Spring RTS Engine

Is there any chance that you can release an 'update from RC3' file/installer with RC4? It would be nice to not have to download 330 MB worth of P.U.R.E. every week or so, if the changes are only on the mod and world builder side, not maps or spring engine version.

Is it just me, or PURE lags terribly when there are 10+ units at each front (east, north, south)?

And the mission Aftershock is WAY too easy. The AI does not even built a landfactory (or whatever)...

Same with the mission ninth circle. WAY too easy. Just build a couple of heavy troopers and the AI is finished.

Speaking of heavy troopers:
They are terribly unbalanced. They can be built early, and they strafe.
Just a squad of heavy troopers and the opponent is dead (not humans mind you).

The Ultramegacannon (what is it again?) Is also a balance issue. Suddenly out of nowhere you see this player shooting blue glowing plasma balls at you. Increase the build time and also increase the hitpoints...

LOL and can you make a variant of you "brief-o-matic" to every single mission, so to give a proper briefing. And the map "GPL" does not include any buildings and fog for some reason, even worse, is that the UI is not present!

Don't balance against bots. Spam a few AA turrets and tanks and heavy troopers die.

The bug with heavy troopers is that they sometimes become untargetable by target land only units when the troopers are on the ground. This only happened as they landed in my base and it only happened with 1 squad.

Also, is it possible to make the help'o'matic minimisable? It usually takes up vital space on my 1280X1024 resolution screen but you really need it for building identification.

I tried this at work and decided I would make a few points, all once again GUI and all related to points other people not me have raised (just as I had predicted).

Firstly the GUI is simply too large.

Now I know you like your rigid non freeform GUIs that never change but even that is no excuse, you are using too much screen real estate, and the vast majority of what your using is being wasted and your not even displaying anything in it.

I took a screenshot and measured an effective playing area of 550x520px at 1024x768, the default screen resolution most end users will be playing at. What's more your GUI ahs been programmed to get larger as the screen size rises so this effective playing area remains constant.

There's also masses of wasted space. Large gaps that make no sense that are too small to be of real use to the user. Even areas of the UI that are unnecessary!

Look at helpomatic and you'll notice the text box is never full of text there is always ~100px of empty space underneath the end of the text or more. It even shows when nothing is selected or hovered over!

To make the point here are two images of the default GUI complete with critique and suggestions for improvement.


Another note that the initial window that pops up with info on overmind and resistance, the yellow text is blurry with it being small.





Nonetheless helpomatic could be much more concise with simple rewording:

When invading planets, the overmind drops a commander to scout and establish base operations. Using advanced internal AI the commander is capable of independent action in extension of the overmind.

A fast, tough, well armed vehicle, exercise caution when approached.

Which is less than half the size of your text.

Agree on the wasted space and help-O-matic text, disagree on the text in buttons, and am torn on the issue of the top bar. In fact, the lack of text-on-buttons is an obvious problem - look at the Help-O-matic buttons. Text is important, I speak English, not Pictogram.

The fact is that there isn't much argh can do with the top bar - I mean, his nice little resource-bar box is cool, and he'd have to break it up to put the resource bar back up at the top. Alternately, the proximity between the command buttons and the build buttons (although a splitting would be nice) is tactically handy, since all the stuff you can tell a unit to do is in the same place.

Either way, the help-O-matic needs a little work. There's too much flavour text in there. That crushes out useful information (like info on firepower and range), forces you to use a tiny font (that is barely legible at 1024 and below), and takes up too much space. I know you want to include the flavour text, but the help-O-matic box really isn't a good place for more than a one-sentance blurb.

http://wolfegames.com/PURE/OvermindGuide.htm

Notice how much text there is on that page, and how little information - it's crammed with tasty flavour text, but very little of it is directly useful. I'd rather see approximate numeric "firepower" "range" and "speed" stats right up top, even if you just used words like "range: short" "long" "extreme" or "speed:fast" "moderate" "slow" "barely mobile" "immobile" etc.

With a more terse approach, you could make them much more legible and compact.

Alternately, you could make the help-O-matic much larger if you made it clear to the player that you really shouldn't be trying to play with this thing left on. Do you still have to hit F11 to get it back after you hide the thing? You could just make the damned thing take the whole right half of the screen by blowing it up a bit - but either way, less flavour, more info.

