Spring RTS Engine

Machete234 wrote:"Competitive" games are repetitive imho.
These players like to perfection their skills doing the same over and over again.
If you look in the game list of some esports league you wont find extremely complex games.

Starcraft is the biggest esports... Is that not complex enough game for you?

What makes games loved by competitive gamers is simplicity.
In many rts games clicking quickly is most important.

Its not the most important thing in any rts but you need to click fast in order to properly execute the things that are most important in pretty much every RTS.


Basically you're totally wrong on what competitive players want and what RTS games are about.

malric wrote: A single player campaign would help a lot. Then people would have time/know units/buildings before going to an aggressive multi-player game.

Maybe not a full campaing but a tutorial that explains the basic things, this of course would be mod dependant.

JohannesH wrote:

Machete234 wrote:"Competitive" games are repetitive imho.
These players like to perfection their skills doing the same over and over again.
If you look in the game list of some esports league you wont find extremely complex games.

Starcraft is the biggest esports... Is that not complex enough game for you?

Starcraft is a more limited game than most spring mods.
Should I have said that 90% of the games are not very complex?

We need a way to bring old players back! The time of manual hosting and altored divide and 1v1 CCR.

Teutooni wrote:We need a way to bring old players back! The time of manual hosting and altored divide and 1v1 CCR.

Yes :D altored ftw

And you're forgetting crossing_4_final and Motkottava Nakkivahvero

Bring back all of WarC, PRO and LCC tbh

Machete234 wrote:

JohannesH wrote:

Machete234 wrote:"Competitive" games are repetitive imho.
These players like to perfection their skills doing the same over and over again.
If you look in the game list of some esports league you wont find extremely complex games.

Starcraft is the biggest esports... Is that not complex enough game for you?

Starcraft is a more limited game than most spring mods.
Should I have said that 90% of the games are not very complex?

Limited or complex in what sense...

Well I'm not overtly familiar with esports stuffs, but games that I know to be big are like SC, Warcraft 3, Counterstrike, and some fighter games... Those all seem to be so complex that you can get better infinitely, always keep learning. Now what are those 90% games you talk of? Sure you can have prize tourneys in any shiny new game but that's not likely to last if the game is too simple and gets "figured out".

And repetitiveness which you mentioned does not mean there is not a lot of complexity still. Spring games can seem pretty repetitive too if you don't understand the details.


Oh and I don't think 1v1 CCR was ever out of fashion :D

JohannesH wrote: Limited or complex in what sense...

Well I'm not overtly familiar with esports stuffs, but games that I know to be big are like SC, Warcraft 3, Counterstrike, and some fighter games... Those all seem to be so complex that you can get better infinitely, always keep learning. Now what are those 90% games you talk of? Sure you can have prize tourneys in any shiny new game but that's not likely to last if the game is too simple and gets "figured out".

And repetitiveness which you mentioned does not mean there is not a lot of complexity still. Spring games can seem pretty repetitive too if you don't understand the details.


Oh and I don't think 1v1 CCR was ever out of fashion :D

I think he meant limited in the sense that in SC you have far less options than you do in something like BA for example. (i.e. range, speed, power, air, land, sea, stealth, arty, etc etc. Not to mention map options, which in SC are absurdly limited). And in that sense I agree.


1v1 CCR will always be the best.

If its the best why dont you play it more...

Gota wrote:If its the best why dont you play it more...

I do when I can, I haven't played Spring in like a month though, too busy.

Satirik wrote:true but competitiveness brings players and spring needs more players

But competitiveness drive away players and Spring needs more player!

I think he meant limited in the sense that in SC you have far less options than you do in something like BA for example. (i.e. range, speed, power, air, land, sea, stealth, arty, etc etc. Not to mention map options, which in SC are absurdly limited). And in that sense I agree.


1v1 CCR will always be the best.

Need I inform you that SC had one of the easiest mapediters to use and No this was not because it was limited, because it was not.

