Spring RTS Engine

yeah sure, no reason not to say that the X unit is overpriced. However telling him your projected outcome of a new feature is a bit silly. Argh might be implementing a feature that is needed for a future feature. Who knows, I can barely understand the guy.

When you make a statement that if it is like CA you are not going to check up on it. what is the developer to think? What do you mean? Ca has a lot of things, what is your issue. Rather that say "if it is like X project" you should probably be more direct. I.E. if it has fuzzy bunnies I probably won't want to spend time looking into it, I hate fuzzy bunnies my dad died that way and just want a heads up.

Most project devs do not like to give out the entire plan, most of them do not like to lay the plan out publicly it locks them into decisions. That could be a whole different thread and I don't want to talk about waterfall vs agile.

simply put be direct and if you have a concern ask it more directly. "will this mod have a krogoth like unit" be more direct, "with this project have a unit that costs a whole like with huge guns"

the comment about telling people what do to was generally at hoi but you have done it in the past to.

too many people here give bad feedback. if you are not sure, ask argh to tell you what he is looking for. there is nothing wrong with extra feedback but people all to often state feedback as imperatives. The developers can observe behaviors if they are around. Saying this sucks do this or the unit should look like this(one of your statements) you should always remember that the aesthetics are the devs concern. Some of the bests posts in this thread where about the help-o-matic where people gave the reasons it was an issue and suggestions that argh could look at.

wow this is a long post.. I am really trying to get the point across though so I will try a different example:

"Shit sux" is not good feedback

Ask yourself why does shit suck? is it because of other factors like screensize or other units make it useless? Are there ways to make it more useful? Are you sure you are using it correctly? ask. If you were using it incorrectly, was it poorly described? was the name misleading? maybe there is a setting that will make the shitnotsuck(sometimes uis have these options) ask why the shitsux one is on when the alternate should be the default(ui, unit on/of etc).

I don't know this really isn't my thread just trying to help and if I am sending messages you don't want in your thread feel free to tell me delete this shit argh.

Gota wrote:Argh.
Do you have a final plan on how pure will play?like gameplay wise.
Is there a point at which it will enter the unit balance/tweaking mod?
or will it always be under constant development that alters the gameplay every x months?

Argh wrote:from here on out, other than balance fixes, I want to concentrate on *other neet, non balance-related stuff*

learn to read. that is all.

Well,if you want to be a smart ass i meant when that will be the only thing to improve,meaning that all game features have been implemented.

unlike CA=not in constant development,making huge changes and chaging the game upside down every few months.

yeah, the CA stable builds could come a bit less often.

1. I'm changing stuff in major ways, largely because it's obvious that what's been done thus far isn't fun enough to be a compelling game.

That said, it's time to start getting serious about building missions and a Single-Player experience that isn't junk, so this is the last time I have, before I have to freeze things again to keep my life sane while I get all of the other stuff done that needs doing.

I'm hearing a lot of resistance about the pay-now system. I guess I'll drop that- it's not really that important anyhow, compared to adding on a third resource to limit exponentiality (i.e., make the game less "spammy") and addressing the fundamental issues of Overmind's economy vs. Resistance.

2. Gota's point is that huge changes on a regular basis make it hard to have any opinion about balance. That's certainly true, and I don't really like changing things that affect the whole design willy-nilly. The basic game design was frozen several months ago, and I've gotten to see the results, both from playing with other people and from feedback and private testing.

3. I am still planning on a private beta test for RC4, to get initial feedback before a public release, and get any major bugs worked out before then. If anybody wants to participate (other than Hoi, who's already volunteered), they should let me know.

I'd like to participate, as I will have a significant amount of free time available for December.

adding on a third resource to limit exponentiality (i.e., make the game less "spammy")

Isn't E suppose to limit expansion? If you want to make it less spammy scale some units up and get some decent antiswarm.

I am still planning on a private beta test for RC4

Multiplayer? In my experience you are no good at balancing and you wouldn't want to release a game that can be broken in 5 minutes.

