Spring RTS Engine

Some (not all) of those glitches also occur in XP.

A number of glitches become glaringly obvious under Vista, some are just as visible under windows 98 and Linux+wine. But theyre all present regardless of OS.

Sometimes, I think of doing the lobb yin SDL, with a running video in the background and a mod-switching-functionality like battlefield1942 used to have. That would be intuitive, and each mod could add its own theme. Sure, it is lots of work and so on.... and we would need some management with the mods.
But I think it is a good idea.

AF wrote: Under TASServer this cannot be fully recreated.

Ontop of that it uses th current battle layout as a basis despite its flawed design which means its inheritting problems and more problems arise that are unforeseen because of this.

what problems?

AF wrote: For example thats a rather small space for chat is it not? The existing chat pane is already not tall enough especially in autohost games.

autohosts talk far too much, for chat its pleanty of room..the only chat you see is "rdy up", "sec, getting map", "maplink?", etc, its not hard to keep up with and not much is really said.

AF wrote: There're a lot of options on show all at once isnt it a bit too busy? That player list isnt very wide isnt there going to be truncation on most usernames?

There's only "slightly" more options for hosts, and less for players but it makes hosting a lot easier. atm, hosts usually have to change the team of practically every player manually, this would completely eliminate this.

By wide do you mean tall? It is quite short, and in big games you'd have to scroll, but the only reason you look at it is to see if people are ready or checking if anyone has a low cpu <1 ghz or something.

It's tempting to get use it entirely for specs, because imo cpu info isn't very important and ready information could quite easily be moved somewhere else.

AF wrote: And that Game type bit? Is that a set of controls or an info panel? Wont that list of team boxes get very annoying when your in a 10way ffa? They dont look very wide either, not very accomodating to usernames longer than that bored joe one. All those horrizontal scrollbars, eek.

Game type is a set of controls. In a 10 way FFA (or any ffa) it should have everyone in the same box, as its a FFA everyone gets a different team anyway.

As for usernames- less than 1% of usernames are longer than than mine, and and the max possible is about 3 more characters than mine currently is. So at worst 3 characters would be cut off, you could always make it autosize anyway, there's still pleanty of room on the right.

AF wrote: And those 4 checkboxes look cramped, what if extra checkboxes need to be added where will they go? Or another game end condition?

what 4 checkboxes?

AF wrote: And ontop of that we already have lots of GUI glitches in tasclient and its forks as it is, all of this is going to make them that much more obvious, thigns that most GUI toolkits provide as standard these days, things even Windows itself forces upon windows that atsclient is breaking.

This is pretty irrelevent. Imo, there are far too many lobby forks atm, most buggy. The main reason I'm not implementing this myself is I don't want to create yet another fork. I'd much rather have this implemented in the main TASlobby, or some other already established lobby.

AF wrote: Should we not fix the glaring errors before we start adding new features?

The glaring errors are easy to fix/don't matter/don't seen to be being fixed anyway.

betalord lacks the time to do this in the main lobby, and satirik has yet to be swayed.

The other lobbies know better and have their own designs.

AF wrote:betalord lacks the time to do this in the main lobby, and satirik has yet to be swayed.

Why is it the ONLY dev that seems to be allowed to work on the main lobby is betalord, who lacks time with it anyway..It's open source therefore anyone should be able to contribute to the main lobby :S.

As for satirik, i dont know how much he might integrate, but he seems to be implementing or trying to implement part of my gui - e.g. renaming of Team/Ally and the sorting of teams.

AF wrote: The other lobbies know better and have their own designs.

meaning? I've seen most of the other lobbies, and apart from some added functionality, they all look almost exactly the same...The only problem with my lobby design is cross compatibility with other lobbies.

meaning? I've seen most of the other lobbies, and apart from some added functionality, they all look almost exactly the same...The only problem with my lobby design is cross compatibility with other lobbies.

lolol, satiriks lobby and altarics lobbies are forks! Theyre nto complete lobbies! Dont be so naive! There are other lobbies!

