Spring RTS Engine

Can we plan to fix this stuff?

Spring is a nice Project and I played it for over 1 year.
There are two reasons I dont play it anymore:
1. I cant drag/remove waypoints/Buildings like I can in supcom
2. The most important thing is, that the more played mods still use ta content and that there is no resync feature which would help big games a lot.

I think I would move back to Spring and play their mods, when its ready for the mass market and gets advertised everywhere.

Only thing that has kept me away from messing more around with Spring is because you gotta find SO many small pieces ALL over to have a decent game.. That's how it was when I tried last time..
I would like to try it, but it would have to be a one torrent and you're ready to go download..

Before anybody answers with that lua widget that drags commands, it is not included with the installer so it doesn't count and if it were its still extremely poor in terms of user interface/usability, which sort of kills it since it is after all a usability feature.

123vtemp wrote:Can we plan to fix this stuff?

Spring is a nice Project and I played it for over 1 year.
There are two reasons I dont play it anymore:
1. I cant drag/remove waypoints/Buildings like I can in supcom
2. The most important thing is, that the more played mods still use ta content and that there is no resync feature which would help big games a lot.

I think I would move back to Spring and play their mods, when its ready for the mass market and gets advertised everywhere.

Only thing that has kept me away from messing more around with Spring is because you gotta find SO many small pieces ALL over to have a decent game.. That's how it was when I tried last time..
I would like to try it, but it would have to be a one torrent and you're ready to go download..

Move waypoints is possible with LUA as has been demonstrated... it could presumably be included in the installer if it was improved.

the more played mods thing is indeed a bit of a problem but is more of an advertising issue... I'm personally waiting for a few other things before to mature before I start burning install DVDs and handing them out.

the "hard-to-get" thingis really a non-issue as with a bit of work (not much) a mod group (or independent party) could build their own version of the official installer and package it in a torrent if they chose to and got the needed permissions... meanwhile the installer and current lobby allow you to download mods and maps on demand from what I understand anyways.

I thought resync was in the works but it's on a fork until it's mature enough.

We dont really need resync anymore, desyncs are rarely a problem.

There are no non-OTA content mods that are ready IMO. The ones that are done need more balance and for that they need players (no playtesting, no balance). The fact most of them are closed source doesnt help, because you cant get a balance fork like BA is. KDR's mods are good but they're mostly gameplay experiments.

The OTA mods that are replacing OTA content (CA!) need artists.

Movable waypoints will probably get in CA as soon as one of our lua devs wants to, ill make a ticket.

There is a widget that does all functions and can move all orders conveniently.
spring needs an engine patch for it to be able to work smoothly even when there are substantial numbers of units ingame.
Or i was misinformed and it can be improved without an engine patch in which case it is even more pathetic we do not have it yet.
Nobody,including CA's illustrious dev team cares about gameplay enough to implement one of the most important control mechanisms of the past few years for the rts ganre.

as to the widgts mess.
I can only speak of SA,since im releasing it, but it is a complete mod with a full set of widgets that are importnat enough to bother the player with their presence.
I would love if the widget list would shorten by x4 times and most widgets were made into gadgets so that ven if the player accidently found out theu exist he wouldnt be dazzeled by 30 different widgets.
Spring has become muchmore wholesome with the new installer including lobbies which all self update and spring downlaoder whic hcan downlaod content outomaticly.
There are some fails here and there lie kthe fact the downlaoder does not work with spring's main content website but overall spring is much more user friendly than before.

As to the legal stuff.
Its just a matter of time till all the remodels are done.
For ota mods it just means they need to rename some stuff do a few smal lchanges and vuallah an ip free mod not that anyone in the game's industry actually cares.

Queued orders can be deleted.

Don't make UI and control gadgets, give the player the opportunity to turn them off. If some don't like the UI widgets give them the ability to customize it.

You must know that there is an advantage to making it all included and unchangable.
Its all about being out of the box playable or not.
When there are so many option of disabling all sorts of widgets it ca nbecome very confusing and it makes everyone's experiance different which in turn may effect game balance.
an extreme case would be if someone turns of nano towers off even by accident.
Imagine the impact it will have on him compared ot other players.
Having tens of widget in the list whic hare hardly self explenatory has many bad sides to it.
Im a big supporter of making an experiance wholesome and demend a bit of getting used to from the players side than making him choose between a few tens of widgets when usually he doesnt want to know how each of them effects the game and he doesnt want to go and figure out what each one does,etc..

I heard that we actually had resync for a short period of time several versions back? Resync code would still be very useful, and would enable open-ended in progress games too.

Resync is theoretically possible in the way of "save game and reload"; you can expect that in big games resync would have to transfer several megs of data (compressed), of course while paused.

If the client state can be serialised, it could be cleverly partitioned and checksummed to find which sub-pieces were 'bad' and then only resync those parts...?

Yeah that would be idea for resync. That however, assumes the resync is because of desync (sounds obvious, but resync could be misused for stuff like e.g. ingame joining, loading game which some players don't have savegame of anymore, etc, in which cases entire game state needs to be sent over.)

problem with serialization is that there's no point in sending client-side data, which isn't clearly separated from synced data. This requires a major refactoring.

Gota, that's why the initial widget setup should be the playable out-of-the-box default. Users can then customize it when they find it.