Spring RTS Engine

Fire at will and return fire should also be removed, as true players have the skill to fire every laser and aa missile at the right targets, having a computer do it for you is for n00bs, my old IRC friend [pwn]d3thl4z0r used to beable to micro 6 llt's at once against 40 flash tanks I have proof of this on my other computer.

Also wtf is with aircraft flying themselves, have you seen those n00b vamps circling around the sky, if a player cant steer their own planes and avoid crashing into hills they should go back to pong.

Maybe Mods should include widgets and groupai's. And only the ones inside the package can be used. So the mod maker can decide how much "cheating" is acceptable.

But then most widgets just wouldn't be used because the most popular mod at the time hasn't released a new version that includes the widget.

'sides, you could still change your client binary to use the widgets even when the host says "we don't use those" since widgets run completely client side.

But # of hardcore hackers that would do that to get an advantage in serious competitive gaming is hopefully very few. Furthermore they would hopefully be caught by means of spectators and replays. Then the simpler people who would download hacks to use can also hopefully be combated in a similar fashion, along with maybe some way to patch them out.

KDR_11k wrote:But then most widgets just wouldn't be used because the most popular mod at the time hasn't released a new version that includes the widget.

'sides, you could still change your client binary to use the widgets even when the host says "we don't use those" since widgets run completely client side.

maybe make luarules to say that only widgets from the mod archive can be used... and mutators could be made to keep it up to date.

TheFatController wrote:Fire at will and return fire should also be removed, as true players have the skill to fire every laser and aa missile at the right targets, having a computer do it for you is for n00bs, my old IRC friend [pwn]d3thl4z0r used to beable to micro 6 llt's at once against 40 flash tanks I have proof of this on my other computer.

Also wtf is with aircraft flying themselves, have you seen those n00b vamps circling around the sky, if a player cant steer their own planes and avoid crashing into hills they should go back to pong.

There is something to be drawn from this - we need to draw a line between a feature and a cheating element.

neddiedrow wrote:There is something to be drawn from this - we need to draw a line between a feature and a cheating element.

Yes, I think ideally this should be drawn at things that come with the normal installation, and everything else labeled "cheats". When your just goofing around in public team games or such I think it should be socially accepted to use anything of course. But for ladders, tournament, general competitive gaming there should be a clear line. I don't think people should need to spend a lot of time customizing their game with all kinds of addons before they can be on fair ground. So therefore, things that come with the game. Perhaps a sort of accepted list of easily accesible addons could be made tough, a tournament/ladder for example could have such a thing for itself?

TradeMark wrote:

zwzsg wrote:You have no idea of how much skill was required in TA to run a good MM based eco. This was the kind of stuff that separated the elite online players from the mass of the n00bs.

lol no, it didnt need skills at all, or if you were total retard, you might fail at controlling them. It was just annoying to control them all the time, like before attack, etc, or when you wanna use dgun, you need to press those damn shortkeys all the time...

Bingo. I don't/didn't play Spring/TA to actually play group-juggle. I guess it takes some skill to rapidly switch between your commander and your group of metal makers. Now, I'm not saying this as some "lol speedmetal only i wanna have fun" player, but I think it's downright retarded for me to spend time switching things on and off when I could be spending time deciding where to send my Cans.

Epsilon wrote:

TradeMark wrote:

zwzsg wrote:You have no idea of how much skill was required in TA to run a good MM based eco. This was the kind of stuff that separated the elite online players from the mass of the n00bs.

lol no, it didnt need skills at all, or if you were total retard, you might fail at controlling them. It was just annoying to control them all the time, like before attack, etc, or when you wanna use dgun, you need to press those damn shortkeys all the time...

Bingo. I don't/didn't play Spring/TA to actually play group-juggle. I guess it takes some skill to rapidly switch between your commander and your group of metal makers. Now, I'm not saying this as some "lol speedmetal only i wanna have fun" player, but I think it's downright retarded for me to spend time switching things on and off when I could be spending time deciding where to send my Cans.

