Spring RTS Engine

Project D-FENS! (Or Doleo's FrontEnd User INterface for Spring) is my current project to create a design for a frontend GUI for Spring. It's bothered me that we have multiplayer in one program, settings in another, keybindings in yet another, and that we have to load the multiplayer client in order to open the singleplayer menu (which doesn't really fit in with TASclient at all). Its all rather disorganized and confusing, especially for newbies. No offense to any of the people that have worked on these things, you've all done fantastic work, I just think its time to pull it all together in a nice, convenient user interface that's stylish, useful, and pleasant to look at, with major emphasis on making it A LOT easier for new players to get into Spring and its games. I'll talk about my major goals and plans for this later, but now, here's a few pics of what I have so far.
PLEASE RIGHT CLICK, VIEW, AND ZOOM IN ON THE PICTURES FOR THE FULL SIZE BEFORE COMMENTING! And try to imagine them without minor JPEG compression. Thanks.


The main menu. The singleplayer, help, and exit buttons are all in their normal states. The multiplayer button is currently being hovered over, and the settings button is being pressed. The white sun logo in the back will be slowly spinning around. The font used throughout the project is Candara. The background is a nice screenshot taken by someone, I'll get into what I think should ideally be in the background later.


The menu you get when you click on the singleplayer button. If a mod doesn't have a campaign or tutorial, the button will be disabled, like here with the Tutorial button. The current mod/game is displayed in the bottom right corner.


The offline skirmish page. Mousing over the minimap will show the map description in a tooltip. Clicking on the minimap will open a large map panel (the next image) where you can edit start points and change the map. The "Change Map" button will do the same, but automatically open the maplist (the last image). The start place markers are numbered and color coded, and they glow green if on your side, and red if agaisnt you. "Download Maps" will show a conformation window asking if opening your web browser is ok, then link to jobjol or something. Maybe it will just open SpringDownloader. Everything else should be pretty self explanatory.


The map panel that loads when you click on the minimap. It contains some useful helptext off to the side. The "Change Map" button shows a maplist. The blue orbs are start point "magnets", think Springlobby. That blue bar I just noticed above team 1's start point is a mere figment of your imagination, please ignore it.


The map panel with the maplist open. Includes a scrollbar and a blue scroller (Which is not a figment of your imagination this time).


That's pretty much what I have so far. My thoughts on effects are as follows. Transitions between menus should all be done with a smooth fading out and fading in, not all the way to black, just so the background is the only thing left. I don't imagine there being much in the way of animation besides the spinning sun, but I think that's fine. Buttons will all have 3 varients, normal, highlighted with the mouse, and pressed. Tabs will have two, on and off.
Now, backgrounds. I've though of three possibilities. 1; A random assortment of nice screenshots included with the enabled mod. Loadscreens, basically. Nothing new. 2; An into movie showing some action and explosions with nice looping capability. I'm not inclined towards this idea because either it will be short and have really low quality, or take up a ginormous amount of space. Or 3; My personal choice, a real time rendered battle using the engine itself in the background. Think C&C Generals, but less fancy. You know what I think is worth a try? Spawn a bunch of random combat units, separate them into two teams. Send them at each other. When one is destroyed, spawn a new unit for the same team. Live, visually appealing action without a huge filesize. In theory.

Now on to goals, I'll be happy with this project if I manage any of the following things:

A: Create a fully functional GUI and implement it into Spring.exe
Not likely. I can navigate my way around a mod no problem, but know little of the inner workings of the Spring engine. I have no C++ knowledge and virtually no coding experience.

B: Create a fully functional GUI and implement it into a separate executable
Again, not likely. But more so then the previous. Game Maker 8.0 would be perfect, since it supports alpha channels, but its still in beta and won't allow any distributing of anything made with it.

C: Create a fully functional GUI and release as many resources and docs as possible to allow someone else to implement it as painlessly as possible.
This would be my grand dream for the project, but I realize that implementing an entire GUI is no short order to ask of someone. Still, I hope against the odds that someone can take the time and do this. I intend to leave this project with more then a few mockups, but release every resource Ive made including all the buttons, tabs, thingamabobs and their highlighted and pressed varieties in a nice, organized package. I'll include the mockups to show how it should all be put together, as well as some instructions on how I made the buttons and etc, and some documentation to my grand designs. But if all else fails...