SpringLobby

An old screnshot of spring lobby


AFLobby

Another old screenshot


They look very different to me

AF wrote:

meaning? I've seen most of the other lobbies, and apart from some added functionality, they all look almost exactly the same...The only problem with my lobby design is cross compatibility with other lobbies.

lolol, satiriks lobby and altarics lobbies are forks! Theyre nto complete lobbies! Dont be so naive! There are other lobbies!

I've seen 3 out of the 5 lobbies, my comment still stands .

Anyway, my previous post was more about making it an addition to the main lobby would be much more useful. If someone was to pick this up (I could help with this too), it would be pretty quick and easy to make the UI.

Otherwise we'd have to create a fork which would also mean we'd have to do a lot more work making our lobby compatible with the main lobby/other lobbys. We'd have to keep up with the main lobby releases and our player base would be small, making the features of the UI a lot less useful unless everyone has the same lobby.

AF continue to argue ... continue to put you nick everywhere ... continue to say all other lobbies are shit ... and users will continue to not use yours !

maybe one day you will stop watchin you in a mirror and you'll understand ...

Satirik, I am simply addressing a user who thought a project fork was the same thing as a lobby written from scratch and that only tasclient forks existed.

AF wrote:Satirik, I am simply addressing a user who thought a project fork was the same thing as a lobby written from scratch and that only tasclient forks existed.

felony 1 - mod

AF* wrote: you're a cancer on this forum

fixed

The layout in the first post doesn't add any improvements at all to the current lobby layout and actually makes it harder to do certain things.

AF wrote:

Hey AF, if you're using the snipping tool in Vista to take screen shots I suggest you go into the options pane and uncheck the "Show selection ink after snips are captures" box. That way you won't get these red borders on your screens.

Anyway, I agree with the general consensus the current lobby has a lot of weird graphical stuff going on. There's also other weird stuff like being unable to copy text from chatlogs, etc. It almost feels like a non-native application, does Delphi use Windows APIs for drawing and managing its GUI elements?

We probably do need to replace it with AFLobby or SpringLobby, but I don't know if either is ready for primetime yet. I think we should include both in the Linux packages for the next version though. That is probably the easiest way to get a decent group of users to test those, and it won't be a total disaster if they turn out to have any serious bugs.

el_matarife wrote:There's also other weird stuff like being unable to copy text from chatlogs, etc.

what are you talking about ?

Having your current text selection deselected when someone says something in the chat?

I notice in your fork satirik that my autoscrolling options vanished and sometimes my text doesnt autoscroll unless I scroll to the bottom and put the caret at the very end of the text.

There're also random moments where some background code blocks the GUI and it becomes unresponsive.

And thanks for the tip ^_^

Satirik wrote:

el_matarife wrote:There's also other weird stuff like being unable to copy text from chatlogs, etc.

what are you talking about ?

Yeah ok like everyone knows about ctrl+c...

Ok...



That said, el_matarife is phail

BoredJoe wrote:

AF wrote:

meaning? I've seen most of the other lobbies, and apart from some added functionality, they all look almost exactly the same...The only problem with my lobby design is cross compatibility with other lobbies.

lolol, satiriks lobby and altarics lobbies are forks! Theyre nto complete lobbies! Dont be so naive! There are other lobbies!

I've seen 3 out of the 5 lobbies, my comment still stands .

Anyway, my previous post was more about making it an addition to the main lobby would be much more useful. If someone was to pick this up (I could help with this too), it would be pretty quick and easy to make the UI.

Otherwise we'd have to create a fork which would also mean we'd have to do a lot more work making our lobby compatible with the main lobby/other lobbys. We'd have to keep up with the main lobby releases and our player base would be small, making the features of the UI a lot less useful unless everyone has the same lobby.

Seriously, I can keep riding this issue until the sky falls. It's not that we're not complaining about the problems with the current lobby enough. The reality is betalord won't do it, and if anyone else does do it it will never make it into the official lobby client. Betalord makes the call, and the answer is always "no".