Multiplayer?

Absolutely.

As for the rest of it... meh, if you have specific recommendations, now's the time...

If you want to help, go through the current units, list what's wrong with them in your opinion, and send me a PM. I'm always open to feedback, but you can't just say, "you don't know what you're doing", it doesn't actually help me at all, other than to leave me with the impression that stuff's broken, and nobody knows what is. I mean... the econ stuff that got broken for Overmind (MetalMakers, etc.) was just plain broke- that's pretty straightforward. But nobody tells me anything about specific units, so I have no idea what exactly is wrong.

Telling me, "X is useless" is completely worthless- why is it useless, that is the question.

For example... "The Heavy Shell is useless, because I can't get it into range against Resistance before it's destroyed". That's useful- it may need a hitpoint boost, or it may need an increase in speed. Just saying it's borked is not enough.

But overall... meh, other than legitimate complaints about the economic issues, I haven't gotten much feedback about RC3, so I'm pretty much in the dark. Most of the huge stuff, like the Ion Laser's range, nerfing turrets, etc. was dealt with prior to RC3, and yet nobody's told me whether any of that stuff did what they wanted them to.

I'm of the opinion that the Tank and MBT are currently massively OP for cost, because I gave them a huge hitpoint boost due to whining about it. It's pretty obvious nobody's tested that, or I would hear more whining, and a request to nerf, etc.

To summarize... since most of the game's current balance is the result of listening to my testers and players... if stuff's broken, it's mainly because you guys give really bad advice.

I think it's sad that I'm here, responding to people every day, and fixing anything I'm told about, and people give me grief about it, instead of being constructive. It's like saying that Spring's developers suck, and obviously know nothing about game engine design, because there are bugs that prevent some people from playing the game- it's not a fair statement, you don't have any idea how much stuff is on my plate, and there's just one of me

I mean... wtf, people? If you want balance changes, just ask for them! It's not that fucking complicated! Otherwise, I have to assume that things are working as intended. That's my job here, basically- fix stuff that's broken, while adding new things. It's not that complicated, but it doesn't work without feedback to tell me what's working.

For example, here's good balance feedback:

I would say figters and whole air balance is fine, its just that Defender is best turret for cost. Bith sam and chainsaw are lacking firepower while screamer is ok for his role - keeping figter patrols back.

Figters die very fast to any type of ground AA. Just bring some AA under fig patrol and watch :)

On the other hand, seaplane figters are very bad, allmost useless. (in comarison to vamp). They still fight gunships and bombers in a decent manner.

That tells NOIZe that he might want to look at the DPS output of the tier-two turrets, and maybe look at seaplanes and see whether they need a buff somewhere. If other people say something else, then you get more information from the exchange- if nothing else, you can see what players are thinking, and how they're using the units (correctly or not).

Google_Frog wrote:You should really look at your turret costs and think. Laser turrets cost 180m, gun turrets cost 300m. The laser turret is better. Also the resistance gun turret cost 42.

Stuff like that. I haven't played in a while and you've changed things in the RC4 so the feedback probably wouldn't be relevant. Even if it is I doubt I'd get a multiplayer game nowadays to test it.

Count me in for a multiplayer beta, then I can give proper feedback.

You want the turrets to be even more nerfed?

I think I'll hold off on that, until you've seen what happened to the economies of both sides. As a Resistance player, you're no longer drowning in riches, to put it another way.

I'd be interested in playtesting. On a sidenote, you're asking about non continuous resources in a forum of TA's spiritual follower. Did you expect everybody to embrace it? I think while it may have it's drawbacks, it's way more Newb friendly; and I think having one starter side which is not too far from convention is a good thing. So I'd give the buy in a lump system a try (for resistance; though having different resource systems for the different sides might be confusing as well).

On a sidenote, you're asking about non continuous resources in a forum of TA's spiritual follower. Did you expect everybody to embrace it?

