Spring RTS Engine

Dragon45 wrote:SmuG is the fucking Rainbow Coalition. We just need a black dude and a mexican, and we'll be set.

Actually I'm not a chinese girl. I'm just a white girl with an education.

oops I made a mistake. The guy asking for chinese support meant the game itself. specifically to be able to display chinese and use chinese input


basically they have two major problems that prevent them from playing, in order of importance:

1. the networking/high ping problem
2. language barrier

also, one guy said that there a few chinese TA players, and even less chinese spring players, and that forum really isn't all that active. I wonder where all thoes people who download it go.

jackalope wrote:oops I made a mistake. The guy asking for chinese support meant the game itself. specifically to be able to display chinese and use chinese input


basically they have two major problems that prevent them from playing, in order of importance:

1. the networking/high ping problem
2. language barrier

also, one guy said that there a few chinese TA players, and even less chinese spring players, and that forum really isn't all that active. I wonder where all thoes people who download it go.

The reason I like to have some more support for the Chinese-Taiwanese (and Indians [EDIT]I see the Indian spike was only incedental (one month)[/EDIT]) is not because there is a 'really' large existing userbase, I like to do this as the statistics show that the current userbase downloads Spring but don't involve themselfs in the Spring community. It's a deviation that should have some attention. And now we know why.

Alright I changed my text a bit, can you still give it a try?:
Technically it would be possible to have Chinese lobby chat support I presume, but we had moderation problems in the past where we had a flame-war in French and moderators powerless to act as they could not understand it.
To solve this we would need people that can write/read both Chinese and English as lobby moderators.
There might be more things that would have to be resolved before we can effectively support a multi-language community but as a native Dutch speaker I understand some of the pain.
I don't know how much work it would be to alter the Spring engine to have support for the Chinese language, could be a small hack can just as well require changes in the net code.
Information in Chinese would be possible with the new site but some things like the text of news itself would be in English, I hope to have support for translated tutorials.
I'm working on the Spring site, other developers would have to look into the networking problems and multi-language support for the lobby and engine.

tasclient lacks support of any kind for chinese characters.

AFLobby supports it but the message is then garbled when sent to and from the server.

Battle listings dont support it or anywhere else so I assume when betalord set the character encoding to fix a server crash bug where magic strings in messages crashed the server, he inadvertently dropped chinese support in the protocol, eitherway the lobby itself lacks support in its textbox and table components.

chinese characters are basically 2 western characters clumped together. i think if they are running chinese windows, they can view it, where as those who dont have the character set see crap.

jackalope is a caucasian male.

Its not a windows problem its a tasclient problem. I can see chinese characters fine, but the character encoding used in tasclients components and TASServers networking doesnt support foreign characters past the most basic european variants.

TASClient doesnt even support the entire chracter set it uses, which sometimes shows up in aflobby when you post character symbols and they show as question marks and squares in tasclient but other aflobby users can see them even if a tasclient user copy pastes

Foxomaniac wrote:And an arab dude....... OH WAIT

No, arab dude will just cause bad feelings in the clan to.... shall we say... EXPLODE? B)

Plus im brown. that's enoguh people from asia/africa that are brown.

so like i said, black and mexican, and we're set. I suppose if we wnated to be really diverse, a girl would be nice to have in the clan too. But ethnicity is more important B)

Wait, so Nixa left the clan? I always heard she was a female arab hobbit.

AF wrote:Its not a windows problem its a tasclient problem. I can see chinese characters fine, but the character encoding used in tasclients components and TASServers networking doesnt support foreign characters past the most basic european variants.

TASClient doesnt even support the entire chracter set it uses, which sometimes shows up in aflobby when you post character symbols and they show as question marks and squares in tasclient but other aflobby users can see them even if a tasclient user copy pastes

TASClient is Delphi right? Delphi doesn't include Unicode support, or maybe it does now but sucks at it. We'd need Unicode support on both the server and mainline client if we wanted to really reach out to the Chinese and Indian communities. If Delphi can't do the Unicode support we need, it'll be time to do a new client in QT4 or some other really good cross platform library.

Cough. AFlobby, Java.

neddiedrow wrote:Cough. AFlobby, Java.

I think AF and I have had this discussion. Java + Swing will work, but I personally think QT may work better. Also, GTK should be immediately disqualified as an option because it is a disaster area on Windows, speaking as a BITTER ex-Gaim user.

The only two decent platforms that are on Windows, Linux, and OSX are Java and QT as far as I know, and I think QT 4.3 will probably perform better and achieve results much closer to the native look and feel.

*cough* SpringLobby

It uses C++ and wxWidgets, so portability or localization won't be problems. WxWidgets uses native widgets (WIN32 on Windows, GTK on Linux, etc) on all platforms and it also automatically sizes the dialogs properly (so that all the text fits nicely, even if localization makes it shorter or longer than in the original language. Unicode is fully supported, of course.

el_matarife wrote:... Chinese and Indian communities. ...

Chinese and Taiwanese, I included the Indians as last month it had a download spike but it's was a abnormality, the Chinese and Taiwanese are consistent in this.

