no respect for spring

[LordMatt]

PS: I hate PR-People, they are scum & plague and a real danger for the democratic system.

+1

[smoth]

marketing people tend to exagerate the truth to make a sale.

[PicassoCT]

If it was only that Smoth, if it was only that. Sigh.
Meet some, soon, you will find a more ugly truth. Just imagine you would know you could sell even the biggest shit to the world, all those things like human pride on thinking are stripped away at that moment. You begin to see the world diffrent eyes, just take a second look on all that Advertising appealing to lower instincts. They are made by man & woman who by word & picture spit in your face as a intelligent beeing.

Sad Subject, and derailing. And a Addition, to calm & rerail - even comercial projects, with Millions backing them up, can have empty servers - for minor failures. Just take a look at the Universe at War Servers, Good Game, well Balanced - just a very close Camera - and there was a small time window, when everybody played the singleplayer campaing. That was the Timeframe, where they would check regularly into the Lobby. Now this Time is over.. and they lost all of there Multiplayer longlifes, which made starcraft or halflife, what they are till today.

We could combine Lichos Autohost with some clever AF-Bot& a Chatbot- to pretend there are going Games... but that would only be a catalysator effect.. if the Gamereaction don´t expands on itself

[AF]

The current mode spring uses is unsustainable. Indeed it would be nci fi all mods and maps could play nice on a shared serve with a shared installer and shared settings, just as it would be nice fi all the enemy soliders stood still and did nothing while you were shooting them, or how there are never queues to wait in and food and resources is distributed fairly amongst all the people in the world.


hmmm this isn't a utopia, and idealistic situations are rarely sustainable.

[PicassoCT]

How about a set of hard Quality Conditions to get your Mod into the Installer:

You got to have:

12 Betatester who say it is flawless for a week
24 Players who testify it is balanced
A actuall Page, a Wiki, and a active Thread
2 Authosts
8 Maps that work well with the Game
1 Promotion Campaign going on (YouTubeVid or else)
1 Mod that can be played in a competition

Does archieve well Performance on a low-endsystem (which is what most users own-and why blizzard titles always are technically years behind-although the graphicstyle is great)

65 % Majority at a Comunityvote for GO

(Now for the final Pyromaniactouch)
And everything to proof again, with every new-installer to include...

And now lets call for BackUP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokejumper



Think of it as a kind of "Game for Windows" Logo, just "Game for Spring"

[smoth]

12 Betatester who say it is flawless for a week
[/size]

gundam or otherwise No such thing

24 Players who testify it is balanced
[/size]

Only if you count fanbois

A actuall Page, a Wiki, and a active Thread
[/size]

easy enough but I will soon strip down my gundam wiki entry because the wiki fails my purposes.

2 Authosts
[/size]

NOT HAPPENING except for MAYBE the most popular mods.

8 Maps that work well with the Game
[/size]

all mods have this.

1 Promotion Campaign going on (YouTubeVid or else)
[/size]

HELL NO. There is INFO but that doesn't mean we should be FORCED to advertise.

1 Mod that can be played in a competition
[/size]

except that spring is too unstable for that.

[Pendrokar]

I think most of the players know little past "this is a way to play TA in 3d" I think that was the OP's point.

My fault! Sorry! (My trailer said close to that!)

[Forboding Angel]

I suppose I'm replying a little late to this but meh...

Well, evo isn't trying to steal players from other mods. Sure, If you wanna be a die hard fan be my guest but on the other hand I'm not gonna be butthurt if your fav mod is BA and you only like Evo once in a while. That's what evo is for, a fun to play rts that while competitive, has elements about it that make it easy for newbs and vets alike to just have a fun game.

Thanks to KDR I'm closer to that goal than ever before. He designed the map control gadget for me and it is absolutely great.

