New User Impressions and Suggestions

[Forboding Angel]

I played for about 1/2 hour, playing with the units, making buildings and stuff like that. It's my second pass on trying out Evo. Basically after getting used to the artwork, I was like... mmmm, better get a metal extractor up, some energy producing buildings and some defense turrets (sound familiar?). No, it's not exactly like TA and the gameplay rules are different (just a win condition mode, really), but it''s TA inside and it feels like it.

Ya know... I would love to have a team member who could help me out with stuff, steer the game and so on (I like listening to new Ideas). I may feel a bit insulted here, but I try not to let me pride (such as it is) get in the way of progress.

[Forboding Angel]

@ Forboding Angel

Not meant as an insult but if stages 2 to 6 were easy why does nobody ever do them? Just look through any mod forum for any game and see how many models never get past the first forum thread, even when they look awesome. I think an Md5 importer will help somewhat but the real show-stopper tends to be animation.

I'm sorry? I genuinely don't understand what you are talking about here. My post was referring to nxain.

[nxain]

Wow. I feel genuinely insulted.

I guess I could get mad about it, but what's the point?

You shouldn't, because at the end of the day, the game is all about the user's interaction with the content.

The theory is that the programmers enable the designers and artists to make the game (the programmers shouldn't be making the game - or else you get hard to use products...) Programmers support content builders who, in turn, support the vision. Without a strong vision and chain of customers, everyone just goes off and does what they want to regardless of how it adds to the end product and user experience.

- nXain

[SpliFF]

Not meant as an insult but if stages 2 to 6 were easy why does nobody ever do them?

I'm sorry? I genuinely don't understand what you are talking about here. My post was referring to nxain.

I thought you were a modeller taking offense at the "dime a dozen" reference.

[daan 79]

You shouldn't, because at the end of the day, the game is all about the user's interaction with the content.

The theory is that the programmers enable the designers and artists to make the game (the programmers shouldn't be making the game - or else you get hard to use products...) Programmers support content builders who, in turn, support the vision. Without a strong vision and chain of customers, everyone just goes off and does what they want to regardless of how it adds to the end product and user experience.

- nXain

I think you have some good ideas besides that flagship but plz dont say after a few months here how things should work. And ppl here just do things because they want not because they are needed. Ant visions and stuff are great but plz stay on the ground. And i think you forget by saying this and this should be done before spring breaks down that spring has come along way and its moving faster upwards every year. Plz read about some replys here and find out ppl are willing to do certain things because they want to not because spring than will become something. Spring allready is a damn cool thing.

[Forboding Angel]

Yes, I am, not a very good one, but yes...

And no I didn;t take offense to what you said.

[nxain]

BTW, there's probably quite a few people reading this who think I'm just not clued in about all the cool stuff going on with Spring and the various games / mods. This is true. It's called the "fresh eyes" test. When you bring in someone not familiar with the details of a problem, you get feedback not tied to any baggage or understanding of the problems behind the scenes. The effect last anywhere from 10 minutes to a few weeks depending on on how complex the problems are. Once it wears off and the subject (in this case me), has more information, perception changes and bias form. Being knowledgeable about Spring won't give you more valid feedback, just more emphatic feedback.

Reality -
Publisher QA Lead, "Your game sucks."
nXain, "Yea, I'll work on that, can you put it in as a bug for me?"

[SpliFF]

Publisher QA Lead, "Your game sucks."
nXain, "Yea, I'll work on that, can you put it in as a bug for me?"

Bug Report #788845

Issue: Your game sucks
Repeatable: Every time I see it it sucks more.
Comments: My kid told me it should be more like Halo. Make it more like Halo.

Sorry to go OT, I couldn't resist

[Forboding Angel]

Prolly holds a bit of truth ironically enough

[daan 79]

I am very happy you started this tread. I hope you will succeed on your way of promoting spring better and have all mods work with better installers and interfaces. While your at it you could also structure the libraries of models and miscs. Besides that you could start a new topic called promotion team and get some diehard psp artist to contribute and make one voice outside. I dont think you dont know that ther are awsome things going around. I hope you can profide soem more cooperations by spreading out your ideas. Welcome here. But dont make a flagship plz

[SpliFF]

Back on topic. It seems to me that your first experience of Spring was to jump into a game of Balanced Annihilation. You seem to be basing your view on that mod.

The thing is you really had a choice to jump into one of 10 different mods but I'm guessing like most people you went with BA because it was the most familiar and had the most games running.

Which really means your first impressions weren't governed by Spring at all but by your own actions, and those of people hosting games. If a killer mod is going to come along it won't be the Spring Devs who make it happen but some truly awesome gameplay you don't get elsewhere. Which instantly makes people wary. The whole thing is a vicious circle until the killer mod is made but that's not something we can solve in this thread.

If your company were to get involved in making a killer mod that would be awesome (I'm almost positive the spring GPL licence doesn't extended to mods that use it). There is nothing I know of preventing a commercial developer from creating and selling a killer Spring mod, provided you provide the Spring source code somewhere on your website.

