TASclient

[Gota]

Suggestion for a default look.
Make the player list be foldable like the filter options and make it folded by default for new players.
I would also suggest changing the background of the chat,letters color and maybe the font as well how about pale orange letters and black,dark grey background?as a default color i mean so new users that join in wil feel like the ywill be playing a game, a mor ecomercial feel that is.

In the replay section replays that have been watched should outomaticly get a ranking bonus and a color pallete and the more a person watches them the more the replay's color changes.
Is it also possible to stop a replay being recorded when you are watching a replay?its just confusing.

Can the jumping of the players list be stopped?when I view my player's list it jumps when someone leaves or joins its confusing and inconvinient.
I suggest seperating private chats and channels by making all player to player interaction bedone through the plaeyrs list.
It should be seperated and people who you mark as friends or those that pm you or you pm them should be seperated from the rest of the list and when someone pmed you or changed status from the friends list an icon near the players list should start flashing.

The lobby or server, who ever is responible for this,should post the topic every say 20 minuts instead of only when you connect and things that ar mod/map related should be seperated or givven a much bigger font with a bright or dark color with an even bigger title called maps/mods downlaods.

[ZellSF]

It should be seperated and people who you mark as friends or those that pm you or you pm them should be seperated from the rest of the list and when someone pmed you or changed status from the friends list an icon near the players list should start flashing.

I'd suggest to not have things "flashing" for that minor details. Things randomly flashing on the screen is very annoying to tons of people. I'm pretty sure I even read a Microsoft document that said so :p

That said, you can easily make a "Friends" group that notifies you of most of the stuff said players do.

Make the player list be foldable like the filter options and make it folded by default for new players.

This makes no sense, why hide basic chatting functionality by default? How does that serve to help new players?

I would also suggest changing the background of the chat,letters color and maybe the font as well how about pale orange letters and black,dark grey background?as a default color i mean so new users that join in wil feel like the ywill be playing a game, a mor ecomercial feel that is.

I don't think choice of colors makes a game feel more or less commercial. Besides, I hardly see what good a commercial feel would really do.

You can change text colours and font anyway (font changes don't apply to player lists in battles though...)

In the replay section replays that have been watched should outomaticly get a ranking bonus and a color pallete and the more a person watches them the more the replay's color changes.

Uh. What's so difficult about just setting ratings? I really don't see the need for automatical ratings, especially since it will ruin the system for people who aren't too lazy to rate replays.

The lobby or server, who ever is responible for this,should post the topic every say 20 minuts instead of only when you connect and things that ar mod/map related should be seperated or givven a much bigger font with a bright or dark color with an even bigger title called maps/mods downlaods.

That would just be plain annoying for anyone who uses the chat functionality to actually chat. That and I really, really don't see the need for this either. Care to explain?

The topic is ALWAYS in a fixed location (the top of the chat log), there's never a need to repost it, and the lobby client should be able to find maps/mods itself (TASClient does).

Can the jumping of the players list be stopped?

Just don't sort the playerlist? The jumping of the player list is sort of a consequence of sorting, I'd guess. What you probably want is for it to automatically jump back to where you were. Not make it not jump at all.

[Gota]

Ahhh....
Id like to say that iwrote it trying to look at the lobby from a view point of a noob that just opened it for the first time.

I want to get inot a game without thought because i dont even know if this game is worth my trouble,i want to see it and see if its fun.

so,when a wall of ugly menus and text is seen that is suppose to represent en entire engine to the simple user it needs to be as simplistic and forth coming as possible.
It needs to look familier and it should push the noob to the right direction towards succesfully joining and connecting to a game.
The userdoesnt need the player list he doesnt know anyone itsjust a feature that together with other clumsy issues like having to go to other websites to downlaod content makes him think twice about wasting allthis time into figuring everytihng out.
The user doesnt know what he needs toknow and what not to start a game as fast as possible so the lobby must help him.
The lobby must get rid of anythig in the users pat that wont directly lead him to starting a game.

I would also add that when a user joins a room the lobby should tell him that he doesnt have the map andhe needs to download it.
It can be easily done by writing with a big sized font in the room chat explaining as quicy as posible what to do.thisoption of such a notification should be possible to disable by just clicking on the notification and selecting the option.the notification should look like a link or a button that shows it is pressable.

about the replays,yes i dothink that most people dont rate their replays id sayitsprobably 95% but maybe we can check that using the lobby itself,this option and all others that i am discribing shoudl all be possible todisable using the options.

about the list jumping..whatever i just want it to stop moving i dont care why it happens(noob saying).
The topic should be listed every x minuts cause many new people dont know what to do and while loking for questons and askingpeople the topicwill springand they will see it cause they might have missed it when connecting.
Obviouslt the best way would be to make a specail section in the lobby itselfwhere the topic is written.a section which is not part ofthe chat window but like in beteen it and the buttonsa bove. It also should be possible to disable.

about the flashing of buttons..they are flashingalready when channels or pm are chaning ,when someone is typing there so i tihnkwhat isuggested might be better in general and it would place thingsin their intuitive/convenient place.

[ZellSF]

Hint: Getting new players isn't that important if all of them are stupid and impatient enough for said modifications to be needed. I'm not even going to bother pointing out the flaws in your idea other than that. Not yet anyway, maybe later.