I agree
Lets make a list of all the lua widgets that are out and decide which ones are helpers, and which are cheats

TheFatController wrote:Fire at will and return fire should also be removed, as true players have the skill to fire every laser and aa missile at the right targets, having a computer do it for you is for n00bs, my old IRC friend [pwn]d3thl4z0r used to beable to micro 6 llt's at once against 40 flash tanks I have proof of this on my other computer.

Also wtf is with aircraft flying themselves, have you seen those n00b vamps circling around the sky, if a player cant steer their own planes and avoid crashing into hills they should go back to pong.

THE IDEA WAS THAT EVERY PLAYER SHOULD HAVE EQUAL RESOURCES TO WIN, NOT TAKE US BACK TO THE STONE AGE.

IMAGINE ONE PLAYER PLAYING LIKE YOU SAID AGAINST SOMEONE WHO'S RUNNING BOTS AND AUTO-RESOURCE-BUILD SCRIPTS, THE PLAYER WITHOUT ANY ADDITIONAL SUPPORT IS CLEARLY IN A WORSE POSITION FROM THE BEGINNING. THIS IS WHAT WE(READ: ME ,BUT NOT YOU)WANT TO AVOID.

use .nohelp make it a requirement for the ladder or something PROBLEM SOLVED

Sleksa wrote:CAPS

Caps mean truth. What did you write, anyway?

Widgets are simple scripts. This is a strategy game. Something that's so simple even a script can do it is obviously not strategy, it's dumb grind. If it wasn't brainless you'd need a human's intelligence to do it right and a script wouldn't help you anyway. As long as the script doesn't have access to things humans don't it's not cheating.

Metal maker management is a stupid menial task. What kind of skill is needed in clicking an On/Off button?

tombom wrote:use .nohelp make it a requirement for the ladder or something PROBLEM SOLVED

Thread over basically...

.nohelp can be a little checkbox coded into the lobby amirite?

Zpock wrote:

neddiedrow wrote:There is something to be drawn from this - we need to draw a line between a feature and a cheating element.

Yes, I think ideally this should be drawn at things that come with the normal installation, and everything else labeled "cheats". When your just goofing around in public team games or such I think it should be socially accepted to use anything of course. But for ladders, tournament, general competitive gaming there should be a clear line. I don't think people should need to spend a lot of time customizing their game with all kinds of addons before they can be on fair ground. So therefore, things that come with the game. Perhaps a sort of accepted list of easily accesible addons could be made tough, a tournament/ladder for example could have such a thing for itself?

No. Things like customizing hotkeys are there for a reason. To suit a player's personal preference. Also included are graphical options and display options. "OMG, HE TURNED HIS GRAPHICS OPTIONS DOWN SO HE HAS A HIGHER FPS THAN ME, CHEATER!"

Seriously, that's just stupid. Cheating should be anything that effects units and issues orders automatically in game, be it a cheat that manages metal makers for you, micro or macromanages units, issues abstract order queues at the touch of a button. You should be allowed to customize what keystrokes it takes to issue an event, but you shouldn't be allowed to remove large portions of the necessary keystrokes from the game by adding common orders to hotkey queues.

This is an open sourced project. There is no guarantee anything default will be ideally designed, or even work perfectly out of the box. Customization being allowed is a necessity.

LOrDo wrote:Metal maker management is a stupid menial task. What kind of skill is needed in clicking an On/Off button?

What kind of skill is needed in rapidly hitting CTRL-B to find a free builder of the type you want? What kind of skill is needed to add new units to the hotkey groups? What kind of skill is needed to CTRL-A and give all to another player when your com is endangered?

LOrDo wrote:Metal maker management is a stupid menial task. What kind of skill is needed in clicking an On/Off button?

You're not supposed to manually manage metal makers by building 10 of them and turning them on and off really quickly. You're supposed to only build as many as you need to prevent you from metal stalling but still while having enough e.

Metal makers are for whatever the fuck i want to use them for.


Seriously, OTA had auto-metal-maker turnoff when things got too hairy. How is a metal-maker widget cheating? That defies common sense!

Maby mods should turn in the auto turn off then. You shouldn't need an engine level AI that does it for you. That's massively abusable on many levels for many things different mods could want to do.