SC (player developed) custom maps have produced a far far greater number more diverse and unique playable concepts which reached the player base than spring.

Point of value being that StarCraft has some thing to tech spring about delivering spread-ability.

And if you were thinking money is the difference; I am quite sure that it was not "custom maps" that Blizzard geared their promotional supports toward.

It is software designed to promote the user that produces such output.

Oddly enough, this demonstrates a very hard concept for so many software developers to grasp. The user needs to be able to implement the product. Ofc the programmer will know his way around his own product. A useless programmer will have accomplished little by having a program that only he can use or understand.

JohannesH wrote: Limited or complex in what sense...

Well I'm not overtly familiar with esports stuffs, but games that I know to be big are like SC, Warcraft 3, Counterstrike, and some fighter games... Those all seem to be so complex that you can get better infinitely, always keep learning. Now what are those 90% games you talk of? Sure you can have prize tourneys in any shiny new game but that's not likely to last if the game is too simple and gets "figured out".

I can talk about cs since I played it enough the basic principle is kind of simple, you have the objectives, you need to kill the other guys for that you get money, with the money you buy better weapons.

To understand how this works you need maybe 1h to get to know the maps and figure out strategies maybe 1 month.

So how do you improve now? muscle memory or skill.
Be the one that shoots quicker and more precisely.

That characterises almost all the FPS games like call of duty or quake live etc.
They are easy to learn hard to master and that is because of players that train and train and train

You might find a more complex simulation in the esports leagues but they arent very popular.
Like racing games one is a sim the rest is arcade.

Hobo Joe wrote:
I think he meant limited in the sense that in SC you have far less options than you do in something like BA for example. (i.e. range, speed, power, air, land, sea, stealth, arty, etc etc. Not to mention map options, which in SC are absurdly limited). And in that sense I agree.

Yes and in SC you have to learn the hotkeys so you can do them while sleeping, that is muscle memory too.
Then you perfection some rushing tactics and wipe the noob off the map.
Of course the noobs will be fed up very quickly.

But I think its game design that makes these games like they are not the fact that there are competitive players.

I have Analyzed much of Spring's tapable potential, but I did not have the time to put it to words so I have a txt with some scribblings for those interested.

http://pastebin.com/c6NBaMRY

I agree on some of the things including moderation.
A lot of what you wrote can also be changed by people that are not necessarily devs...

a lot of the issues are also lobby related and ta mod related...kp,s44,gundam...they have installers the issue is TA mods which are very loosely developed but are supported by most of the players.
Those have no websites,no installers and with the whole lobby/spring directory/spring.exe and the concept of downloadable mods/maps instead of installers(with at least some sort of mappack) is horrible.

Just out of the top of my head i can say that the starting options are complete fail and do not resemble the way it works in other games..
Random should cycle through available starting positions on the map.
set should be based on prechosen points in the room and boxes should be as they are both allowing more flexibility and covering for maps with broken starting points.
I suppose that is lobby/engine issue?

Another thing is not enough GUI support in the lobby.
Need a standardized autohost command list for all autohosts and GUI support for some of the more used commands.
Gui support should also exist for renaming accounts and browsing through the list of channels.
Spring.exe should be renamed to something like enginetest.exe and tucked away.

Machete234 wrote:I can talk about cs since I played it enough the basic principle is kind of simple, you have the objectives, you need to kill the other guys for that you get money, with the money you buy better weapons.

To understand how this works you need maybe 1h to get to know the maps and figure out strategies maybe 1 month.

RTS games are mostly pretty simple, you need to kill the enemy. You expand which gives more res, which can be turned into units, you use your units to secure your expansion and kill/deny enemy expansion. Aim to get a good enough army at 1 point or another to roll him over.

Are the same strategies still used in CS, as the strategies used 1 month after release (of latest patch)...

Yes and in SC you have to learn the hotkeys so you can do them while sleeping, that is muscle memory too.
Then you perfection some rushing tactics and wipe the noob off the map.
Of course the noobs will be fed up very quickly.

