn some defense buildings and tell the player to destroy them through built units.

Isnt this relativly easy to make?

*memo to myself, learn lua, modeling, texturing scripting....what?*

UF staff are putting togeather a propper nubs guide to spring, sit tight :)

we currently have a video and a tutorial on stuff, however if someone makes a program that simply works out what file you dropped on an exe (by use of unitsync) then copies it to the apropriate directory it would be much apriciated.

also, considering this project is based in sweeden

how on earth do you think anyone is going to shut it down,????

seriously

http://www.thepiratebay.org

SWEEDEN..

the piracy capital of the world!!!!!!

and your woried about some fan stuff being targeted.... seriously.

and EVEN IF they did try it would cost them SO MUCH it wouldnt be worth it they would make a loss trying to sue for damages for something thay they probly make 20 quid a year out of, and you would just take the ta content out straight away i asume, and they would most likely stop there.

1v0ry_k1ng wrote:spring is passing its prime graphically, every year its visuals get less impressive and visuals are what about 50% of gamers care about.

Spring never really was "in its prime" for graphics, afterall its just an engine. As far as free open source games goes, there really isnt anything that compares, though its a bit different when you start to compare a free open-source game against crap that costs $50.00 or more.

If graphics is even as high as 50% of the gaming experiance, do you feel people would run out and buy 3d solitare for windows? Solitare is still solitare, and despite nearly 15 years of development, it still sucks.

Dragon45 wrote:Uhh, a better website is the big thing... first impressions are important


Get the website fixed and spring will finally look OK. It looks like garbage. The actual game is actually quite alright :)

Not only the website, but the lobby which looks like it was designed in the 1980s.

iamacup wrote:
SWEEDEN..

Cuppy makes a very good point.

zwzsg wrote:I know theorically there can be LUA scripted mission, but I've yet to see one.

There are at least three LUA missions for NOTA. Convoy Rescue, Island Defence and Lake Battle.

SwiftSpear please post more often again, you are a fountain of rational discourse

tombom wrote:SwiftSpear please post more often again, you are a fountain of rational discourse

Seriously, I wish he was here more often, it is difficult going it alone.