D: Create something that someone in the community, be them developer, modder, or artist, can use for somehow improving their project or the spring engine.
Hey, there's going to be a lot of buttons and titles and stuff. Somebody's bound to find a use for something in my resource package, right? I mean, all IceXuick left was a single jpg of an ingame UI mockup, and we managed to get IceUI out of it, right? Sure it ain't perfect, but it's a great proof of concept. I just hope someone can do something out of all this, that's all.

Sorry about the wall of text. That should be it for now. Comments and constructive criticism is always welcome, trolling and flaming is frowned upon. Hope you all like what you see.
More to come, I hope.

*recoils in horror*

HERESEY!!!!

There's a set of spring logos already and a design spec, and tbh the first thing you should see is a choice of games, THEN a single player multiplayer thing, which installers would take advantage of because only a conventional spring install would have multiple games thus avoiding the list. The front end should be styled according to the game not a generic spring front end

Looks like photoshop v1.0 work from the 90's.

first i'd like to correct few things, firstable TASClient is not the main lobby, so it's not installed by default, secondable, you can launch the single player directly using the -menu argument or -menu "mod name" to load the custpmized mod interface

and now ... this is not nice at all ! it looks like you stacked noob photoshop tutorials over a screenshot (like someone here likes to do and think it's nice, but it's not), sure the screenshot is nice but the rest sux, best thing when you're not a good designer is to keep it simple, like vista, nice background and blurred transparency or things like that, and PLEASE .... NO COMIC SANS MS !!

if you really want to make a front end for spring it has to be crossplatform (starting a windows only project would be stupid), to be fully customizable, yeah spring is an engine not a Total Annihilation mod, so you're just doing it the wrong way, you'd have to make the software first and then a generic default skin that could fit any game without custom frontend skin

I like the idea of improving the front end, I disagree with essentially everything else you said... granted I stopped reading after "That's pretty much what I have so far. " so it's entirely probable you came up with a good idea or two, lodged somewhere between you decent premise and terrible sense of style... if you can't draw have the decency to do your concept are in MSPaint so that when our eyes are offended we have the option by giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you are trying to be ironic, ha hah.

Ok, so, if you are offering to acctually program something here, I take everything back and encourage you to do your thing but make the menu's and graphics scriptable/XML so that someone who knows how to use photoshop and has an idea of how to design user interfaces can use it to produce something awesome.

I like the idea, if you can get the software part of it working, I am sure we can lots of general and mod-themed make skins.

I was going to ask if you had actually code behind or just pretty images, but I read:

Doleo wrote:Not likely. I can navigate my way around a mod no problem, but know little of the inner workings of the Spring engine. I have no C++ knowledge and virtually no coding experience. [...] Again, not likely.

So here are a couple ideas for you:

• Use your pictures to make a TASClient Single Player Gui:
  Open your \lobby\SPThemes\*.ssk with 7-zip. You'll see it's just images and html. Should be editable at your level.
• Get in touch with SpringLobby's dev: SpringLobby is a nice lobby, except the Gui which is horribly badly designed. Not sure SL devs will be willing to cooperate, but you could ask. Oh, and please remove any trace of Copyrighted Cavedog Units if it is to be included in a lobby.
• Find an *A mod you like, and make them an ingame Lua menu, like the one I made for KP: With Lua you can display picture, make button, etc... This require some coding, but Lua is easier than C++, and maybe that mod maintainer will give you a hand with Lua.

Doleo wrote:C: Create a fully functional GUI and release as many resources and docs as possible to allow someone else to implement it as painlessly as possible. D: Create something that someone in the community, be them developer, modder, or artist, can use for somehow improving their project or the spring engine.

Not going to work: You could spend thousand of man-hours creating something beautiful and ready to use, it won't ever be used if you are waiting for someone else to use it.

Doleo wrote:PLEASE RIGHT CLICK, VIEW, AND ZOOM IN ON THE PICTURES FOR THE FULL SIZE BEFORE COMMENTING! And try to imagine them without minor JPEG compression. Thanks.

