Spring RTS Engine

All the mods in the installer should have these tags, and as of 0.76b1 the lobbies will have access to them. I personally want to change the list/drop down box mod selector into a much prettier and more useful tool using this, and any old mod not implementing the tags correctly will look plain weird, that or itll look like little efforts been put into it.

Another example of weirdness in the lobbies from not using these tags would be the battle list. The new lobbies have started using the abbreviated versions of the mod names instead of the actual names in the mod column of the battle table. If the mod doesn't update the tag or puts in something like n/a or moo itll look weird.

However, some people still don't get it, so I'm going to explain it clearly in one place with diagrams, that way modders aren't chasing around the forums playing jigsaw


The magic diagram of explanation



Some of these tags where added by me, some by trepan, but they dont replace any of the older tags.

Here we can see that BA and CA are not original games, they're mods of TA. This is why their game tag would have the value "Total Annihilation", and their shortgame tag is "TA".

shortgame and shortname are the abbrieviated versions of the name and game tags. BA instead of Balance annihilation, EE instead of expand and exterminate, and so on.

EE is an original game, it is not a mod of another game, therefore the official EE content will have the same values for game and name, aswell a sshortname and shortgame. A mod that was pure OTA from cavedog with no changes, aka zwzsg classic TA would have the name=Total Annihilation; and shortname=TA; as well as game=Total Annihilation; and shortgame=Total Annihilation; because it is the original, the official unmodded content.

The mutator tag should contain the value official if it isnt a mutator and its playable. If it's a mutator or variant of the mod then itll have a different value, such as the 'deployment' mutator. Putting in mutator=deployment mutator; would lead to situations such as "You are playing the deployment mutator mutator"

http://www.darkstars.co.uk/2007/the-new ... -use-them/

[11:57:26 PM] <trepan> there's also a "version" modinfo tag

This would go at the end on the diagram.

Stuckied.

Nice. Can we get similarly clear documentation of the other bazillion tags? Or are we stuck relying on the never-updated wiki, crawling through changelogs, or bugging KDR who seems to know everything?

I didn't know before that a "blank" mutator tag should read "official", I think you told us to leave it empty when there is no mutator.

but putting 'official' in would be preferable.

[11:57:26 PM] <trepan> there's also a "version" modinfo tag

This would go at the end on the diagram.

So do we omit the version string from the mod name?

yes, it now belongs in the version tag.

I've updated the diagram accordingly

So spring will be able to tell the difference between mods with the same name and different versions? I don't see anything in the svn rev log to suggest this...

it doesn't have to, the lobby should pass the archive name not the mods canonical name. aka BA.sdz or XTAPE.sdz

So how do I launch my game from spring.exe then? It goes by name, not by version or filename.

a patch to append the version number to the end seems easy. I cant do ti yet as I havent the means to test it

Well it needs to be done before anybody can strip the version string from their modnames.

Oh great, can't you say these things earlier? I'm not reuploading Gundam again for such a triviality.

do I HAVE to strip the version from the filename?

the filename can be what you want it to be.

AF wrote:a patch to append the version number to the end seems easy. I cant do ti yet as I havent the means to test it

Does it do the same thing for mutator?

thanks af.

Umm, just tried it out with the current release and they don't work. In TASClient.exe, I see three mods with the same name. In Spring.exe, I see one mod. None of the cases show the mutator name.

Besides, the packaging for mutators is a mess and has gotten messier with the new mod-install support. Mutators still must be packaged as separate files (so a single mod that comes with a suite of mutators must be unpacked instead of being a single file). Second, if you're trying to make a 3rd-party mutator, you're screwed. The modinfo.tdf file references dependencies by filename. Since the file you're depending on (let's use BA for example) could have two filenames (BA**.sd7 or BA_Installer_Version.sd7), you can't use the filename. You can't even release two versions with different dependancy names, since they mutators will hash differently and become incompatible online, even with the same filebase.

Yeah, I think AF is the only one who's actually using the new tags.