I went for a job at Auran once and took in my art portfolio and talked to the boss. He dropped a 1/2 metre thick folder on the desk and said "these are ideas we were sent this month. We're not going to do any of them because ideas are easy and we have our own."

The Spring community has no shortage of ideas either, just the man(woman)power to do them all at once.

[smoth]

nxain, it isn't so much that you are a noob, you supposedly have qualifications and if anything we have accepted that without asking for proof. At the least you should know we are nice enough to give you benefit of a doubt.

However, and there always is one. We do not need a "fresh eyes test" or whatever, we get them all the time and they are dime a dozen. I am interested in any new or interesting perspective you bring but as Argh said, we have talked about much of this. Also the be fair, rolling in and telling us what we need to do, how we need to do it without making the effort to look at the projects not released but coming down the pipe leaves you in a state of ignorance. Resulting in much pointless debate and text.

It is like coming to a debate bringing all old issues and demanding that they are addressed when they are already resolved. ESP when you make blanket statements about how everything is pretty much ta. If you were talking about the TA mods that is fine, but you have said that none of this is for them.

Much of this has been discussed and unlike paid devs we do not spend fulltime on our project(maybe argh) but having jobs/school means that our project timelines are much longer. Combine with that the fact that much of our content is generated by 1-2 people per project. Yeah, we all know that many of the currently release projects do have a TA flavor to them. We are not stupid, however, you did not bother to look at what is in the works. That is your bad.

You may know a lot about this or that, good for you but do not come in with only a cursory knowledge of the subject then tell us what to do. I am a developer, as a developer before you suggest any changes you make certain that you understand the code. You should know this. Instead you did not really look into what spring is capable of.

Also on artist. yeah it is easy to find talent on a paying job but for a hobby project it is not as easy. If it was I would not be modeling. Free artists who will stick around and work with you are hard to find for these sort of projects. It is hard to find FREE labor.

[Pxtl]

Is anybody even *trying* to make a decent single-player gamemode or tutorial system for BA? That's probably the big problem that BA has - it's a very hard game and there is no way to learn except in multiplayer.

That, and it wouldn't hurt to get an FFA-friendly game-mode for BA, so that n00b games could be FFA instead of either "get killed instantly by Jeffies by a hardcore player in a 1v1" or "drag down your team in a 5v5". An FFA game would mean that the players that are aggressively competing for the main objective would probably be ignoring the weaker players a fair bit.

However, BA isn't good for FFA - After all, FFA in any last-man-standing game is silly - the winner is the least-aggressive player, since the aggressive ones are tearing each other to shreds, leaving the pacifist to pound them all into oblivion by teching up.

A nice "King of the Hill" mode in BA would probably help FFA fair bit - you could run a nice 5-player FFA/KOTH on Blackstar or something.

[nxain]

If your company were to get involved in making a killer mod that would be awesome (I'm almost positive the spring GPL licence doesn't extended to mods that use it). There is nothing I know of preventing a commercial developer from creating and selling a killer Spring mod, provided you provide the Spring source code somewhere on your website.

I went for a job at Auran once and took in my art portfolio and talked to the boss. He dropped a 1/2 metre thick folder on the desk and said "these are ideas we were sent this month. We're not going to do any of them because ideas are easy and we have our own."

That's in Australia, right? If I'm not mistaken, the studio tanked a couple of months ago.

My company has a proprietary engine that cost a very large amount of money and years to build. You haven't heard much about it yet, but you will when our various projects are announced (you've definitely heard of projects I've worked on previously). This has been a difficult engine to build because we're really trying to go for some big feature systems that aren't common yet and develop new gameplay. Everything I've talked about is from experience in working with complex game technology involving a end user who expects to have fun with your work.

I don't realistically see any interest in Spring from commercial developers with huge investments in their own engines. I can see, Spring being used by "garage devs" to get their first product off the ground (that should be the main source of new tech and innovation). In fact, the reason I'm on this board annoying you is because Spring could be the gateway to literally thousands of developers putting out the game they want to play and driving a vibrant DOY community. Spring is the only real competitor I see to Flash based games, but the window of opportunity won't be around long.

Also, Spring should be used by Universities and game development programs, who currently strongly favor Unreal (you can't really "give back" with Unreal, whereas work done in Spring really give back in the spirit of Open Source). The government should also be a source of game development and technology. The DOD does quite a bit of game-esque development now, usually on commercial game engines or home-brewed sim engines (this is largely driven by academics wanting to make cool things for training).

As far as good ideas go... the game industry is awash with them. The only thing that matters is being able to actually make something (and finance it...) I do, however, always ask my interviewees to describe the game he / she wants to make, regardless of the position being interviewed for.

- nXain

[nxain]

You may know a lot about this or that, good for you but do not come in with only a cursory knowledge of the subject then tell us what to do. I am a developer, as a developer before you suggest any changes you make certain that you understand the code. You should know this. Instead you did not really look into what spring is capable of.