I've looked at them full size, and I'm not impressed. Better than anything I could do, but much uglier than some of the already existing Spring FrontEnds I saw. If all you can come with is the art, no code, nothing working, just picture showing how you want it to be, those pictures have to be extra beautiful.

If CA gets the code for a nice single/multiplayer game launcher, CA will use it.

Consider getting in touch with the Winter crew (#winter in the spring lobby), we're working on something similar.

MidKnight wrote:Consider getting in touch with the Winter crew (#winter in the spring lobby), we're working on something similar.

* I am working on something similar (x2 (if not x3).

* koshi is working on something similar.

* Satirik is working on something similar.

* Pxtl is working on something similar for Argh

Anybody else I missed?



All those people have two great advantages over you:
- They can also do the coding.
- They have already finished and released their frontends.

ehhh stop saying im working on something similar ... i spent days doing something cool ... don't even try to compare it to what they did ... i could have done the same in 1hour

Doleo, if you want to develop this further, I'd suggest making more mockups. Try a different look, and maybe just concentrate on the front-end, trying to find a cooler presentation.

Since you're basically talking about design concepts and "what would look nice" after the development of the various current solutions is further along, I think you'd be best-served by:

A. Thinking through the ergonomics of the design- how to keep menus and buttons nicely arranged, attractive and useful, while allowing different end-users (i.e. game designers) to built a new template on your visual blocks (i.e., this is where a drop-down that does this goes, and why, these buttons are here, here, here and why).

B. Showing us some better conceptual work in terms of pure visual quality. What you've shown us was a lot of work, but at the same time, the visual base was pretty weak (largely, I'm guessing, because you wanted to present the ideas for the UI layout). Go back to that area and rework it to be prettier and more clearly designed. Go over elements that are weaker, like the button designs and the background of the UI, which are all clearly WIP, and present something that looks more like a final product. One of the main reasons IceUI was a successful prototype is that it looked really solid at the point it was presented. Take that to heart, and give it another round- I can see how you ended up having to cut a lot of corners to present the whole idea, so maybe cut it down a bit, show us what a really polished presentation could be.

vista style menu easy and nice (that's just an example)


best would be to have that kind of menu with ingame backgrond and units moving etc

I'd prefer something that didn't feature transparency.

I like the idea of a script operating in the background creating some behaviors in a rendered world, but it would be very annoying if I couldn't read the buttons because of something going on behind them.

And personally, I think a left-hand menu that expands into large sub-pages for various scenarios (Settings and key bindings, SP free play, SP campaign / missions, MP launcher via whatever Lobbies are detected as installed) would be nice.

Maybe you should ask someone to do the graphics for you...

Satirik wrote: best would be to have that kind of menu with ingame backgrond and units moving etc

nice idea, couldnt u make a lil video and play it in the background?

why showing a video when we can show the game ...

Poor boy... Cmon guys it doesnt look that bad. In fact it looks about 100 times better than what we have atm.

@Doleo:
Maybe you still better join an existing project before building your own. I dont think you will find someone who implements all you graphics stuff, but you surely can be a good help for existing projects.

Well this has definitely been a large mistake. Ive been looking around the forums since this post, and Ive decided that this forum and project has REALLY slid on a slippery slope since I was last here (another account). It now seems to have become somewhere other forums have dumped their trolls or something. What happened guys? Seriously... Apologies to anyone that actually tried to be constructive, but I realize now this little project of mine could better be put to use elsewhere. Later.

Doleo wrote:Well this has definitely been a large mistake. Ive been looking around the forums since this post, and Ive decided that this forum and project has REALLY slid on a slippery slope since I was last here (another account). It now seems to have become somewhere other forums have dumped their trolls or something. What happened guys? Seriously... Apologies to anyone that actually tried to be constructive, but I realize now this little project of mine could better be put to use elsewhere. Later.

Oh no, we offended someone on the internet.

Spring forums have always been brutally honest, and all the better for it.

No great loss, move along.

it is a great loss if someone who is trying to contribute to this project is being driven away by unfriendly forum-people. others may think twice before they publish their work.