<shrugs> I just assume we're all grown-up enough to deal with it. I mean, I dunno exactly how many RTS games I've played, but more than 20. OTA's resource economy is unique, both in good ways and bad. While it acts like it's endlessly forgiving, in reality, it's just hiding mistakes from people, which is why nobody else uses it. That, and most RTS games deliberately require more micro on the economic end.

btw why don't you upload the mod on spring.jobjol.nl ? the installer is good for new players, but for spring players ... i doubt anyone want to install two versions of spring just for pure

My personal opinion is that it's not that they are different approaches - the TA approach is an improvement on the old and (imo) outdated method of down payment - especially if you are using TA's 'infinite resources' mechanism, as well as TA's expanded scale. Pay as resources come in, an infinite-yet-supply-limited resource model, and a typically epic scale with hundreds of untis are all mutually inclusive of each other, I think. If you remove one, the others don't really work.

Satirik wrote:btw why don't you upload the mod on spring.jobjol.nl ? the installer is good for new players, but for spring players ... i doubt anyone want to install two versions of spring just for pure

Why would people install another spring for it? Am i missing something?

I see what you mean... but besides the fact that this change is Resistance only, since I am keeping Overmind as close to stock OTA as I think is reasonable... I think that instead of looking at this as a difficulty, perhaps a paradigm shift is in order.

Argh you have utterly failed to understand what has happened to AI development in the last year or two.

You say you opened the doors to AI developers? Firstly, there were no AI developers save kloot to actually get to the doors, they were all stuck in real life or struggling to get their feet out of the bear trap that was the mingw32 compiler change.

The AI itnerface redesign si long overdue and addresses the number one crippling problem fo AI development here. Our 'build in visiual studio and upload to site, post in forums' release cycle was utterly shattered and replaced with a complicated longwinded cycle that required an extensive and coutner productive set up which wasn't documented and when help was asked for, usually resulted in the word 'scons' which tbh didn't mean much, and wasn't very helpful, yet still required all the steps we and complicated environment setups needed to build.

Basically compare the old way (plugging a few things together and throwing it out into the community) with the new way (spend hours building a build environment, build using command line tools and an IDE that rarely ever works and refuses to debug libraries under windows, deal with library packages that are incomplete and need you to mess around etc etc)

This made building and developing AI a huge hassle for those of us who used Visual Studio, and the new C interface will allow us to return to the old way.

What's more, none of us know lua, nor do we have the time to learn how to build lua gadgets and all these APIs as it is. Most AI devleopers have trouble finding time to work on the existing C/C++ code they have nevermind lua stuff. We're told its simple but we're not told how. Accronyms are thrown at us, yet no working example is given, no explanation, just very crude 1 line sentences that assume a tonne of knowledge we don't have.

Kloot is the only person who has actually done anything that bridges the AI<->lua divide and he is not telling us anything, just that its simple, and in the process beign extremely counterproductive, because to see the code we need access to the Starwars private beta testing, and those guys are steering clear completely.

The other AI developers as a result do not understand how lua <-> AI communication was intended to work, or how to use the AI end of the API, and as a result, there is no consensus on how to implement AI <-> lua in the new interface beyond taking the existing methods and tacking them on the end of the C interface.

Anyway argh, you are manipulating a fundamental logic flow in your game that AIs depend on as an absolute certainty. Whats more your refusing to explain the new logic flow, which means redesigning and adapting is now impossible because there is no specification for the problem. We do not know if there is even a problem in the first place.

I have no idea what you want to do now because your not giving any information yet your complaining your getting nothing back. Your not helping at all.

"You're"

>_>

Warlord Zsinj wrote:"You're"

>_>

Neither are you (not a reference to above post)

On a sidenote, you're asking about non continuous resources in a forum of TA's spiritual follower. Did you expect everybody to embrace it?

It's the Spring Engine forum, things change, take a hint. It's not all about bloody TA i welcome the changes and i look forward to playing the first stable p.u.r.e release.