Spring RTS Engine

i'm not a native english speaker, so be polite with me. :)

I've just downloaded and installed spring on ubuntu 10.04. I was a good AoE player and I'm having some troubles here.

What I'm going to explain is my experience until i get tired. May be I will never be able to play, some people thinks i'm not patient enough, i think starting some stuff is hard, and i think that a game if it's hard to play your first time you'll probably don't would like to play. A game should be for fun.


First, installation, easy.
Second , mods and maps. The directory .spring/mods did not exist, so it fail to download stuff on there. I created it myself, easy. But it's a hidden folder, a linux newbie will never reach that point.

then, i tried to play myself on singleplayer, no maps, no mods, no game. sucks.

then I go 'online' where i can download maps and mods with right click, springs hangs and quits. no information shown. it happens twice or more. not nice but i can handle it.

finally , my first game, with real players, but i do not know what to do or how to move. fuck, 1 hour for this?.

but, something happens, people on the chat helped me to find the forum and from here i reach some stuff(manuals and docs, lot to read.) but that's a lot. There is no tutorial? i been looking around for a 'solo' tutorial, not a doc, a game-tutorial . where the machine tells me what to do next and how to do it. there is no such thing or i have not been able to find it. so.... i read.

and i will read meanwhile i play alone, to learn faster by test and fail, because now i have some maps and mods.

i select the map 'intro battle v3' and 'balanced annihilation v7',add a bot, and click start. nice. but ... why I win so fast?? (1 second )
i'll try again with more bots, with different AI. crashhhhhhh.

would you like to open the log file? o yes, please, i will paste it to the forum to help on it. but, there is no editor selected, i select it, my loved vim . fuck what now? i can not see my screen properly, i'm stack to 800x600 ? o lord.

i'll post and restart. let's see if when rebooted i'm on the mood to try again.

I assume you're playing Balanced Annihilation, which is the most popular game on the Spring Engine.

"Balanced Annihilation" is a semi-abandoned game, and has a very difficult learning curve. It has a man running it (TheFatController) but he is not attempting to expand it into a complete single-player experience with tutorials and missions.

Many games are currently developing tutorials and missions for a more user friendly experience, such as Kernel Panic and Gundam.

Simply put: the problems with learning BA are well-known, but people who would be able to fix them are devoting that work to their own projects.

KP and Gundam both have single-player launchers that will easily get you into missions that are a friendlier introduction to the game... although I don't know how well those launchers work under Linux. I do know that Kernel Panic is available on Ubuntu in the repos, allowing you to install and run it as a complete game. So for KP, the user experience is much better.

I'm trying to play springlobby, by now the only thing I know about this game is that it's 'like' AoE' .

1 hour ago i was convinced to play a couple of ours and let's see if I like the game. Now i'm planing to see a movie, it has been hard and tired trying to play.

:)


anyway, thanks for your advice, maybe tomorrow i'll give it another chance and try kernel panic or gundam.


thanks.

And people wonder why I think its irresponsible to label the spring engine installer anything but a developers SDK

if by AoE you mean age of empire ... there is nothing like that in Spring ...

if you win so fast against a BOT, it means the BOT failed to initialize itself (bad AI dll, missing config files for the mod you're playing), check the infolog.txt for more details

For Kernel Panic:
- (assuming the Spring engine is already installed)
- get and unzip that file: http://jobjol.nl/1684
- put the content of /mods/ into ~/.spring/mods
- put the content of /maps/ into ~/.spring/maps
- Discard the rest
- Run Spring directly, a greenish menu should pop up
- Click skirmish, duel, easy, run.

Pxtl wrote:KP and Gundam both have single-player launchers that will easily get you into missions that are a friendlier introduction to the game... although I don't know how well those launchers work under Linux

When it was Kernel_Panic_Launcher.exe obviously it didn't work under Linux. But now I moved the launcher functionnality into a widget, and so it now works under Linux as well. However, the GRTS menu and single player missions is not official yet, you can only get it from the SP mutator inside my GRTS installer .exe. The last official GRTS release feature single player in the form of chickens, though. (GRTS=Gundam RTS btw).

Pxtl wrote:I do know that Kernel Panic is available on Ubuntu in the repos

Yes, but I'm not sure it's up-to-date, or that mammadori or YokoZar made the link to the special startscript.

at this point im thinking someone should package BA with at least one map and at least one compatible AI

Hey permalac,
thanks for the feedback - though as has been said, there is awareness of the problem, I was happy for your reminder (since as a long time insider, I am prone to forget how being confronted with Spring anew).

Hope you can get a game running one way or the other (and find some enjoyment in one of the many cool games out there).
Sean

AF wrote:And people wonder why I think its irresponsible to label the spring engine installer anything but a developers SDK

+over 9000

There is a kind of single-player mode for Balanced Annihilation too, it's called chicken defense. You fight against swarms of aliens that are called chickens for some reason.

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=15579

Play the chicken defense mod, and include 1 of the chicken ais that get listed then.