You need hotkeys in spring (you even need to configure them yourself). Learning hotkey sequences is easy, in Spring and Starcraft. Finding the right moment to go through them is hard. Perfecting rush tactics is not the only way or best way to victory in neither SC or most Spring games, honing late game skills is required as well, watch SC games, everybody mainly expands & techs earlygame... Noobs will still lose the game within first minute(s) of the game in pretty much any rts.

Hobo Joe wrote:I think he meant limited in the sense that in SC you have far less options than you do in something like BA for example. (i.e. range, speed, power, air, land, sea, stealth, arty, etc etc. Not to mention map options, which in SC are absurdly limited). And in that sense I agree.


1v1 CCR will always be the best.

That list of options sounds silly, or are you just trying to say BA has a lot of units? Yep theres more units but SC units are more clearly different from 1 another... Theres spells, upgrades etc. They're just different you can't put out a good argument how 1 is somehow more complex, its pointless when neither can be fully mapped out strategically

WALL OF TEXT FTW (even if most of it is quote, and kinda offtopic)

My mother likes spring, she says it looks way less violent than all those fancy fpshooters my bad friends play.

I agree with basically everything that's being said in this thread so far.

Some more brainstorming:

In my opinion, the following is mandatory if spring wants to have a chance for mass appeal:

-Websites for each game (why has BA no website yet?)
-Accounts with lots of statistics
-Ladder

Right now, playing games in the lobby feels a bit like being in a sandbox testing environment. It definitely doesn't feel like using a finished product.

Maybe the development should focus on implementing a "Spring account system" which encompasses the ladders, lobby, game forums+wikis, statistics and achievements. It should be very flexible, so all kinds of data can be extracted from games. Every mod developer can register his mod, and change the settings for it's ladders, statistics etc. to it's liking. In other words, every player gets a separate set of data for each mod. Game websites could then also have such things as "latest activities" window, which shows who won recent battles, edited wiki, made forum posts, got achievements, joined clan etc - very useful for showing an active community to first time website visitors. It allows for lots of interactivity, so you can click on every map, clan, player, achievement etc. and have easy access to some statistics to obsess over.

Optimally, this would provide the tools for each mod developer to quickly set up it's website and its own style of achievements and ladder (e.g. elo or any other system), allowing new mods to easily set up a community. I also really think that a ladder would help create attention for unpopular mods a lot. For example I never ever played Kernel Panic, but if it had a ladder showing at least a bit activity, I'd at least start speccing some games.

Developing this sure takes a lot of effort, it basically means turning Spring into a social network site.

Yes, I have no idea what I am talking about.

All great ideas that will sadly never happen, but if they did would be a huge boost to Spring.

knorke wrote:imo only ba, ca and xta games can sometimes be called "competive"

I reject this opinion. S44 as nemo said has been designed for competitive gameplay, and for that matter, so has Evolution RTS. Yes, it took a long time to get there, and it took a lot of iterations to get it right, but it's there.

I don't have any stats to be able to tell how many games of evo are played and if they're even playing the latest SD test version (tho thanks to licho I was able to delete all the old sd7/sdz versions from SD, leaving only the test versions).

On the other hand, I have tried very hard not to be pushy, including being pushy towards other devs of evo to constantly host games and whatnot. I've been trying to take things at a relaxed pace, and I've been adding new content like crazy (most of the newest content doesn't affect actual gameplay).

I agree tho with whoever posted that starcraft map. Starcraft maps are designed for players to be able to start in any position and have non-fail gameplay, and as a result of being reminded of that, I imagine I will make some maps with that principle in mind. However, it is uniquely difficult in the case of evo, because you have a tech that can traverse each type of terrain available from the start, but, that's just semantics and shouldn't get in the way of proper map building. I just need to think outside of the box.

PicassoCT wrote:My mother likes spring.

Everybody's coolness level just dropped by 10.