I added these bugs to Mantis for the Unicode and connectivity problems of the Chinese and Taiwanese Spring users.
http://spring.clan-sy.com/mantis/view.php?id=561
http://spring.clan-sy.com/mantis/view.php?id=562
http://spring.clan-sy.com/mantis/view.php?id=564

To any Chinese user reading this, I think we will need some good information regarding the connectivity problems.

I think java swings layout management is far superior to wxwidgets.

Java swing is brilliant, and when used correctly can do soem amazing thigns. Sadly ti has a bad name because 99% of all programs in java dont use ti correctly, and vioalte the golden rules of GUI programming (only do GUI stuff in the GUI thread and never do lengthy operations in that thread or the GUI will block). As a result most java programs become slow, sluggish, prone to lockups and errors.

But when used correctly its great. As can be seen in the steady stability and performance increases that have been coming in since I first found out about it.

So yes perhaps a new lobby might do the trick, and we can always keep tasclient as that plan B system incase thigns go horribly wrong. But we need help. AFLobby for the moment is a 1 man show, and so is spring lobby. That needs to change very soon, if only to speed up lobby development.

And I've already posted images of AFLobby with chinese text in it, and I have partially translated to french (I'm not a french user though so I'm not sure how well it works).

AF wrote:I think java swings layout management is far superior to wxwidgets.

Seems pretty much the same to the user. The developer interface of Swing is far superior, though, as one does not need to manually play with the sizers as in wxWidgets. I believe that this is going to be fixed in wxTNG, which won't be out any time soon, but this issue isn't a showstopper as it only bothers the developers and not the users (remember that a program is written only once, but then used numerous times).

Java swing is brilliant, and when used correctly can do soem amazing thigns. Sadly ti has a bad name because 99% of all programs in java dont use ti correctly, and vioalte the golden rules of GUI programming (only do GUI stuff in the GUI thread and never do lengthy operations in that thread or the GUI will block). As a result most java programs become slow, sluggish, prone to lockups and errors.

This is true for every GUI library out there. Developers are taught not to use threads and the support for asynchronous I/O is lacking at the very least (even though Boost ASIO does quite nice job on C++), so they'll just block the GUI instead.

But when used correctly its great. As can be seen in the steady stability and performance increases that have been coming in since I first found out about it.

Actually Swing gets *extremely* slow when you add a lot of widgets (on JRE 1.4 at least). If you write your own paint method instead, you can do about 1000 times (a guesstimate) more in the same time, which suggests that Java isn't slow, only Swing is.

The real problem with Swing, IMO, is that it cannot use native widgets. The dialogs suck big time and the regular widgets don't look & feel right either. This is why I don't consider it an option for GUI development, at all.

So yes perhaps a new lobby might do the trick, and we can always keep tasclient as that plan B system incase thigns go horribly wrong. But we need help. AFLobby for the moment is a 1 man show, and so is spring lobby. That needs to change very soon, if only to speed up lobby development.

SpringLobby has four developers, in theory. But you are right in that only one is working at a time. Currently semi is the main developer, as tc- is busy with his family (AFAIK).

And I've already posted images of AFLobby with chinese text in it, and I have partially translated to french (I'm not a french user though so I'm not sure how well it works).

Congratulations. Keep up the good work :)

By dialogs you mean the 'OptionPane' class? I agree its ugly and not veyr good but that doesnt stop you using the alternatives.

and the regular widgets don't look & feel right either

agreed, thats because the default looknfeel classes are 'swing metal' whereas custom looknfeels can be set and even a native looknfeel that looks like the OS theme. So far the only hitch in the native look n feel I've found is that under Vista progress bars have a little sprkling animation which swing doesnt recreate but is promised in a future update.

(You might wanna upgrade form java 1.4)

Otherwise its good. It is developed by SUN though, I assume wxwidgets is opensource and free? No paid fulltime employees?

Tim Blokdijk wrote: Chinese and Taiwanese, I included the Indians as last month it had a download spike but it's was a abnormality, the Chinese and Taiwanese are consistent in this.

Well, Taiwan and China use the same character set as far as I know, so I referenced India since I assume they're using a different character set than our current vanilla ASCII.

AF wrote: Java swing is brilliant ...

Trolltech has an open source version of QT for Java out now. http://trolltech.com/products/qt/jambi
It gets pretty close to native look and feel from what I understand, which people care about. (Especially our future Mac population)

Tronic wrote:WxWidgets uses native widgets (WIN32 on Windows, GTK on Linux, etc) on all platforms and it also automatically sizes the dialogs properly (so that all the text fits nicely, even if localization makes it shorter or longer than in the original language. Unicode is fully supported, of course.

Is the performance okay? I just remember all the complaints about performance in the original BT client using WxPython and wonder if this is still sluggish.

AF wrote:By dialogs you mean the 'OptionPane' class? I agree its ugly and not veyr good but that doesnt stop you using the alternatives.

The file open dialog in particular is horrible.

(You might wanna upgrade form java 1.4)

When I quit developing with Java, 1.4 was the latest.

Otherwise its good. It is developed by SUN though, I assume wxwidgets is opensource and free? No paid fulltime employees?

They sell other stuff (wxWidgets book, DialogBlocks, etc) that apparently allows working on it full time and getting paid. The license is essentially LGPL, but it also allows distribution of binaries under users' own terms.

Time out. If you stopped with 1.4, then you shouldn't pass judgment on Java.