Leaky Buckets

[AF]

The AI download rates prior to spring bundling them in never added up. They didn't even compare favourably with the downloads for new AA.

What's more there's no single player client bundled with spring, so people have to use the multi-player lobby anyway. Granted there will be those who figure out howto get around that or find the SpringSP client looking around the website.

There are then lots of people who visit the site and turn away because it's too much effort to get spring downloaded. Or those who do and can't figure out how to get spring going.

[SwiftSpear]

You want to sove problems faster?you want official packages whith only the best luaui/mods/maps/ai/lobbies?
Chose a leader'im serious,someone that will decide on everything.or maybe 2 leaders.onw that will be a technical pro and the other a game pro.
all the things spring related will be devided into 2 categories and each of those "leaders" will make obsulute choixes on which no one will argue.
it will allow much easier and faster descision making.
It can alos be done in the following way.Everything is the same except those 2 persons decide on a few options and than make polls ....maybe we can decide on what there should be polles and on what there descision is final and non negotiable.
Now'i know it sounds like a risky idea but i think such a move will accelerate work and might allow for some mistakes but its better to have a few mistakes than no progress in any direction.
we need 1 max 2 people that will decide about almost everything including deciding on what is the most important on the to do list at any given moment.
if we have it more organized and everyone knows exactly what the communities goal is in any given moment and there are people whom you can ask to recieve answer on any question and get a final answer.
im not saying stop discussing things .discuss them and let the chosen leaders read your posts and decide...but their descisions must be final and all must agree to listen to them for better or worse for a certain period of time for example.
i knwo it might sound a bit crazy but i do thing we should try out such a structure.we can pic candidats and have a vote about who shoudl lead..and every month ave another vote..

Leaders don't make decisions, they negotiate decisions. What you're describing is a tyrant, and I can give many many many examples on how it will ultimately fail.

That being said, granted me and tobi should be more active in plotting future plans as opposed to the current trend of mostly just overseeing activity. The problem is, ultimately if we become too goal oriented in this project, due to the fact that contributors appear and disappear without warning we're in large part setting ourselfs up for failure/disappointment.

[Argh]

Um, I told everybody, nearly two years ago, that the Lobby's lack of a Steam-like interface, and the website's rather poor support for new mod releases, is a major part of the problem here.

Gamers want new stuff, and a variety of new stuff keeps them coming back.

Spring actually has a rather staggering number of mods available- if you go hunting on UF, you will actually find several games that haven't even been posted about on these Forums- ever.

The next releases of the Lobbies is going to finally change a lot of that, from what I've seen. I hope that it will lead to much greater user-retention in the future- that, and good games, are the chief things we really need.

[quantum]

I think that modders are those who should find players for their games. It's hard to market something as vague as an engine to players.

The mistake non-TA modders have done until now, imho, is to mostly try to convert the existing user base, instead of finding new people.

As for TA based mods, the legal uncertainty makes modders unwilling to try to find new distribution channels. If CA was free of Cavedog IP, I'd certainly try to increase our player-base much more aggressively.

[AF]

Indeed, I and the people at the springlobby team have been working together on various things aswell as improving our lobbies, if only to force tasclient to innovate or give satirik ideas. Fortunately we have the advantage of having started from scratch rather than inheriting our codebase.

Quantum, CA has a wealth of material free of Atari IP as well as a lot of different innovative ideas. Perhaps a small variant of CA with the TA specific stuff removed, a streamlined but free TA of sorts using high quality models that have been made as replacements, Mr.Ds commander, the raider and golly models, smoths morty, etc.

Aside from having a smaller size and being easier to balance as a result, it would have the capacity of gaining much more traction and room to experiment. Remove arm and core references and call them something new. It'd be a much better alternative to something like nanoblobz in the GPL installer. If you did this I would personally endorse and push it out with my projects as I did with nanoblobz and build installers for it.




However, I believe action is necessary, and usually its suggested and discussed but nobody takes the final step even though a small action makes a lot of discussion irrelevant. Why argue a points superiority for weeks when 10 minutes of coding is so much better at it?

[Felix the Cat]

A good game can have both a strong single player community and a strong multiplayer community.

I'd like to think that Spring is a good game.

However, compare a new player's experience with Spring with a new player's experience with an average commercial game.

Commerical game:
-Open package, insert CD.
-Run installer. Click OK a couple of times.
-Run game. Click "Options", mess around with graphics and sound options at will until satisfied that they are at a level that computer can handle.
-Click "multiplayer" or "Internet game".
-Click "create a new profile". Follow prompts. Type things.
-Find a game. Play.