Perhaps with a smaller help-o-matic, he could move the map over to the top-right corner, and flatten the command/action buttons into a single-wide instead of triple-wide (probably leave build-buttons at double-wide - they're not always present anyways).

Players have a reasonably sized playing area once they disable the Help-o-Matic. The help-o-matic doesn't have information that's useful to playing. Stats, relative speed, relative range etc.. should be added. People shouldn't be playing with it open anyway because it just takes up so much space. Flavour text good, it's just flavour isn't needed ingame.

The wasted space below the orders panel can't be helped because some factories use the whole area with their large build lists.

Satriks fork of IceUI has an auto minimap resizing feature. I think something like that should be added as a widget.

The resource bar is too big and lacks information. The problem is instead of showing how much you're trying to spend/store it shows you how much you are actually spending/storing. This isn't as useful because if you're excessing or stalling your income is displayed as 0. How are you to know how bad a stall is if it's always displayed as 0? If M is -0.2 and P is -1000 there's no way to quickly decide what to build. The default income/outcome/net gain system is much more useful, also it's much smaller. Although the PURE bar is much better looking and doesn't take up that much room.

When mousing over things they show up on the helpomatic but the bottom tool tip says ancient metal processor and does not change.

Icons AND text may be a better compromise. If you look at the sims they saved masses on translation costs by using pictograms and icons in place of text and keeping as much of their UI non language based as possible. The added benefit of this is that the end user doesn't have to read the text, if the picture is good enough it becomes purely instinctive and the time needed to find and learn the button drops to near zero.

Let me explain things for those of you who completely missed the obvious. In particular, AF.

First of all you posted a 1024x768 screenshot, which fails. Using modern hardware, we can pretty much rely on 1280x1024. I myself play at either 1600x1200 or 2048x1536 depending on whether my eyes can handle a 75hz refresh rate at the highest res (75 and below I can actually see the refresh) or not. But regardless, lets stick with 1024x768 regardless of how idiotic it is.

Help-o-matic is designed for FIRST or SECOND time users and helps with the immersion factor of the game. Much like the CA popups when you build shit. After your second or even your first game, they get turned off (duh, doesn't take a damn genius really).

Bottom menu. Spring doesn't allow for much to be done with the text on the left side. If you paid attention you would realize that the guipanel is simply and image overlay and the text in the box at the bottom left does not wrap and never has, which is why that space is there (because if the unit has a long description, it wouldn't look so hot getting covered up by the guipanel now would it?).

Help-o-matic is JUST AN IMAGE you dufus' (plural). How did you miss that little fact? Every single panel is just an image that gets changed depending on what you have your mouse cursor hovering over.

Wasted space above the buildbar? Have we completely forgotten that the minimap can be resized? Seriously. If you were at a res that made sense then you would realize that there is a LOT of space between the buildbar and the minimap. Stop trying to play on your mom's dell that runs BA jsut fine and get a halfway decent machine.

Now the solution to all your bitching and whining (yes AF I am looking at you, because you HAVE to be right no matter how retarded the argument nor how much of a fool you make yourself out to be).

Simple. Argh do it one of several ways. Have helpomatic slide offscreen when the user's mouse is not over a helpomatic item (which means you would need to remove the "terrain" helpomatic graphic. The second option (and maybe should be integrated with the first) would be that you would have is so that that big red button on helpomatic causes it to slide offscreen and stay there unless something else is clicked (maybe add a helpomatic button to the guipanel? Bottom right maybe?).

Viola. Problem solved. AF take a screenshot at 1600x1200 and make your little boxes on that. Or even 1280x1024 (cause if you aren't playing you vid games at at least this res, then you fail. Period).

People say I am aggressive towards players. Yes I am when those people PRETENDING to be players who have a known vendetta of sorts vs maker and come up with the stupidest shit to whine about, and then make wide sweeping statements which are biased towards faulty data... You bet your ass I'm aggressive towards those people, because blatantly stupid shit pisses me off.

Peet wrote:Nobody uses 1024x768, definitely.