What TASClient however could use in user friendliness is making it multilingual.

[aegis]

springlobby

[Gota]

If a person never played TA and doesnt know what spring is and nobody of his friends told him how awsome itis why would he make alot of effort to understand it? there are so many games out there..
it is important and even with shitty players joining and the community growing there are higher chances good players will get to know the game .

[SwiftSpear]

AF has taken a break from redesigning the site... hopefully when he gets back we can decide on a new standard theme for spring in terms of colors and logo standardization.

At that point I intend to seriously look at getting the standard lobby client replaced with something different, and hopefully get some lobby developers that have time to do regular work on board to join the official spring team and work directly with moderation and spring development towards our mutual goals.

Until that happens we're pretty much stuck with what we have unless betalord or satirik decides to make random changes, which are usually things they personally want to play with, as opposed to things that support the project in general, because they are too busy, simply put, to do work work.

[Gota]

Yeah i know.. i wasnt bindng anyone ...was just saying that hey, if your asking how can it improve,those are my ideas..

[ZellSF]

If a person never played TA and doesnt know what spring is and nobody of his friends told him how awsome itis why would he make alot of effort to understand it? there are so many games out there..

It does NOT take a lot of effort to understand a simple chat window with a games list. Even if it did, hiding the user list would not make any difference whatsoever, neither would repeating the topic or making the letters saying the user doesn't have the map bigger.

What DOES take a bit of effort is finding a game where new players are welcomed, or figuring out the interface if you don't know any English whatsoever. Neither of those problems you suggest fixing though.

[Gota]

You are wrong,it does take to long to understand how to get into agame andwhere to take the maps from and so forth.
It is a fact supported by data.
Spring doesnt make a good first impression.

[[Krogoth86]]

Well if I think back to when I first played Spring I was rather impressed by TASClient. The interface is simple, fast and shows you everything you need. You have a user list, a chatroom and a nice list of games where it's immediately indiciated if you have a map or not...

When thinking of SupCom's client thingy the TASClient is made of pure win because the Internet Explorer, ActiveX using, totally overloaded and unclear client plus the bad performance the SupCom client offers really make it bad imo...

I think in general I find TASClient to be one of the best lobby clients I know - it's simple & clean, fast and doesn't have flashy, animated things everywhere trying to "spice it up" but in reality make everything take longer and more annoying...

With that said I disagree with you:
Spring makes a rather good first impression and as ZellSF said: If a user can't figure out that nice interface he'll be totally lost in one of the rather complex mods Spring mostly is played for...

[ZellSF]

You are wrong,it does take to long to understand how to get into agame andwhere to take the maps from and so forth.
It is a fact supported by data.
Spring doesnt make a good first impression.

It is *NOT* fact supported by data, get a dictionary already. While you're at it, a spell checker might not be a bad idea. Much like your 95% claim earlier, claiming that something is a fact when its not just makes you look stupid.

We do want to give a good first impression, telling the user he's too stupid to understand basic information (the userlist, how to get maps) without excessive font sizes, will not do that. It will make a horrible impression.

Spring is not suited for people with five minute attention spans anyway, why should we make a lobby suited for them? It makes no sense. Nor do lots of the changes you're suggesting either, for that matter, it sounds a lot more like changes you personally want rather than things you think would make TASClient more user friendly.

As said earlier, the skill barrier, as well as the lack of multilangual support prevents a much larger problem for getting new players, but really, TASClient has little to do with the lack of players. That the players aren't advertising Spring enough has.

[Satirik]

there are three big problems with tasclient and spring for new players, the first problem is the Connect button, until you click on it or put your mouse over it's hard to understand what it's for ... the second problem is the installer which doesn't install the OTA content by default (i know it's a choice and it won't change but still)... most new players don't understand why they can't play although they have the mod, and the third problem is that Spring doesn't have any menu (or just the minimum required) to play, it's hard for new players to understand that they need to launch another application to play spring and maybe a fourth problem is that tasclient doesn't support single player but right now the spring single player is just skirmish with not really powerful AI so it's not really interesting until it supports campaign

[Gota]

Another small sugestion....can you please put a small search window above the players list..many times people have tags or others addon and when you have 300 people it takes ages to find someone if you dont remember tag sand stuff so a search that just highlughts what youv written,in all the names that have it,would be cool...so if im pro basic and someone doesnt remember im from pro clan he can type basic and hell see me highlighted.

[LordMatt]

the second problem is the installer which doesn't install the OTA content by default (i know it's a choice and it won't change but still)... most new players don't understand why they can't play although they have the mod

It does if you install a mod that requires it.

[Satirik]

the second problem is the installer which doesn't install the OTA content by default (i know it's a choice and it won't change but still)... most new players don't understand why they can't play although they have the mod

It does if you install a mod that requires it.

yeah but why would they check a mod if they don't know any of them they'll just let the default ones only

[LordMatt]

Because it says to? btw get on the lobby TASClient is crashing on me continually.

[Satirik]

the only thing people do when they install something is finding where the "next" button is ...

[LordMatt]

Maybe I can make some popup box that says "Install some mods you noob!"

[Argh]

That would probably be a very good idea, tbh.