Spring:
-Find latest installer. Download it.
-Run installer. Click OK a couple of times.
-Find settings program. Mess around with graphics and sound options. Many of these options are incomprehensible, like "max texture stages (for SM3 maps)". Others have random incomprehensible things like "need fragment_program" attached to them. Most are unfamiliar, and it's unknown what will run well on the computer.
-Run lobby. Create username.
-Try to join a game. Receive a prompt, "you do not have this mod! would you like to download it now?". Click yes. Internet browser pops up, goes to a broken web page.
-Ask people how to download mods. Receive a response like "go to UF" or "lol u nub". If lucky, someone will walk through finding UF and downloading the correct mod into the correct folder.
-Try to join a game. Receive a prompt, "you do not have this map! would you like to download it now?"
-Go back to UF, find the correct version of the map, download it into the correct folder.
-Join a game. Quite possibly be kicked for being a one-stripe.
-Join another game. Play.

It would help if we could transform Spring's installation/startup/play cycle into a commercial game's. However, many issues lie therein, and it gets very political. We should include a TA mod! We should include BA! No, we should include CA! No, we should include XTA! No, we shouldn't include a TA mod because it uses Atari's intellectual property. We should include a GPL mod so that we can get Spring put into various game lists and distros! No, no GPL mod, GPL is bad! We need a new lobby, the current one is ugly and has barebones functionality! We should create a new lobby! No, we should include AFLobby! No, we should include SpringLobby! No, we shouldn't include a lobby, we should let people choose their lobby client! The lobby should have direct download capability from UF! No, it can't, UF uses a different hash scheme than Spring! We should include some maps! Let's include the most-played maps! No, let's include the 'best' maps, because the most-played maps suck! We shouldn't even include maps and should let people download them as they need them! We should include single-player! Let's include SpringSP! No, let's not, it sucks! We need some AIs, we should include AAI! No, that's not open source, we should include NTai! No, RAI! No, let's ditch the single player thing, it doesn't grow our multiplayer community! Et cetera.

[quantum]

Perhaps a small variant of CA with the TA specific stuff removed, a streamlined but free TA of sorts using high quality models that have been made as replacements, Mr.Ds commander, the raider and golly models, smoths morty, etc.

The new models are amazing, but their number is too small to make a version of CA that people would play. As soon as there are enough models to make increasing our player-base possible, I'd gladly switch to non-Cavedog content, and I think that the rest of the CA contributors would feel the same.

[AF]

I have started a thread in the art forum asking for links or references to any and all usable models.

[Neddie]

Switching content out was one of the points I tried to raise in the very early days of CA, before Tired and I faded out for different reasons. Within the framework of CA there is a little more to overcome than there might have been, but I think you have a good structure for content transition and if you do move for it I'll be around if you want some helping hands.

[AF]

No Im thinking more of a small minimod which is also a fork of CA. So it would initially use CA as a base for most of its contents, and hold mostly balancing changes and the odd texture with the logos changed.

[Pressure Line]

My opinion is these other mods are waste. We need to try keeping the players we have, nevermind try attracting new ones. Forcing players to learn new shit all the time doesn't help.

THIS JUST IN! NON-TA CONTENT IS A WASTE OF TIME AND RESOURCES!

looks like the south did win after all T__T

[SwiftSpear]

If there was enough modelage to at least preserve the majority of T1 in CA for at least one land build tier and air it would be forkable.

[quantum]

It would help if we could transform Spring's installation/startup/play cycle into a commercial game's. However, many issues lie therein, and it gets very political. We should include a TA mod! We should include BA! No, we should include CA! No, we should include XTA! No, we shouldn't include a TA mod because it uses Atari's intellectual property. We should include a GPL mod so that we can get Spring put into various game lists and distros! No, no GPL mod, GPL is bad! (...)

That's because Springs is not a game, but an engine. Modders should prepare their own user-friendly distributions.

[DJ]

If you really want to get more people using Spring then there are several easy steps that you can take. Please don't bother to post angry replies to this post because I won't rise to the bait and I hate politics.

Firstly lets deal with this Atari crap. No large scale games company will care about a small open source game using content from a ten year old game. Look at the bottom line, IF spring became very successful then Atari could build on that success and use everything the community has done to make a quick buck. We are acting in their interests keeping their intellectual property alive.

I can only imagine the angry reactions I'm going to get to that last paragraph but hey. Bottom line is we could always contact Atari and ask permission to use the TA stuff on a non profit basis. let Atari advertise on the site for free and they may go for it. Which brings me to the first thing...

