Spring RTS Engine

Hello all. I'm interested in assembling and maintaining a decent wiki page to track the better maps available at any given moment. My initial thought is to treat this collection as a mapping equivalent of top-40 music charts. Whether it's actually 40 maps, or more like thirty (or even less) can be decided as we go.

So here's some basic criteria (open to discussion)

1) Maps should be suited to TA-based mods, although cross-compatibility with othermods is definitly a plus.

2) Maps should be free of visual glitches, distracting features/textures. In short, they should be polished looking and well built.

3) The chart as a whole should provide a range of map styles (land/sea/both, 8x8, 16x16, etc)

4) Gameplay should be well-balanced across sides. It doesn't have to be symetrical, just well balanced. The collection as a whole should provide a range of challenges/opportunites (i.e. wide open, choke point maps, etc...).

Any other thoughts?

I'll post my starting line up soon, but I'd like to get some general feedback on the whole idea first.

1) comet catcher redux
2) comet catcher redux

etc.


...in all seriousness, things like this have been tried and failed before. You need to approach it differently. It can't be some sort of communal effort. If you want something like this, you'll have to solicit suggestions and then make the decisions yourself, perhaps with a small group. The community will then decide whether to take you seriously or laugh at you when they see your published rankings.

Felix is right.

Perhaps work out some sort of algorithm to determine what map is the 'best' (ie: - played x times, for x long, by y mods, isn't speedmetal, etc), and then include a 'tilt' value, which either is done by you, or is run by some sort of anonymous vote system.

I like IslandParadiseV2, but I only play AI's does that count?

Reasonable enough suggestions.

Given how things go i was actually planning on just posting 32 maps on the wiki that I thoughts merited additional attention. I was going to use the various flames, OMG's, and how could you's as the feedback to drum up other suggestions and or tweak the list.

I'd also like to specifically stay away from the most popular maps (i.e. comet catcher, other OTA conversions, etc...) to get more interest in newer less / played maps.

Maybe their can be listing or a different section convering the more popular offerings that have stoode the test of time, then the main chart could focus more on newer maps.



EDIT: Couple other thoughts:

If the mappers themselves would like to chime in on what they think are some of the better maps, that would be greatly encouraged.

Did the spring promotion project drop down to a simmer? I only ask because that forum hasn't seem much activity recently. To the extent that map "content packages" could be assembled around good maps, that may be a worthwhile thing to do.

Warlord Zsinj wrote:Felix is right.

Perhaps work out some sort of algorithm to determine what map is the 'best' (ie: - played x times, for x long, by y mods, isn't speedmetal, etc), and then include a 'tilt' value, which either is done by you, or is run by some sort of anonymous vote system.

There already is a vote system.

Ask someone with the majority of the maps what the top 40 maps are.

But the voting system is more like a fun, as the first 3 maps for me have 1 and 2 votes...

I strongly agree with Warlord Zsinj suggestion. Make an automated system, and tweak that. Like that it will be constantly updated.

ZellSF wrote:

Warlord Zsinj wrote: Ask someone with the majority of the maps what the top 40 maps are.

I currently have ~180 maps in my map folder, which is a fair amount I think. I'm going to start with my own expert judgement and go from there.

Speed Ball V2 is included in that package, right?

It fits perfectly to all those "rules":

1) Maps should be suited to TA-based mods, although cross-compatibility with othermods is definitly a plus.

2) Maps should be free of visual glitches, distracting features/textures. In short, they should be polished looking and well built.

3) The chart as a whole should provide a range of map styles (land/sea/both, 8x8, 16x16, etc)

4) Gameplay should be well-balanced across sides. It doesn't have to be symetrical, just well balanced. The collection as a whole should provide a range of challenges/opportunites (i.e. wide open, choke point maps, etc...).

Well there's no doubt but good maps need to be promoted better. Whenever I see a new map in the muti client view it usually ends up being some crap variant of SpeedMetal except uglier.

Peekaboom wrote:

ZellSF wrote:

Warlord Zsinj wrote: Ask someone with the majority of the maps what the top 40 maps are.

I currently have ~180 maps in my map folder, which is a fair amount I think. I'm going to start with my own expert judgement and go from there.

Try five hundred, bucko.

Hmm, I wonder is there is any way we could get 2-3 different maps packaged with the full spring installer.

Mars and small divide are certainly not a good representation of cutting edge maps for someone downloading spring for the first time, but I understand keeping the file size small is worthwhile. Those maps, and now islands in war is about 20mb. I could see packaging two really solid maps (not to exceed 30mb) in the installer, but who knows.

EDIT: Not to mention very few games actually play mars/small divide, so a new player coming in has to immediately download more maps anyway to get a game going, so file size is less an issue when you consider that.

Mars and Small Divide remain standards in 1v1 and testing to this day.

i dunno what the purpose of this is, the infrastructure is already in place to vote and comment on maps both in tasclient as well as on unknown-files, and hardly anyone ever uses it

the infrastructure is already in place to vote and comment on maps both in tasclient as well as on unknown-files, and hardly anyone ever uses it

I'd guess that less than 1 in 20 maps on unknown-files has comments. What's worse is that the map authors themselves frequently omit basic information like map size.

What I'd love to see are some map reviews similar to those on TAMEC. Each map was graded on several criteria (graphics, mechanics, gameplay) and given a writeup based on testing sessions. I'd grade 'em out of 5 instead of 10, though, since everything is so subjective anyway...

malric wrote:But the voting system is more like a fun, as the first 3 maps for me have 1 and 2 votes...

Obviously maps with less than 20 votes should be ignored.

Using the existing vote system is better than creating a new one anyway.

Speedmetal

only pros can handle tiny-me

Dragon45 wrote:only pros can handle tiny-me

Thats good map with 16 players 8v8 with mod E&E 0.163
Played it lots once, and it was fun :D

Or was it the other map... mini-me, yeah that it was.

Hey! I'm being quite severely missquoted in this thread