I will reply to AF & BoredJoe discussion without quoting cause it is interesting.

I'm glad to see that BoredJoe noticed that it is really sad that Satirik's can't work on the official TASClient releases. He has added a lot of useful features (See the changelogs here). At the beggining, he never wanted to provide an alternative TASClient version and contacted Betalord to give an help/ have access to the commit. As Betalord didn't have time to commit Satirik's sources, he didn't update the official version or let Satirik do. I can understand that cause you can be afraid of an unknown developper doing some changes. But the Satirik's version is widely used, tested and is not evil, bugged or something else. He also proposed to remove the springmark features for the official lobby modifation as it was largely discussed.

It would still be cool if Betalord could grant the official access and Satirik would be happy to provide the new features to everybody.

AF, you always say "fork". I read this thousands times and I think it is not good to look down on TASClient modification. Even if it is the official poor and shitty lobby modification, it's still useful to add features. Giving it by the official update way would be better for everyone until better lobbies client are finalized.

I know you give a lot to the community but you often stand against people to keep your mind on some points. You have to be open minded cause you work for an open game. It's the first time I'm into an open game community and it's hard to see people with an uber ego always fighting for themselves. First time we argued, I pmed you to say I was not personaly against you but against some of your ideas. So don't make bad advertisement on TASClient modification (satirik or not).

I do keep an open mind, but at the end thats what it is, a fork of the tasclient project. It even bears the same tasclient name and doesnt claim to be a lobby in its own right. Somewhat like MSN Plus! Patchou doesnt claim MSN Plus! to be an entire messaging suite for msn but rather a modification. This doesnt mean I look down on it.

However Ive long been of the opinion that once the alternative lobbies used mainly by linux people reach tasclients featureset, tasclient would very quickly become hopelessly obsolete. And theyre closing in on that goal very fast.Right now, the AFLobby on my machine has 80% done AI support, and when thats done the only thing left to match tasclients featureset would be /ignore, highlighting, setting handicap, and a few other small things. Spring Lobby has a nice little webpage with a progress bar which was at 52% last time I checked, and its rising quite fast, theyll soon have finished all the hard stuff and be onto all the small easy stuff that Im nearly finished with.

To make the point here is the current progress of the major lobby efforts so far after tasclient was made the official lobby. Private efforts have not been included, nor has jouninkomikos C# lobby that tasclient replaced:

Rate of features or bug squashed in the last column on the right.



As you can see satiriks fork has a sizeable lead over the other lobbies in lots and lots of small addon features. AFLobby is almost caught up to tasclient, and spring lobby is a little way behind but its moving fast and gaining speed. I'd say its progress has tripled in the last 2 months.

However TASClient wasnt designed as the ultimate lobby system, back when it was first used people talked about an eventual replacement which enver came. People forgot and started asking for more tasclient features. TASClient was never intended to last 2+ years with competition. To this end satirik will soon enough run into the limits of tasclient just like altaric did, and hell be bogged down with issues and design problems that can be demotivating.

Now lets fast forward 1 month



As you can see satiriks running into design issues from TASClient but has still managed to move forward. The other 2 lobbies have finished all the hardwork and used their remaining momentum to zoom ahead Both have surpassed the official client as shown below:



Of note is that at this point the number of features being added in the other lobbies is going to start falling, and Satirik will see this too, not because of a loss of momentum, but because of a brick wall called TASServer and its lack of generic commands coupled with the inability to extend it without betalord.

I can imagine that progress at this point will start to plateau in all the lobbies untill AFS or another server implementation surpasses TASServer, which should happen easily before christmas. Untill then the most likely changes are GUI design innovations.

If the charts remain balanced that way for longer than 1 month I expect the balance of who uses which client to tip from a tasclient dominated system to a healthy 4 way balance between satiriks fork, those who have yet to switch and the 2 other lobbies. I expect as long as TASClient is bundled with spring and active lobby development continues on all 3 fronts things would remain this way untill one lobby replaces TASClient which could displace Satirik indefinately.