Posted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 4:13 pm

Forboding Angel wrote:Help-o-matic is designed for FIRST or SECOND time users and helps with the immersion factor of the game.

Well unfortunately that's not entirely correct. When you disable it the tooltip gets fucked up too and so I can't see the unit's names, costs and so on which just sucks. That really should be something seperate...

I also really hate the way this Help-O-Matic works right now. It really just should become visible when you hover over the buildmenu. I always turn it off (and I'm playing at 1280x1024) because it takes away lots of precious sight on the map (I really hate having "useless" UI stuff floating around in a game and just a tiny spot where the actual game takes place)...

So please don't connect the tooltip with that Help-O-Matic "blinds" and see if you can think of a way that makes it "disappear" and do it please - it's kinda useless apart from giving info on what you may want to build...

Oh and apart from that I support pretty much everything AF said recently concerning the UI...

Foreboding I dont have a vendetta against argh otherwise I would only have included screen shot number 1 rather than adding suggestions.

But there is logic in my madness:

Forboding Angel wrote:Let me explain things for those of you who completely missed the obvious. In particular, AF.

First of all you posted a 1024x768 screenshot, which fails. Using modern hardware, we can pretty much rely on 1280x1024. I myself play at either 1600x1200 or 2048x1536 depending on whether my eyes can handle a 75hz refresh rate at the highest res (75 and below I can actually see the refresh) or not. But regardless, lets stick with 1024x768 regardless of how idiotic it is.

Actually when PURE is installed the screen resolution is set at 1024x768 regardless of the desktops screen resolution. Thus it is the default, and most users use the default screen resolution.

The power of defaults is extraordinary!

What's more spring settings does not provide a combo box or list of alternative resolutions so most users cannot change the resolution because they have no idea what to put. We're not talking average spring user here, we're talking average internet surfer remember!

Coding Horror: The power of defaults
Engineering Windows 7: The Windows Feedback Program

From the Windows 7 team:

Help-o-matic is designed for FIRST or SECOND time users and helps with the immersion factor of the game. Much like the CA popups when you build shit. After your second or even your first game, they get turned off (duh, doesn't take a damn genius really).

I play pure at work in my lunch hour when Im not playing go, and it does not 'dissapear'. Whatsmore when I turned it off I found it was better with ti turned on so its a part of the GUI and best kept there unless you've played many many games.

Its veyr useful for when zoomed out and you don't even have to bother seeing what the little unit actually is because you see the big picture in helpomatic at the side you dotn even have to move your eyes to focus on it!

The widget menu to turn it off is somewhat voodoo magic to enw users anyway as they need to be told by existing community members about it and since they dont know it exists they dont ask how to show it.

Of course there's that googly eyes widget that tells you but this widget isn't in PURE.

Bottom menu. Spring doesn't allow for much to be done with the text on the left side. If you paid attention you would realize that the guipanel is simply and image overlay and the text in the box at the bottom left does not wrap and never has, which is why that space is there (because if the unit has a long description, it wouldn't look so hot getting covered up by the guipanel now would it?).

Oh I did realize hence why it would be absurdly easy to change it! You do know that tooltip can be hidden using lua trickery? Or that there are pure lua based implementations of it? I thought argh ahd already used one of those. Either way this tooltip doesn't actually do anything or work at all in RC3 and helpomatic does the same job only far better.

And even if your point was valid it still wouldn't invalidate my point because the tooltip is always the same size.

Help-o-matic is JUST AN IMAGE you dufus' (plural). How did you miss that little fact? Every single panel is just an image that gets changed depending on what you have your mouse cursor hovering over.

I know this which makes it even easier to implement what I said because we already know every single helpomatic entry doesn't use all the space and theres a sizeable portion of wasted space, and that in most cases the text can be made more concise anyway. If argh needs help figuring out how to do resizing which Im sure he doesnt he can ask, and there's always pagination.

Wasted space above the buildbar? Have we completely forgotten that the minimap can be resized? Seriously. If you were at a res that made sense then you would realize that there is a LOT of space between the buildbar and the minimap. Stop trying to play on your mom's dell that runs BA jsut fine and get a halfway decent machine.

