Spring RTS Engine

SwiftSpear wrote:Maby when people load up BA games it just randomly loads some other mod instead, and then flashes about how new mods have been released

lol, kill the userbase

What about advertising other mods/games in loadscreens? I can't see it hurting the mod which is being loaded much, and could help things out quite a lot: it is a screen players are absolutely garaunteed to be looking at.

true gi +1

Pintle I use loadscreens for play tips.

As do 90% of the mods I have played, you could still have loadscreen tips, maybe just have 1 in 10 loadscreens advertising a random mod/game/mutator?

no

no offense but loadscreen adds in gundam wouldn't have much impact anyway

yar and imagine if you were a new player to a mod and saw pictures of other mod's in it's load screens. Not very appealing.

well it doesn't have to be tacky, it could just be like: hey, you're playing this mod right now, you should try this other mod out sometime.

that is the problem though, the load screens are randomized, that one add may be all that they see and playtips are more important. That and I HATE HATE HATE the constant marketing spew that society forces on us. I may put a don't do drugs thing in there one day but I hate adverts. I think the LOBBY should have a mod browser with info about each mod.

I have mentioned this idea several times and each time it goes ignored.

I don't think invading loadscreens would be cool- that'd be like the Bioshock Steam entry scene occasionally turning into an advertisement for toilet paper

However, getting back to the Lobby Client's news-delivery....

Steam, which is an effective and profitable product delivery tool, flashes up mini-pages with nice screens whenever it's started, showing players what's available. Everybody here, when I bring this up, groans. But it works- players actually pay attention. And buy things.

So, why do we keep using things that don't work, when we know what does? It doesn't hurt anybody, and we could make it optional. And having the Lobby just pop open a window displaying some HTML and JPGs would be easy enough.

I think that that Installer changes are a major step in the right direction, mind you. But I also think that they aren't enough. We're probably losing players every month, who think BA is the only game, have seen it, and have gotten bored. Players who might never know there are AIs, and other problems like that. Why not use the Lobby to deliver information to them, in a format that we know works? Steam doesn't force you to sit through the advertisements, if you really don't want to. But most people leave that on, so they know what's going on.

I dunno why I even bother bringing out this set of arguments. I've probably said, "yo, Steam works, emulate Steam, problem solved" at least a million times. It's not a technical problem we face, people. The problem is that we do not have the proper tools to conduct effective marketing.

Heck, I just checked... and the Lobby's News feed... hmm... it shows links for BA 6.0, DSD, and SpeedMetal, has a link referring to "old maps", and ... says nothing about mods even existing. Shouldn't a link to here and here always be displayed?

Argh wrote:Heck, I just checked... and the Lobby's News feed... hmm... it shows links for BA 6.0, DSD, and SpeedMetal, has a link referring to "old maps", and ... says nothing about mods even existing. Shouldn't a link to here and here always be displayed?

That was #newbies...those links were set because UF was down and those were the three most requested files.

smoth wrote:That and I HATE HATE HATE the constant marketing spew that society forces on us. I may put a don't do drugs thing in there one day but I hate adverts.

Moar FGJL ads plz.

KDR_11k wrote:Moar FGJL ads plz.

Argh wrote:I don't think invading loadscreens would be cool- that'd be like the Bioshock Steam entry scene occasionally turning into an advertisement for toilet paper

However, getting back to the Lobby Client's news-delivery....

Steam, which is an effective and profitable product delivery tool, flashes up mini-pages with nice screens whenever it's started, showing players what's available. Everybody here, when I bring this up, groans. But it works- players actually pay attention. And buy things.

So, why do we keep using things that don't work, when we know what does? It doesn't hurt anybody, and we could make it optional. And having the Lobby just pop open a window displaying some HTML and JPGs would be easy enough.

I think that that Installer changes are a major step in the right direction, mind you. But I also think that they aren't enough. We're probably losing players every month, who think BA is the only game, have seen it, and have gotten bored. Players who might never know there are AIs, and other problems like that. Why not use the Lobby to deliver information to them, in a format that we know works? Steam doesn't force you to sit through the advertisements, if you really don't want to. But most people leave that on, so they know what's going on.

I dunno why I even bother bringing out this set of arguments. I've probably said, "yo, Steam works, emulate Steam, problem solved" at least a million times. It's not a technical problem we face, people. The problem is that we do not have the proper tools to conduct effective marketing.

Heck, I just checked... and the Lobby's News feed... hmm... it shows links for BA 6.0, DSD, and SpeedMetal, has a link referring to "old maps", and ... says nothing about mods even existing. Shouldn't a link to here and here always be displayed?

Steam has nearly a billion users. They can afford to run what is basically the same scheme that email scams rely on. If 1% of all steam users buy a game it's still 10,000,000 sales. If 1% of all spring users start playing gundam regularly we're still only looking at a dozen games a day or so.

That being said, I'm acctually not against the idea... There are alot of things I don't like about the steam system that I think spring lobby does better. Pseudo IRC integration for example I really like. However, the add panel from steam seems like it would be a good way to profile stuff that casual users would otherwise miss.