Spring RTS Engine

A release of spring that actually works for me?

I'm sick of being thrown into these unannounced massive beta testings that make spring broken for me :/.

I cannot get the damn thing to work, and im not the only one.

I've had countless new players coming in asking why this game is broken, and has so much hype.

I have to tell them to come back 2-3 weeks later when there's a bug fix that allows me to start the game.
This.

Spawn_Retard wrote:<[DOG]NotCat> have a stable engine version
<[DOG]NotCat> and a development version
<[DOG]NotCat> have a server for development and a server for stable
<[DOG]NotCat> once the bugs get ironed out of development
<[DOG]NotCat> a stable can be made
<[DOG]NotCat> stable and development versions are common practise
<[DOG]NotCat> in open source and indie software
<[DOG]NotCat> all it would need is a different server for test

We do already have all these.

zwzsg wrote:

Spawn_Retard wrote:<[DOG]NotCat> have a stable engine version
<[DOG]NotCat> and a development version
<[DOG]NotCat> have a server for development and a server for stable
<[DOG]NotCat> once the bugs get ironed out of development
<[DOG]NotCat> a stable can be made
<[DOG]NotCat> stable and development versions are common practise
<[DOG]NotCat> in open source and indie software
<[DOG]NotCat> all it would need is a different server for test

We do already have all these.

Where the hell is the stable?

EDIT: when has their ever been a stable that hasn't needed drastic fixes, like this one will need.

Because.
People.
Don't.
Test.

If you release a test version, and the people who test it report no major problems you assume it works fine. If more people tested and bug reported things would be fixed before they became a major issue.

That being said, I have never encountered a non-AI (or non- me being retarded and screwing up something when modding) related gamecrashing bug. not once, in 4 years.

I cannot get the damn thing to work, and im not the only one.

I've had countless new players coming in asking why this game is broken, and has so much hype.

Where are the bug reports from you and these 'countless' other users? The first thing any techie in any discipline is going to ask when you report an issue is "can you give me more information" things like system specs, driver versions, details on the specific problem you are having. If you can't or won't provide this information there isn't a lot anyone can do to help you.

Spawn_Retard wrote:unannounced

It was front page news for a week. Did anyone test?

imo its not done properly if you check how wesnoth do it.

http://www.wesnoth.org

they have more the latest development and a stable build on the main download page.

It would be even easier with spring as in wesnoth both the development and stable builds are different clients so you can only be running 1 at a time.

Here you can have 2 lobby clients open up (or maybe added support for being connected 2 to 2 servers at the same time on one lobby client reading 2 seperate spring exe's)

So you can play both stable and development at the same time. and the development server would autoupdate you to the latest development release so every1 is running the exact same dev version instead of different versions which cause desyncs etc.

i know devs complain about people not trying to test out new versions but with this system it will make getting test builds alot less hassle and you'd get way more testing.

no one reads the forums enough so they dont care or even see that dev builds are up and cba doing the testing.

Put a development client and stable client download button on the frontpage and spam up #main topic and channel messages about the development versions. And you will get alot more people testing and a better spring

the lobby can be made to automatically download the current testing version and use it when joining testing games

Test games need to be automatic...u need to be able to test from the lobby without doing anything else.
have an option in the lobby to automatically download new tests or not. and people should be able to host test version games in the lobby everyone is using...than we will get testing.

I have been able to play gundam as have others. what is the issue keeping you from playing?

Not only that, but when a stable version is released, it needs to be download and installed professionally.

I should only have to open my client, all the necessary files and downloaded and installed automatically, then it restarts my client, and I'm good to go.
Newbies don't even want to go anywhere near their Spring folder.

smoth wrote:I have been able to play gundam as have others. what is the issue keeping you from playing?

fear of gundam. i suffer from it.

Yeah seriously, there have been some issues but I haven't seen any game-crippling problems.

Right now the only problem left besides bad sound is that ppl who dont use the patched exe desync.
Other than that, everything looks ok.

Yeah,would have been better if the patch auto updated like the initial release.

Pressure Line wrote:Because.
People.
Don't.
Test.

If you release a test version, and the people who test it report no major problems you assume it works fine. If more people tested and bug reported things would be fixed before they became a major issue.

That being said, I have never encountered a non-AI (or non- me being retarded and screwing up something when modding) related gamecrashing bug. not once, in 4 years.

I cannot get the damn thing to work, and im not the only one.

I've had countless new players coming in asking why this game is broken, and has so much hype.

Where are the bug reports from you and these 'countless' other users? The first thing any techie in any discipline is going to ask when you report an issue is "can you give me more information" things like system specs, driver versions, details on the specific problem you are having. If you can't or won't provide this information there isn't a lot anyone can do to help you.

People do test thank you very much.

I've been around here long enough to know that there's a team testing quite often that seem to miss out something like, idk 90% of all in your face bugs.

I love it when new releases come out, because you know the devs have fixed something trivial for a mod, and not something like "does this engine actually work at all on very popular OS's."


I've already given my bug report, that's if you can call it one.

You should never make a community beta test as a means to an end, because then there is no point to a beta testing group.

Hosting two servers would be great for this sort of stuff, have one be experimental, and the other a stable version.

Have them linked so that they require people to log into them aswell as the stable, and wait for people to test.

If the version does not work for some odd reason, you get your bug report, and no grief because people can still play.

No, we can't call yours a bug report.

They are hosting two servers.

One is experimental, the other is stable.

The problems are that 99.95% people don't use the experimental until they are forced to. And even then, they bitch instead of giving proper bug reports.

Spawn_Retard wrote:I've been around here long enough to know that there's a team testing quite often that seem to miss out something like, idk 90% of all in your face bugs.

No there isn't. Test games are pretty infrequent, purely due to lack of people willing to test new versions.

I love it when new releases come out, because you know the devs have fixed something trivial for a mod, and not something like "does this engine actually work at all on very popular OS's."

I don't even know what problem you're talking about but Springlobby isn't Spring and Spring isn't just being changed for "trivial" stuff

I've already given my bug report, that's if you can call it one.

Where? Note "it doesn't work" says nothing.

You should never make a community beta test as a means to an end, because then there is no point to a beta testing group.

I doubt anybody thinks "welp, sure, forced public beta testing, perfect solution" but there is no beta testing group

Besides that I can mention there have been various attempts to get a proper beta testing group going, but this only works as long as a _developer_ is actively _dragging_ people into the testing game.

Once someone from the community took over the testing group (in the cases that even happened) it always died pretty soon.

Oh and besides, the fact some bugs slipped through only proves the community does not (sufficiently) test, so please do not claim otherwise. This time the new version was even announced a full week before it was released, so there was plenty of time to play some 16v16 DSD BA games to find these "glaring" bugs.

It's not that I don't agree with the general point that quality assurance could be better, but it isn't as simple as certain people in this thread suggest: nearly all things mentioned in this thread either exist or have existed, and nearly all of them died or are never used just because people are too lazy to test unless someone (a developer) is beating them with a wooden stick with spikes on it.

This is a configuration issue. If you want people to test, you _need_ to provide a good solution for running Spring Stable and Spring Unstable side-by-side on the same machine. Right now it's too much of a headache to figure out.

On the download page we need 2 installers that create 2 folders and 2 launch-list entries. Spring, and Spring Unstable.

Even without lobby integration, it's pretty simple to make portable install test builds.