Likewise, I redesigned all the tanks for an entire side to add more flavor and succeeded beautifully. There are some other redo's I have planned as well. But I suppose the thing is, I'm not trying to steal take or bribe players from other games, I just want players to feel somewhat secure that regardless of whether they are good at evo or not, they will still have a good time playing it.

I do know one thing for a fact... If evo is only fun because of the competitive aspect of the game: I'm doin it rong

[Forboding Angel]

I cant really comment on evolution because I haven't seen the latest sites incarnation but I do know I haven't seen anything, no banners advertisements etc outside of the odd download link in their channel topic in the lobby so there's room for improvement there.

No point in advertising just yet for me. THere are a few bugs in the lua that the core of the game revolves around, smf mapping fails hard for anything over 20x20, and I'm not quite done revamping stuff yet.

There are however, quite a few vids on youtube, even if they are old.

[Neddie]

Picasso, it will take more than fire to kill me.

I can run two autohosts for anything alone, but it would work better if one person ran each. Right now I run an Alternative autohost, four CA hosts, a Kernel Panic and an XTA host.

Argh, anything you can do for P.U.R.E. that I can use I will. Mostly I've been trying to get around the issue of no budget, plus mapping possibilities.

[SwiftSpear]

Edit:

one of the unwritten Spring goals: to have mods market their stuff separately, on separate sites, with separate installers, etc

Can i just mention that i think this is a terrible idea? It just leads to a load of different standards and conflicts. I used the KP installer for example and it generally fucked with my spring install (settings etc) and i had to uninstall it eventually as it was conflicting with everything else.

Separate lobbies (though you did mention that) are an especially bad idea. Its a huge boost to smaller or new mods to have people just hanging around in the lobby for the game, who are there to play something else like BA, but can be roped into something new. If a new or unpopular game has its own lobby, people probably wont even join it to check if there is a game.

I want to clarify my opinion here, because I agree with dhmoris. I'm not trying to say that I want all spring mods to go their own way and try to break away from the community, but it's DEFINITELY A goal for spring to have projects large enough that they CAN run their own advertising and community centers.

Of course this isn't to say that I want separate lobby client's either... In fact I'm a huge proponent of implementing compatibility with our lobby for even more open source and freeware gaming projects. But ultimately I want people building full game projects for spring, I want people to be able to get over our shadow and have built stuff that is worth advertising of it's own value.

When you play TF2, you don't play Source Engine. You still log onto the steam client everyone else logs onto, you're still using the source engine, but ultimately, you're playing TF2. It's it's own game on a full scale sense. Spring needs projects that do that.

[Vadi]

Neddie's hosts rock.

[Felix the Cat]

Swift, that's a nice idea and I really wish it could work that way. However, because as I established earlier the Spring community is at this point in time essentially a Total Annihilation community, and because it isn't a terribly large community, it's very difficult for games/mods other than the *A mods in vogue at the time in question to gain any sort of following. This is because the primary interest of most players is in playing *A.

Therefore, it would follow that at this present point in time the best route for a non-*A game/mod to take would be to attempt to forge its own independent community through distributing the complete game package (Spring engine + game content + custom lobby) independently of spring.clan-sy.com and the associated community.

Essentially, at this point in time the best distribution method for a non-*A mod that aims to have a player-base of its own would be to be distributed like a HL1 mod - when you download The Specialists or Hostile Intent or whatnot, you download the entire package and find servers through the mod's executable itself.

This of course only applies to mods that are created with the intention of being played and becoming popular, not mods that are created to please the creator. Either reason for creating a mod is valid, of course!

[Neuralize]

Give me 200 dollars and I will give you 200 more players.

[Sertse]

As a matter of practicability, there are some things we could do right now to improve Spring's "perception", and it doesn't need coding or graphic design ability.

Start contributing to the wiki on this site. You are allowed to add in/edit what you want covered for much of the site anyways.

It's also self evident that this is the main spring portal (no pun in intended), and how randoms think of Spring will be influenced, funnily enough, by what they read on this site.