I can tell immediately that what Spring is doing overall is not working and there are no products ready for the general public or tieing the community together. In all fairness, other Open Source projects have to live and die by the same rules and volunteer efforts. Gnome is working. Ubuntu is working. Blender is working. Will Spring work? The question is in doubt.

- nXain

[SpliFF]

Yeah, they imploded after the debacle that was Fury. There's a really interesting interview about it on the net where one of the programmers vented about the whole thing.

Anyway. Spring is not a game game development platform. It is molded by its RTS roots and that isn't likely to change. General development is better done with Apocalyx, CrystalSpace or XNA.

All the products you mentioned have a larger audience and therefore more developers. The fact that you think they're comparable means at least Spring PR is working.

[nxain]

Anyway. Spring is not a game game development platform. It is molded by its RTS roots and that isn't likely to change. General development is better done with Apocalyx, CrystalSpace or XNA.

All the products you mentioned have a larger audience and therefore more developers. The fact that you think they're comparable means at least Spring PR is working.

I wouldn't say comparable so more as comparable potential. Spring could be the Ubuntu of gaming. I don't care much for Crystal Space (it's considered the ghetto of gaming).

-nXain

[smoth]

The question is who cares? The devs just want to write good code and do interesting things? We are all "garage" devs as you say that is fine. A core project isn't needed at this point. This isn't a NEW IDEA, it is and OLD IDEA.

Again, you say what spring is doing isn't working for it. I think you are premature to say that. The key part you keep ignoring is what is in the works. I cannot snap my fingers and produce a good project for you and to hurry and rush a project results in a shoddy job. Good things take time and people are doing this in their spare time. So come off of it, none of us are going to work any faster and saying that you know stuff doesn't make things go any faster.

Why can you not recognize the point that this is going to be a garage type engine and you know what... nothing good in computing ever started with people fucking around with garage projects:



If people want a good engine they are going to go with ogre etc. Fuck my one of my best friends is strictly an engine dev. doing professional work and his engine make this one look like a steaming pile of shit. You act as though we are all 13year old wannabes who have no concept of anything, give us some credit.

You want to see your idea done, get started. You want to try and help spring pick up the source and start patching. Content is coming projects that each in their own way show off the engine are coming but saying that they are not because all of the stuff released is WIP is fucking stupid. The version of starwars that is out is like 2 years old and the version of gundam is >1 year old. In that time there has been a lot of work. You would know this if you looked on moddb at all the images and videos that the various in progress projects are posting.

BUT YOU DIDN'T BOTHER.

Don't tell us what to do when you don't know what we are doing. You cannot say that spring has nothing good to showcase it if those projects are in the works. It is rude and frankly I think you are just ignoring the ongoing efforts because you feel your concepts should be pursued. Content takes time and here is where you experience is irrelevant: We are GARAGE devs and it is something that we are proud of, we are the indie scene and we are not your corporate developers! We will take our time but don't waste our time we have precious little of it. Yeah you can snap your fingers and crack a whip over random code monkey and have them scramble but that isn't happening here. You ignore all of our projects, I bet you didn't look at fibre? it is a small download and nothing like TA.

Until you look at what is coming, what is really done, I suggest you stop, read up on it and the come back with real feedback instead of old crap that we have discussed to the point of MTR. Right now you are telling us what do to base on the experience with a few projects. Spring's strength should not come from the fact that it is over focused on one thing. It comes from the fact that the stuff that will be here all too soon will be very differnt from TA. With a little effort spring can do almost anything as long as it is an RTS. However, you only looked at a bit of it's potential.

I'm done here guys, don't waste your time.

[daan 79]

It think what here was to be said is the spring community is proud anough to say bye to alot of potantial users if that means they cant just do ther jobs on a non demanded way. Spring community on the other hand imbrasses ppl tha thave ideas and something going on that comes of the ppl ther own mind and not givin in by soem other pseado reason like market.

I remeber when i bought ta i knew this was different from all other games. That only made me valid my reasons to contribute to this because it takes alot of time. I not much of a contributor besides the fact i play alot. You probelly here for the same reason but trying to comparish this with blender and other really shows a lack of understanding.

[SpliFF]

Actually I was bored, and wasting my time anyway, and probably the only one other than nXain who hasn't heard it all. Still I think this conversation is tapped out:

* We can't improve PR because the mods in progress are in progress and trying to "sell" them to the public is just going to taint the final releases.

* We can't rush the mods because everyone who wants to work on them is already doing so.

* We can't combine the mods because they are a product of many different concepts and interests.

* We can't do anything except plod along at our real lives while filling in time programming, testing and helping on the forums.

I'm not entirely sure what you think will help. Even better interfaces and lobbies are under development.

If you're not totally put off by the resentment brewing please have a look through the forums and the wiki and try some mods under development and then be more precise with your concerns and hopefully the reception won't be as hostile.