Frustrations of a casual player
Posted: 24 Aug 2009, 01:23
<rant mode on>
Today I got an itch to play Spring after an absence of a few weeks. Things went downhill from there
I started up the lobby client, and the first thing I see is a message to update. OK, downloading 20 megs of new stuff... Seems like these updates are being pushed out pretty regularly? It's rather frustrating to have to re-download the entire game every couple of weeks, even if the process is automated.
Download finished. I started up TASClient (yeah, I know it's old and unsupported, but it's what I like)... and it won't start. Error in unitsync.dll. Ok, so my preferred client is now broken.
Started up Springlobby, which I've never used before. The initial startup was nice - it imported my settings from TASClient, which I appreciate. Unfortunately I found the game list to be difficult to use. It was hard to absorb the information for some reason. Sorry I can't be more specific than that. Also, the game list wouldn't sort by more than one column at a time, which was a nice feature of TASClient.
Anyway, I found a game I wanted to spectate. Whoops! New version of Balanced Annihilation. Need to download it.
I switched to the download tab and first tried to find Balanced Annihilation 7.0 visually. But for some reason, even when I clicked on the "Name" column, all of the results were sorted by the hash code. Who the heck sorts stuff by hash code, anyway?
Eventually I found Balanced Annihilation 7.0 and clicked the Download button. Nothing happened. I tried double-clicking it, and nothing happened again. I think it may have appeared in the download list briefly, but was quickly removed. No error message explaining why.
At this point I gave up on using SpringLobby to download. I started up the SpringDownloader application and quickly downloaded what I needed, then restarting SpringLobby.
I join a game (as a spectator), and the game starts. What... the... heck... I'm used to around 60 fps, but the game is running at about 10 fps for some reason. I press F11 and start randomly toggling lua widgets until I find the culprit. Apparently "LolUI" was the biggest offender, and my FPS instantly tripled when I turned it off. The game still runs slower than I remember, but at least it's tolerable.
At this point my wife asks me to look something up for her on Google, so I alt-tab out of the game (dun dun dun!). When I switch back to Spring, the entire map is completely black. All the lighting is screwed up. I know for a fact that alt-tab used to work fine, because I used it regularly. I'm forced to quit the game (since I can't see anything), and I give up on playing or spectating today because I don't have another 30 minutes to waste in the lobby waiting for another game.
Anyway, I hope newbies have a nicer experience with Spring than I had this afternoon.
Today I got an itch to play Spring after an absence of a few weeks. Things went downhill from there
I started up the lobby client, and the first thing I see is a message to update. OK, downloading 20 megs of new stuff... Seems like these updates are being pushed out pretty regularly? It's rather frustrating to have to re-download the entire game every couple of weeks, even if the process is automated.
Download finished. I started up TASClient (yeah, I know it's old and unsupported, but it's what I like)... and it won't start. Error in unitsync.dll. Ok, so my preferred client is now broken.
Started up Springlobby, which I've never used before. The initial startup was nice - it imported my settings from TASClient, which I appreciate. Unfortunately I found the game list to be difficult to use. It was hard to absorb the information for some reason. Sorry I can't be more specific than that. Also, the game list wouldn't sort by more than one column at a time, which was a nice feature of TASClient.
Anyway, I found a game I wanted to spectate. Whoops! New version of Balanced Annihilation. Need to download it.
I switched to the download tab and first tried to find Balanced Annihilation 7.0 visually. But for some reason, even when I clicked on the "Name" column, all of the results were sorted by the hash code. Who the heck sorts stuff by hash code, anyway?
Eventually I found Balanced Annihilation 7.0 and clicked the Download button. Nothing happened. I tried double-clicking it, and nothing happened again. I think it may have appeared in the download list briefly, but was quickly removed. No error message explaining why.
At this point I gave up on using SpringLobby to download. I started up the SpringDownloader application and quickly downloaded what I needed, then restarting SpringLobby.
I join a game (as a spectator), and the game starts. What... the... heck... I'm used to around 60 fps, but the game is running at about 10 fps for some reason. I press F11 and start randomly toggling lua widgets until I find the culprit. Apparently "LolUI" was the biggest offender, and my FPS instantly tripled when I turned it off. The game still runs slower than I remember, but at least it's tolerable.
At this point my wife asks me to look something up for her on Google, so I alt-tab out of the game (dun dun dun!). When I switch back to Spring, the entire map is completely black. All the lighting is screwed up. I know for a fact that alt-tab used to work fine, because I used it regularly. I'm forced to quit the game (since I can't see anything), and I give up on playing or spectating today because I don't have another 30 minutes to waste in the lobby waiting for another game.
Anyway, I hope newbies have a nicer experience with Spring than I had this afternoon.