The main problem I find is that much of it is just not presented well, appears unprofessional or not up to date... just fixing that would go al long way.

That said, the top banner really needs to be changed to something more generic.

[PicassoCT]

I cant really comment on evolution because I haven't seen the latest sites incarnation but I do know I haven't seen anything, no banners advertisements etc outside of the odd download link in their channel topic in the lobby so there's room for improvement there.

No point in advertising just yet for me. THere are a few bugs in the lua that the core of the game revolves around, smf mapping fails hard for anything over 20x20, and I'm not quite done revamping stuff yet.

There are however, quite a few vids on youtube, even if they are old.

Somebody i know once said that "Perfection is the coffinnail to all good things."

I don´t think that any Game, not even the Engine Spring would ever reached a release, if they would aim at 100%bugfreenes, perfect beauty and balancing.

However, i am also one of those Guys who begged for starcraft for years - and that late release, perfectly balanced, was worth waiting- so lets get (g)old (Somebody write a Patch)...

PS: How about copying othere free Games distribution & PR - for Example, take Battlefield Heroes.. - one big Red(or Pink) "Play" Button on Top to ruule them all.

[SwiftSpear]

Swift, that's a nice idea and I really wish it could work that way. However, because as I established earlier the Spring community is at this point in time essentially a Total Annihilation community, and because it isn't a terribly large community, it's very difficult for games/mods other than the *A mods in vogue at the time in question to gain any sort of following. This is because the primary interest of most players is in playing *A.

Therefore, it would follow that at this present point in time the best route for a non-*A game/mod to take would be to attempt to forge its own independent community through distributing the complete game package (Spring engine + game content + custom lobby) independently of spring.clan-sy.com and the associated community.

Essentially, at this point in time the best distribution method for a non-*A mod that aims to have a player-base of its own would be to be distributed like a HL1 mod - when you download The Specialists or Hostile Intent or whatnot, you download the entire package and find servers through the mod's executable itself.

This of course only applies to mods that are created with the intention of being played and becoming popular, not mods that are created to please the creator. Either reason for creating a mod is valid, of course!

You still find HL games through the steam client actually... Irrelevant of what mod you are trying to run. The only difference is if you boot a HL mod from it's executable, the steam client interface has the filter set to find only games in the relevant mod.

Finally, I think you're backwards. NS, TS, HI, all suffered SIGNIFICANTLY from not being able to tap directly into the CS market. Hell, once they were added to official mod lists in steam the player base jumped significantly, and you have to navigate all kinds of stupid menus to even get to those sections.

I don't think you gain yourself any advantage at all trying to distance yourself from the spring community... It might be nice to be able to boot up the spring client with command line entries that log you into different initial start channels and have different game filters set though... Mods could dist with client setups that make it as easy as possible to find games in their catagory.

[Tobi]

Separate lobby wouldn't really work atm unless you can really pull off a decent marketing campaign to get at least some games going on 24/7.

If your lobby is (mostly) empty most of the time new players wont stay. (at least I wouldn't)

Also don't underestimate the effort it takes to run lobby server, moderate it, etc.

IMHO separate stuff is cool as far as it concerns installer/website/wiki/documentation/etc., but unless you have a really big project I don't think separate lobby would be worth the trouble.

(But note that especially for separate installer there are technical issues that would need to be worked out. Doesn't stop mods from making their own website/portal to Spring with clear instructions on how to install Spring with that mod, etc.)

[Vadi]

Give me a goal of Spring, a mod website that sells, is easy to get on Linux, Windows, and OS X, $0, and I'll get you more players.

[PicassoCT]

Maybee it is the Problem, that the Todo-list is so titanic- if we break it up into little parts, well it can get sort of sideway hobby. So no longer Request a Redo of the whole Wiki - But how about a Redo of the Pewee for BA? How about just one Screenshot from every Mod? Little Tasks are not so scary...