Oh I get this issue running War Evolution at 160x1050with max settings =p But you shouldnt ened to resize at the start of every single game.

What's more your forgetting most people dotn know the minimap is resizable since the resize button is hidden and when it shows it just looks like a coloured box. Its called mystery meat navigation and its well documented in web design circles.

Now the solution to all your bitching and whining (yes AF I am looking at you, because you HAVE to be right no matter how retarded the argument nor how much of a fool you make yourself out to be).

Simple. Argh do it one of several ways. Have helpomatic slide offscreen when the user's mouse is not over a helpomatic item (which means you would need to remove the "terrain" helpomatic graphic.

Didnt I already say this? =s

The second option (and maybe should be integrated with the first) would be that you would have is so that that big red button on helpomatic causes it to slide offscreen and stay there unless something else is clicked (maybe add a helpomatic button to the guipanel? Bottom right maybe?).

Argh already intended this but did not implement it yet, and doesnt really address a point I made in my screenshots that end users do not know its actually usable and think its purely aesthetic. Its also again mystery meat navigation as there are no labels or cues. It could be a warning light for all they know.

Viola. Problem solved. AF take a screenshot at 1600x1200 and make your little boxes on that. Or even 1280x1024 (cause if you aren't playing you vid games at at least this res, then you fail. Period).

Please don't insult your games user base

People say I am aggressive towards players. Yes I am when those people PRETENDING to be players who have a known vendetta of sorts vs maker and come up with the stupidest shit to whine about, and then make wide sweeping statements which are biased towards faulty data... You bet your ass I'm aggressive towards those people, because blatantly stupid shit pisses me off.

I on the other hand have data to back up my points and logical arguments while offering suggestions to fix or correct the problems. Remember, I'm not the only person who has raised these points. I have no vendettas in these forums, I simply don't have the energy anymore for that, but I will give constructive criticism.

Ill have 1680x1050 diagrams in the morning, its late and Id have to setup those folder permissions to let spring make screenshots properly

This is the screen at 1280x1024 resolution:

It's not much different from the 1024x768 version.
I have a suggestion that could solve this all though: Make building buttons show in the tooltip when they are hovered over. That would solve the problem for me anyway, since other than that the help'o'matic is only useful for far out zooming and noobs as others have said. Or, make it minimisable using those buttons that are already on there.

Once the help-o-matic is removed there's plenty of space. There needs to be an obvious minimize button on it for players to use before they discover the lua menu.

The distance recognition problem is easily fixed with a well thought out icon system.

Distance recognition is not an issue because the helpomatic is such a good solution for it. Either way the helpomatic is too large and verbose and has wasted UI space that isn't being used, aswell as being far more effective than the bottom tooltip.

I would have a short description with stats in the helpomatic aswell as a verbose version that pulls out when a button is clicked. I would make helpomatic do the job of the tooltip in the bottom left corner, and then remove that tool tip and move the command buttons down wards into that space. This could as much as double the effective playing space, while keeping the static nature Argh wants.

Current Status, RC4

DONE Power / Materials much lower for Resistance, fixed Materials output for MetalMaker at 1:300.

DONE Rocket Platform damage nerfed.

DONE Put the StartBox Replacement Widget into World Builder.

DONE Fixed damage of MBT vs. GunTank.

DONE Overmind Commander will produce 1 materials, 100 Power.

WIP, BUT RELEASE READY Finish WorldBuilder editor, which is also, I should add, effectively a SDK for mods / games that want to use World Builder (yup, I've finally gotten it done).

Currently outputs the entire state of a game's Units and Features, is tested and working, with a simple UI borrowed straight from Spring (basically, it's a "commander" that just happens to be able to serve as an editing environment). I'm still working on saving paths for mobiles (so that you can put seabirds into a map, for example, and expect them to fly along the seashore), and the heightmap editor is not really up to par (yet), it's too crude to include at this time, imo, but it'll develop as I find time. I'm thinking about adding a feature that will allow you to define start positions directly in the software, and some other things like that, to make it a complete suite of editing tools, so that map-making is essentially painting and then becomes merely clicking all over the map, placing stuff. Two screenshots, and a working Lua file:


This is a screen of the editing environment.


