Spring RTS Engine

LCC doesn't really play anymore, UoY is gone, bau is absent, otherside and universal don't play, yogzototh was gone for a while but finally came back, God is on but mostly only specs, utukki doesn't even spec anymore...

I mean its really good to get new players but spending every game trying to babysit a new player through the ropes gets kind of tiring. I miss the good old days of brilliant games, now mostly just the team with fewer newbies wins.

So whatever made people quit?

moderators: fixed title

i thought that by now everybody was aware that about half a year ago the interface/widgets reached a new level of suck.

Too much effort spend on spamming the screen without thinking if players need that.

Game wasn't going in the direction i liked (1faction).

To many dev's. None of them fixing the main issue's in getting a playerbase instead making the problem worse (Car's widget clutter).

Realisation Spring will be nothing more than BADSD

Not enough games of CA and started playing Heroes of Newerth.

All 4 of the above combined made me quit CA and playing spring.

knorke wrote:i thought that by now everybody was aware that about half a year ago the interface/widgets reached a new level of suck.

Too much effort spend on spamming the screen without thinking if players need that.

lolwut are you talking about, half a year ago? Have you forgotten the days when CA interface would spam a popup whenever you built a unit for the first time?

Otherside wrote: Realisation Spring will be nothing more than BADSD

Noooo I keep hoping for better still

Otherside wrote:clutter

That will be your last post in this thread, I'm not in the mood for your trollings again.


Back on topic, I might be willing to put effort into resurrecting the days of massive FFA with ceasefires. Ceasefire 2.0 was a failure. There seems to be no progress on a new chili playerlist needed for Ceasefire 3.0. At some points I thought SirMaverick or jK were working on this. It would be a cinch to resurrect back Ceasefire 1.0 and we could bring back the old days of The Hunters and the like. I just hope det is finally over his XTA phase.

Well, the chatbox thing is still a bit of mess - and I find that you have to do a _lot_ of rearranging to get the CA UI usable in 1024x768.

But either way, I don't understand abandoning CA because of it - I can't think of a time when CA's UI wasn't a WIP.

And I really can't understand leaving because of 1fac
a) it's a fork and
b) the gameplay really isn't different.

Either way, I don't play because my wife just pushed out a kid... but even before then, I started trying XTA games simply because it was impossible to get a CA game started. XTA is good (better than BA) but still CA wins for me.

But either way, I don't understand abandoning CA because of it - I can't think of a time when CA's UI wasn't a WIP.

yea there always were some annyoing things (ie test version reminder or the automatic friendly noobbot, ok that one was quite lol because of its face)
But you could always just disable them, now you have 3 or 4 chat things and if you disable them it is still fucked.

None of them fixing the main issue's in getting a playerbase instead making the problem worse

Imo this. When trying BA or SA they do not have the newest cutting edge technology but it feels like they concentrate on things players want and avoid useless stuff. I am aware the ca team has created lots of lua magic and its fun to look what is possible in spring sometimes but then in the end sometimes i just want to play without much hassle.

Well, the chatbox thing is still a bit of mess - and I find that you have to do a _lot_ of rearranging to get the CA UI usable in 1024x768.

stop trolling please, its perfect.

lolwut are you talking about, half a year ago? Have you forgotten the days when CA interface would spam a popup whenever you built a unit for the first time?

lies, stop trolling please.

Realisation Spring will be nothing more than BADSD

this as well partly. With xta even dsd+larger games are kind of ok because with the commander you can always do something fun if you are bored of spamming units.

You are also missing CATs from the list.

Btw GUI has been fixed for a long time now.

I think main reason is natural decline together with lack of fresh blood for VERY long time.
Reason for this was springlobby - it replaced tasclient and does nott include rapid downloader so it effectively blocked fresh blood from reaching CA.

We now have SD lobby which at least brings some new people to game. So I hope that numbers start rising again. CA is down from 15-20% players to 5-10% but its still most played non-BA mod atm..

To me the issues with CA UI are threefold:
1) Layout
2) The chat system - the bubbles look nice, but they're too large at lower resolutions, and the wierd back/forth between bubbles and chatbox+playerlist when you hit escape needs some kind of cleanup.
3) The occaisional GUIs might need some TLC. The Chicken GUI is huuuuuuuge, and the ally GUI seems to live in shrodinger's box.

The way the playerlist and chatbox pop in and out of existance is very jarring. Photoshop-style shade-to-titlebar/expand approach, with a smooth animation, would work best. Then it wouldn't be surprising and confusing how your boxes appear/disappear.

Similar shade/expand functionality would be nice for the Chickens panel.

Chat hiding is not default gui now pxtl. It was that way only one stable, default UI now is default spring chat + bubbles.

Suggestion: Chili windows can be created with optional pushpin property. When user clicks on it to to toggle unpin, window minimizes to small square and only shows on mouse hover. Then apply this to chat and (future chili) playerlist windows by default. No need for fancy settings, pushpins would be straightforward and familiar. Licho's press-enter-to-show-chat could manually show the chat window if it's in minimize mode, with a Chili function.

But jK is always stretched thin these days, so maybe one day.

I also miss the drag grip. No one knows you need to drag windows from the very top row of pixels, very difficult to pull off.

Edit: instead of small square, use Pxtl's "shade" suggestion to minimize. Chili windows have titlebars now so those can show you what the windows are.

CarRepairer wrote:There seems to be no progress on a new chili playerlist needed for Ceasefire 3.0. At some points I thought SirMaverick or jK were working on this.

I was and somewhat still am. But lack of bigger ffa games don't motivate much...

Licho wrote:Chat hiding is not default gui now pxtl. It was that way only one stable, default UI now is default spring chat + bubbles.

My bad - yeah, some manner of user-friendly auto-hide-show would be nice. It's too bad that you need to preserve Spring's edge-scrolling, or the Visual Studio style of auto-hiding side-docked panels would be wonderful. But players would probably be annoyed if they kept accidentally showing the auto-hide panel (thus obscuring the battlefield) when edge-scrolling, or accidentally edge-scrolling when they were just trying to show an auto-hide panel.

SirMaverick wrote:

CarRepairer wrote:There seems to be no progress on a new chili playerlist needed for Ceasefire 3.0. At some points I thought SirMaverick or jK were working on this.

I was and somewhat still am. But lack of bigger ffa games don't motivate much...

Just modify advplayerlist to use chili? It shouldn't be nearly as hard as starting from scratch. It has all the structure there, just need to replace draw calls with chili controls, which can go in a giant stackpanel.

CarRepairer wrote:Just modify advplayerlist to use chili? It shouldn't be nearly as hard as starting from scratch. It has all the structure there, just need to replace draw calls with chili controls, which can go in a giant stackpanel.

The last attempt doing so created more problems than it solved and I don't need to start from scratch as I have some basic stuff already.

Tbh we dont need anything as cool as adv player list, though some of its features are nice (alert points, sharing).
And doing simple list is easier to do from scratch.
I did modify adv player list to fit into chili container - with issues - widget itself is too complex to be easily modified.

Licho wrote:Tbh we dont need anything as cool as adv player list, though some of its features are nice (alert points, sharing).

For alert points we have pointer tracker and chat bubbles.

My favorite features are the label alerts (sorry I don't play with chat bubbles on), take alerts (look much nicer than take-remind widget) and double-click the tank to share units is my favorite.

Take reminder is evil, i would remove it, it causes nubs to take 90% of time.

Licho wrote:Take reminder is evil, i would remove it, it causes nubs to take 90% of time.

Don't. Not everyone is using adv playerlist.
There are enough noobs that ignore it while all the "pros" already resigned.