1) The website

How have a community with the massive amount of design talent that we have ended up with a site that looks like this? Yes I know there's a project to redesign it but have you been in that forum? I don't know who is running that project so I'll go easy on them and say they couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery. What a monumental cluster f*ck! You cannot build a website by comittee. For a project like that you have to ask for volunteers to build it, elect ONE of them and then let them do it. Otherwise you end up with a typical 1000 designer mess! The website is our marketing, our way of capturing players and should be treated as such.

Lets also bear in mind that Total Annihilation is the reason most people find the Spring engine. Most of those people will only ever play TA based mods, that's just the way it is. This means the website needs to be heavily biased towards TA, this makes sure that the user knows they're getting what they want. Each mod should have their own subsection and an equal amount of exposure to the incoming traffic but the landing page must have a TA feel.

With that in mind we need to make it obvious that you don't need a TA cd to play Spring! I know that message is an attempt to protect the game from Atari etc etc but really that's just scare moungering as I talked about earlier.

2) Support

These forums are quite an intimidating place. As this is an open source game the tendancy is for it to be played by people who have above average knowledge of computers. This does not excuse the behaviour towards new users asking stupid questions. Most users will look at the kind of answer other users get to questions before posting, if they see trails of abuse then they won't ask they will just leave! There are people who spend alot of time on the forums and who do help but there is an under current of elitism that reduces our chances of keeping new players.

3) Singleplayer

Spring is a small communtiy which means most of the players who play it are at a reasonable level of play. This makes it very difficult for new players as there are very few games at their level to join. This makes a decent, easy to use single player option all the more important. Spring SP is a superb tool for this yet its not included in the install package, why is this? include it with spring and call it singleplayer.exe. Roberts your mothers brother....

4) Using stats

We seem to be having an argument about what is causing people who download spring to not play the game? Why is this? Surely we have all the stats available... Lets just look at the people hitting the site, then the number who download, then the people who create a username, then the people who play a game. See where the percentages are going missing and make some educated guesses about where the problem is? All this reasoned debate and posturing is fine but why not actually use some logic?

Bottom line is I think Spring is ace, when I show it to my friends they think its ace so why so small a player base? see above I believe

[Erom]

We are acting in their interests keeping their intellectual property alive.

The law doesn't work like that. If you let someone "keep your intellectual property alive" for you without prosecuting them, and shutting them down, you can by law lose the copyright to that IP. Even if we aren't a threat to them, they _have_ to CnD this project to keep TA out of the public domain if we continue to distribute their stuff.

So far, so good, because we have insisted that TA mods require an OTA CD, and because we're still pretty small, but you're deluding yourself if you think they won't come down like a ton of bricks if we overstep.

Even requiring the CD isn't enough in and of itself- when Spring gets larger, they WILL CnD the distribution of XTA with the engine, and the promotion of TA mods on the official site. This is not an if. This is a when.

Other than that one point, I fully agree with the things you said.

Bottom line is I think Spring is ace, when I show it to my friends they think its ace so why so small a player base?

When I show my friends, they say "Nice idea. When are they going to finish it?" I've tried to get my LAN groups to pick up spring, but for two reasons (A, the interface, B, no single player campaign) they feel it isn't finished enough to play yet.

[tombom]

Copyrights never expire, it's trademarks that do.

[lurker]

Copyrights never expire, it's trademarks that do.

No, copyrights do expire eventually, but it takes a long time, partially thanks to corporate interest...
It's trademarks that expire when you don't fight for them.

[tombom]

Copyrights never expire, it's trademarks that do.

No, copyrights do expire eventually, but it takes a long time, partially thanks to corporate interest...
It's trademarks that expire when you don't fight for them.

I meant copyrights can't expire through not using them.

[BrainDamage]

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.html#works1

Works created on or after January 1, 1978: For works created after its effective date, the U.S. copyright law adopts the basic “life-plus-seventy” system already in effect in most other countries. A work that is created (fixed in tangible form for the first time) after January 1, 1978, is automatically protected from the moment of its creation and is given a term lasting for the author’s life, plus an additional 70 years after the author’s death. In the case of “a joint work prepared by two or more authors who did not work for hire,” the term lasts for 70 years after the last surviving author’s death. For works made for hire, and for anonymous and pseudonymous works (unless the author’s identity is revealed in Copyright Office records), the duration of copyright will be 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.

[Erom]

Tombom:

EDIT: People made my first point for me.

Expiration aside, an undefended copyright can be declared in court to be abandoned, and it becomes public domain. This has happened before to big companies, and they are usually keen to avoid it.