This is me playing P.U.R.E. on the map (PURE-RiverGlade-v01.sdd) with the finished script.

Here's the script, if you're still thinking I'm promising something too good to be true and wanna put it to the test (rename WorldBuilder.lua to *.tmp first, duh).

It's remarkably easy to use this tool, frankly, and while I love World Builder's core automation tools, and would certainly use them to take out a lot of the drudgery... this is a combination approach.

First design a basic "climate" with World Builder... then use the editor to finalize. I only have the World Builder objects that are currently shipped with P.U.R.E. in the available content, but LathanStanley gave me the OK to use his Features awhile ago, so I'm going to get them in there, and a couple of things from SpikedHelmet's contribution that I didn't get around to last time, which will give us something like 80 pieces of content, maybe more. I seem to have lost my download of Lathan's other Features, though- I only have the BlackLake Swamp stuff. Anybody have a link to the "desert" stuff, etc.? And, of course, if anybody else is willing to contribute to the World Builder project, send me S3Os and textures. Oh... and if somebody would be willing to offer some time to do some true drudgery work on this, I have stuff that needs doing, but it's really boring and lengthy.

DONE Fixed stupid issue with blocking-map objects not actually being removed properly.

BUG FOUND Setting for Unit Reply Volume does nothing when tested. Will report to engine devs.

NOT DONE YET Documentation. I am hoping to have that done by Friday, it will get done before RC4 is released.

...and now lemme read through everything and see what else needs doing...

I've got a backport of AppLauncher to .NET 1.1, which is a more universally common version of the .NET platform. I also added better error reporting for any bugs. Only problem is that it can't scrape an icon out of an exe anymore, you need to give it an actual .ico file. Did you ever develop a PURE icon? If not, can I get some source .psds? I could probably whip one up for AppLauncher.

I've got a backport of AppLauncher to .NET 1.1, which is a more universally common version of the .NET platform. I also added better error reporting for any bugs. Only problem is that it can't scrape an icon out of an exe anymore, you need to give it an actual .ico file. Did you ever develop a PURE icon? If not, can I get some source .psds? I could probably whip one up for AppLauncher.

There is an ICO file in the root of the installer ("PURE_ICON.ico").

Is there any chance that you can release an 'update from RC3' file/installer with RC4? It would be nice to not have to download 330 MB worth of P.U.R.E. every week or so, if the changes are only on the mod and world builder side, not maps or spring engine version.

Until 0.77 is released, no. Engine keeps changing, bugs get fixed, etc.

About the UI...

1. It'd require a pretty huge chunk of re-coding and a very large amount of new content to do all of the stuff people have mentioned in terms of the UI.

It's not happening, people. Most of the UI elements are, to put it nicely, "resistant to sudden changes of direction". They involved large investments of time, basically, and I am very unlikely to change them at this point.

The whole point behind Help O' Matic is to provide newbies with a resource that explains what everything in the game is about, why some things work the way they do, what the controls might do, etc.

It's something I expect people to "grow out of", basically. It's not meant as a hardcore player aid, and I have no intention of trying to make it do that.

Basically, I expect people to shut it off, and forget it ever existed, and I'll have to yell at people when I release new units to "read the Help O' Matic entry".

2. The tooltip issue has been resolved for RC4. Don't make me repeat myself, it was fixed on Monday.

3. I'll try some experiments to regain some space with the main bar at the bottom, because I agree, there is some serious waste there (the give / take to allies for example, is pretty totally useless), but I think that on lower resolutions it'll just end up being too difficult to read, because of the fuzziness caused when the images are smaller than actual resolution.

4. I don't buy that new users are too stupid to change their screen resolution when running a game for the first time. And that's not my choice anyhow, that's koshi's.

5. The Tooltip core logic, or the way it interacts with Lua, is currently buggy. It has non-obvious problems that I found when I made the Tooltip replacement. For example, if you hide it, it screws up Widgets that are looking for WorldToolTip() callouts, and keeps delivering the same data every frame no matter what you do. I dunno how to fix that yet. It feels like an engine bug to me, but maybe it's just some of Trepan's code.

6. Please refrain from further giant blog-posts here.

Argh wrote:LathanStanley

Where is he, anyway?