Art, Derivation, Legal Mumbling

[AF]

tbh the *A community has the resources and means to upstick and leave anytime they want, and while they remain almost exclusively here they're like a dam laced with lead, holding back spring and tainting it.

If anything the project sub-forums are a bad idea. They shouldn't have been made here, they should be an entire message board hosted elsewhere.

Someone should start an official BA website (a basic forum isnt hard to make) and the CA guys should shift all CA stuff to their own server forums and stuff, they already have a considerable amount of infrastructure offsite as it is. This site should primarily focus on development, and the technical support of content developers and other developers. It's ill equipped to serve the needs of a playerbase as it is, and never will be.

[Otherside]

Im sure that the forums being clogged up with *A derivatives and most of the subforums being made up of *A mods (at least the active ones) are off putting to new artists and game dev's in general who still see Spring as TA in 3D instead of an RTS engine.

The engine dev's are not doing spring any favours by adding extra support (sub forums) to the *A mods and giving off that impression.

[AF]

The sub forums have a double edge effect, they clear up the main forum of the major *A mod threads, while in effect lending official weight. At the same time, the non-BA and non-CA mods based on TA litter the main forums instead, which is even worse.

There is no need for sub forums. Every game should have its own site. Forb and I have already offered and gone to great lengths. I will setup blogs and everything, foreboding has a prepackaged website for deployment with wiki and forums and everything already. You need not know anything about web design, you need only ask and login when presented with a brand new site.

[lurker]

The engine dev's are not doing ... sub forums ...

FTFY

[BaNa]

oh shush noone likes a party pooper. You dont like them then dont look at them how about that?

[CarRepairer]

CA has a discussion forum on its website but most players don't even know about the website, much less go there, much less create an account, much less post there. CA's massive 75 page "news" thread on this forum was too much and it's a lot easier to communicate now. This only proves that having a mod website is not enough, at this state in spring.

[Otherside]

thats cause CA's forum isnt a proper forum its some crappy trac thing

[Saktoth]

I know you are a big advocate of the ghettoization of Spring AF, but splitting up servers and sites would only kill every mod except BA.

No other mod has a self-sustaining playerbase yet. CA is the closest but even it relies on people being able to log in and then pick which game they want to play based on activity.

People can log into spring knowing there will be a game up, it may not be their preffered mod but it will be a game of something. Even disregarding the BA players overlap, the non-BA mods communities are incredibly incestuous. Most of the regular s44, IW, CA, NOTA and XTA players play at least two of those mods.

When a game seriously starts advertising outside of this little community and has any hope of getting a self-sustaining playerbase you can think about splitting the community up. At the moment, the community is just too small to be split.

OTA content only holds spring back because there is no free-content mod bringing players in, and the OTA mods are incapable of seriously recruiting due to the legal issues (be they a stigma or legitamate fears) outlined. Splitting off the OTA mods wont magically increase the number of players, only well-advertised and promoted free content games will.

[Gota]

PURE?S44?SWIW?KP?Gundam?
Where are the people?
The issue is not free of IP content...
starting to play spring is not streamlined enough yet...
It's still pretty complicated to make spring work.

[AF]

I know you are a big advocate of the ghettoization of Spring AF, but splitting up servers and sites would only kill every mod except BA.

I do not call it ghetto-ization, I call it standing on your own two feet.

No other mod has a self-sustaining playerbase yet. CA is the closest but even it relies on people being able to log in and then pick which game they want to play based on activity.

This is not because the content isn't good enough, this is because the current ecosystem does not allow for it. Our current ecosystem requires a larger number fo players, while at the same time stifling the growth of the community, preventing those players from staying. A catch 22 of sorts.

People can log into spring knowing there will be a game up, it may not be their preferred mod but it will be a game of something. Even disregarding the BA players overlap, the non-BA mods communities are incredibly incestuous. Most of the regular s44, IW, CA, NOTA and XTA players play at least two of those mods.

They have to play more than one mod, and this is actually both a desirable outcome, and a trait fo normal players. The average player of computer games does not pick a game then stick with it for life, I personally own more than one game, and sometimes I og back to games I once played.

When a game seriously starts advertising outside of this little community and has any hope of getting a self-sustaining playerbase you can think about splitting the community up. At the moment, the community is just too small to be split.

Too small precisely because ti has not been split up, however I would point you towards P.U.R.E and the other games attempting to do exactly the thing you said hasnt been done.

OTA content only holds spring back because there is no free-content mod bringing players in, and the OTA mods are incapable of seriously recruiting due to the legal issues (be they a stigma or legitamate fears) outlined. Splitting off the OTA mods wont magically increase the number of players, only well-advertised and promoted free content games will.

Not at all, there are numerous popular websites listing free games that pointblank refused to list spring because of TA and didnt care if there was other content that was perfectly legal.


What we have here people is a single plant pot, the engine plant pot. Inside which we have the little plants, the games. This pot is only so large on its own, and the pot was put there as a nursery for games. One or two plants in the pot however have grown too large and need repotting. Without repotting, neither they nor the other plants can grow any larger.

You see BA suffers from this too. You could easily double the player base of BA and CA while having no impact on the other mods if effort was put into a BA installer advertisement and mini-site

[AF]

I agree with gota too, PC Zone when commenting on Starwars for spring said it was rough around the edges so unless your tech inclined steer clear.

[Forboding Angel]

I know you are a big advocate of the ghettoization of Spring AF, but splitting up servers and sites would only kill every mod except BA.

That isn't true at all, gundam is very much alive and kicking, evo is very much alive and kicking, making a lot of progress and we have a tiny playerbase.

You mean it would kill of CA because the main reason CA gets as much love as it does is because people actually play it. How many of you are dedicated to sticking around and working on it when you have no players?

I'm sure there are some of you that would stick around no matter what, but the truth is that a lot of your dev work would immediately tank.

So what you really meant to say is: "Splitting up servers and sites would kill CA."

Why do we want to keep CA alive? It's not exactly a new way to slice bread, you you're still a *A clone, so why should it matter to the rest of us?


One thing that IS true, is that atm if the servers were split up, things would get kinda lonely for us little guys

[lurker]

Forb, don't you think Evo would get more help if it was more popular? CA would be just fine. Also, if anything is done to kick out *A games, CA will simply stop being one.

But it'll get really annoying if I have to modify things to load lobby channels on different servers.

[Forboding Angel]

Yeah I'm quite sure it would, and already the whole remodel has received a lot of help from interested people.

While I agree in principle about kicking out *A, I kinda fail to see the practicality of it. I wasn't saying "Down with CA!", I was just saying that if stuff was split up, we aren't just going to abandon our projects for reasons unknown.

Spring atm is a mess honestly. The fact that the lobby isn't a part of spring is a real trojan horse to the OC games in the fact that unless we learn to be epicly awesome coders we will always be tied in with the rest of the stuff. It makes it real tough to get our own thing going.

I, for one, want evo to be a standalone game at some point. That doesn't mean cutting off current spring users from it, it just means isolating the game for newcomers. You dl evo, that's what you get. As always the raw mod stuff would be available for current spring users.

I have already done this to some extent, but what I have found is that my bundling of springlobby is kinda meh. Springlobby just doesn't work well enough on windows machines to be taken seriously.

I don't have an answer tbh. It's not like working with source where we can just make our own independent deal. As a result, spring is pretty much being relegated to the realm of hobbists, rather than true hardcore game developers.

[AF]

hmmm what do you want to do that requires you to be epicly awesome coders?