Spring RTS Engine

Given that the game runs smooth, without lag or slowdown, would you prefer a game with very many units or with fewer units?

Write +1 if you prefer more units
Write -1 if you prefer less units

By the way, who the f-k disabled polls in this forum?

+1 (I'm an action freak. Maximum carnage and B action movies ftw)

Not clear to me what this means? More units than what? Assuming games run smoothly with arbitrary many units doesn't sound realistic :p

We already have 16 player games with ~2500 units at max and these run well. Tbh I think even more units per player would not gain a huge amount, at least for BA. Maybe speedmetal players would disagree? Iirc the 12v12 team games that briefly existed were abandoned because they ran for so long that people got fed up.

I think my answer is, I like games the size they already are... sometimes they run at slightly lower speed than 1.0 and if that can be helped great, but imo its not an issue worth sacrificing anything for now; the regular MT build is fantastic and does quite enough already.

+100500

+1 up to a point. When your force becomes a big meaningless aggregate of numbers like the Total War series, I lose interest.

+1

I'v played quite some games in which i hit the unit limit and i had to adjust my tactics to the limit.


Oh and PS.
This thread is ofc about the removal of the MT version made by zerver. Without knowing anything about coding i'll say this on the subject: true MT is the future of Spring.

klapmongool wrote:Without knowing anything about coding i'll say this on the subject: true MT is the future of Spring.

Seems to me that zerver wants to use this thread to make it seem that people want his MTism branch, and thus win arguments with other developers.

Obviously everyone wants the engine to be faster, all other things equal, but it's unrealistic to expect people who aren't developers to be able to decide how it should be done.

If this thread is indeed about the MTism thing, it's not very constructive to discuss it here (in offtopic of all things).

However, if on the other hand the intent would be to discuss gameplay of games depending on army size, my opinion is this:

Games with smaller army sizes can be just as interesting, and usually move towards a more micro-based combat, where it's usually essential to keep track of one unit's health.

The extreme of small army size games are MOBA style games like LOL, DOTA and HON in which the player most often controls 1 and up to 5 units. The huge popularity of those games seems to suggest that the average PC player would actually prefer games with very few units.

Personally I dislike huge battles in which most units are extremely badly used (like most TA-like games near the end game). It can however be both visually and tactically pleasing to control large armies like in the Total War games.

I prefer games that have no less than 10 units per player, and 100 is usually too much to control sensibly (balance also doesn't tend to scale as well with army size).

The background behind this poll is that it was used as an argument against MT.
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... 62#p539858

abma wrote:maybe as note: more units doesn't mean better games, it just gets confusing.

So naturally I want to know what the community thinks.

As I read that, it was not an argument against MT, but against new MTSim braches; I can't see anything there where abma is against vanilla MT. And it was not really an argument against its existence, more of an argument to say MTSim wouldn't eradicate performance issues.

I have to admit though, abma seems to have some pretty good points in the rest of that post.

+1xxxxxxxxxxxxxx need for speed- the future is now

Entirely a function of game design, c.f. S44 vs BTL

+1

TA is the reason i am here, and TA brought the battle to a whole new scale compared to other RTS:s. Don't throw that away.

+1 ofc

We already have 16 player games with ~2500 units at max and these run well

whahahahaha ... eh eh ..... snif snif

I don't need more units in common BA games, but I play BA Chickens and TA RoboDef, and there I _always_ have CPU-related lag and dropping players.
spring-multithreaded doesn't help, and it got worse: 94.x had a massive negative performance impact.
So if multithreading spring can help with my performance problems, it can help me.

Not being an engine dev I was going to keep quiet, but as the discussion has been opened here, I'll drop my two cents:
IMO everyone has good reasons for their position. Abmas and jKs position on maintainability (which includes code quality) protect the foundation of what everyone needs: a stable engine! zerver wishes to raise springs performance. Something users crave for too. Given the complexity of the system and the lack of man-power it's no surprise this creates friction.

tl,dr: My point: What I don't understand is the one-or-the-other-rhetoric. What I would expect is a _roadmap_. Then the devs could act as a _team_ to reach each milestone (phase out legacy, include MT-pathing, LuaJit, incl. MT-sim etc) and ensure stability and maintainability in the process together. Or the roadmap would clearly say that there will be no MTSim etc. in the foreseeable future, then zerver would have to officially make a fork or drop it.

Not necessarily, the nature of the game and the condition of the game state determine the answer to this question. This does not appear to be a serious question, of course.

I prefer a good amount of units.

+1

Also, spring is the only game I know you can actually control thousand of unit efficiently because of the widget (auto group and custom formation are the most significant examples). That the reason I enjoy ffa, you just dont click and hope for the best.... Hopefully MT will keep the flow going toward the right direction

Poll: Is this a loaded question?

I agree with Neddie and FLOZi, it should really depend on how the game is designed.

So far every spring game has just completly ignored unit limits in its game design, at best some autohosts set a unitlimit.
It is easily possible to build so many units that the game becomes unplayable. See http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/4656 for a thread on this problem.

Most RTS have some kind of system to prevent too many units becoming a problem: population limit, resources run out, upkeep, ....
In Spring the only limit is a "gentlemans agreement" not to lag out other players.
So if Spring was to run faster with many units, it would not actually help much: It will just take a few minutes longer for players to reach unitnumbers where it starts to lag again.

Also, spring is the only game I know you can actually control thousand of unit efficiently because of the widget (auto group and custom formation are the most significant examples).

Actually a player never controlls "thousands of units."

See "active units" stats at end of a game, rarely does it over ~200 for one player.
Now remember how many units a windfarm can be, then substract turrets, other eco stuff etc and you are left with maybe 50 "actually controllable" units - not that different from other RTS.

knorke wrote:So far every spring game has just completly ignored unit limits in its game design, at best some autohosts set a unitlimit.
It is easily possible to build so many units that the game becomes unplayable. See http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/4656 for a thread on this problem.

Most RTS have some kind of system to prevent too many units becoming a problem: population limit, resources run out, upkeep, ....
In Spring the only limit is a "gentlemans agreement" not to lag out other players.
So if Spring was to run faster with many units, it would not actually help much: It will just take a few minutes longer for players to reach unitnumbers where it starts to lag again.

Also, spring is the only game I know you can actually control thousand of unit efficiently because of the widget (auto group and custom formation are the most significant examples).

Actually a player never controlls "thousands of units."

See "active units" stats at end of a game, rarely does it over ~200 for one player.
Now remember how many units a windfarm can be, then substract turrets, other eco stuff etc and you are left with maybe 50 "actually controllable" units - not that different from other RTS.

Maybe you are right when talking about the average player, but you are wrong when it comes to BA in FFA or 'the best player in the team'. These players do hit high unit limits on a regular basis AND it forces these players to change their tactics.