Spring RTS Engine

First of all I like to introduce myself. I´m new here at TA Spring and the reason I´m here is because I LOVE Total Annihilation. I live in Sweden and have played TA for 5 years. I have always sigh in vain for TA2. As many else I also thought about what makes TA the best RTS ever and what I wanted to improve to TA2.

My answer is: Most of all I want better graphics. TA´s gameplay is so good that it easily beats all other RTS ever,including all new games. The only thing TA needs is a face-lift (more funny A.I. and campaign could be good too) to become the universial-RTS-game.

Another reason why I want better graphics is if you want your game to attact many players you must have good graphics. To maintain the players you must have a good gameplay, that do TA have. That is why the community still is this alive . So what TA needs, as I said, is better graphics to get more players.

The reason I write this is because I think TA Spring needs to improve the visual to be able to receive new players that haven´t played TA. I may also stay with the original TA because at the moment Total annihilation is so much better than TA Spring. With hard work and skilled workers you may force me to change my mind.

It is kinda visual impressive with the right options, and high poly units are being worked at... or was planned atleast... And a new GUI is being worked at, and proably a nice skin for the TASClient...

Where excakly are they lacking Visual?

Also, the game still has bugs, lacking many other features (New scripting invoirment for new cool units) , Music ingame, other stuffies... but sure, visual is always good...

When I have read the title, I was expecting an intresting post with solution, or at least, some way to have better graphics. Something constructive...

I may also stay with the original TA because at the moment Total annihilation is so much better than TA Spring.

I would be intressting to know why you think that Total annihilation is so much better than TA Spring.
Because not everybody think like you.

I like the gameplay of both games. I like how building are blocking missile for exemple.
Graphically, I think Spring is better, even if it could be even better.
But I prefere playing spring beceause it's easier to find people, and because it a growing games ...and TA is a dying game wich is improved with hack.

And from a high horse I declare; Noob.

I'm always impressed with the graphics of Spring.
(For -as Neuralize highly called- noobs, you do need to turn the goodies ON in the settings. If you have the capability* to).
Even more when you remember this all is OS and made in spare time (or it should be).

As for your general unconstructed blog about how not-impressive Spring's graphics is: You didn't pay for it, so if you don't like it, make your own.
Furthermore ... why am I actually caring about this...

*'capability' should be read in a way of: You need a High-End PC for it. Not be interpretet as you need the capability to find the Settings, be smart enough to know what it represents, then be phisicly able to change it.
but then again, I did mention the group of people who should take notice of it

Pingu wrote:...
My answer is: Most of all I want better graphics.
...
Another reason why I want better graphics is if you want your game to attact many players you must have good graphics.
...
So what TA needs, as I said, is better graphics to get more players.
...
I think TA Spring needs to improve the visual to be able to receive new players that haven´t played TA.

You made your point I guess.

Pingu wrote:I may also stay with the original TA because at the moment Total annihilation is so much better than TA Spring. With hard work and skilled workers you may force me to change my mind.

Please stay with the original TA!
We will certainly not force you to change your mind...

All joking aside if you like to see improved graphics you can also get of you lazy butt and help out.

as it stands right now, I believe Spring is far superior to Total Annihilation in every respect except for distribution. Either turn up your settings, help out with improving the shiny side of Spring, or go back to Total Annihilation. Your choice.

Also spring is just plain cool!

Dose it NEED explination?

Spring has many grafical bugs, true! But it's grafical engine allows for very good looking things ... if the content it is running is good.
Do not mistake maps with textures that could look better with lack of capabilities of Spring's grafical engine.

As a general rule, most maps could be better and most units in most mods could be more detailed and have better textures. You could help with making better content for Spring. No great science is required, just work force and a little talent.

Just look at some of the shiny new models gnome has for the next Starwars release ^^

Or the EvoTA models. High quality, even if they are not the same as the normal models.

or Absolute Annihilation, Caydr has polished up the models a little bit. Take a gander at the Bulldog in TLL though, it's been shiny'd up alright, so Spring can do stuff like this easily.

A common vibe I get from some people is spring is dull/dark compared to OTA. I think weapons fire having custom lighting would fix this, and add a huge improvement, but thats just an opinion from soemone who knows very little about OpenGL.

In the visual department, the only things Spring is missing are a proper GUI and a half-decent mod-variable weapon FX system.

I think a big problem is that people are still making things with OTA and low system specs in mind. It's unfortunate, but people who aren't keeping up in hardware and internet connection are not what any modern game targets, and I don't see why Spring should be any exception. People are making too many compromises in my opinion in the name of greater compatibility with old systems and bad internet connections. A 25 megabyte map can be downloaded in under a minute on any modern connection. It will look better than any 10 or 5 megabyte map. Why make compromises?

A great shame IMO is the map called 2 Valleys (or something similar). It's a really good, high quality, well thought-out map. But the compression that was used is much too high and it definitely shows.

Whether it makes my audience smaller or not, I'm going for maximum quality (within reason) with anything I make.

Bandwidth still isn't free, and we North Americans are very fortunate to have decent, uncapped internet connections... people in parts of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and other places aren't quite so lucky. Saying "well you should have a good connection LOL NOOB" is just a cop out for not learning how to do it right.

Even with modern games they try to keep the game playable on the lowest possible system to gain more customers, and I don't see why Spring should be any exception.

if spring has some saturation settings the game could look fabulous... as it stands spring IS a bit grey..

Gnome wrote:Bandwidth still isn't free, and we North Americans are very fortunate to have decent, uncapped internet connections... people in parts of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and other places aren't quite so lucky. Saying "well you should have a good connection LOL NOOB" is just a cop out for not learning how to do it right.

Even with modern games they try to keep the game playable on the lowest possible system to gain more customers, and I don't see why Spring should be any exception.

100% agree.

The very cheapest internet connection I've ever had had a 1 gigabyte cap per month. That's equivalent to 40,000 25-mb map downloads, assuming I was using the right number of 0's in my calculation. Ok, let's say you have a half-gig cap. 20,000 downloads. Anyone can spare a bit of bandwidth for decent quality. Look at 2 Valleys - I think anyone would gladly take 10 extra MBs of extra size in exchange for a fix-up of the tile-mess that the hillsides are.

Game development needs to be forward-looking. By the time Spring is fully stable and has all its glitches and odd behaviours worked out, I'm betting at least a year will have passed. By that time even the slowest computer you can buy off-the-shelf will be capable of reasonable speeds with high-detail maps and mods. And for anyone who's an enthusiast, like most of the people who play spring (judging by the fact that the slowest CPU i've seen in the lobby is 1.6, and the fastest being a 4 ghz), our computers will more than likely be twice as fast a year from now.

Internet connections are constantly getting better and more affordable. Here in little old undeveloped Canada, you can get a 2-gig-capped connection for 20 feeble canadian dollars a month. It's reasonably high speed, too, with about 150 kbps downstream from what I've seen at a friend's house. Countries that don't have high speed readily available WILL have high speed readily available in the near future, it's inevitable. I mean, look at Sweden. Their residential internet connections (according to SJ I think it was) are far faster AND cheaper than an average high speed connection in North America. Umm.. other countries. In Korea, Starcraft is practically a religion. You can play it on 56k, but poorly. I bet most SC players have some type of high speed connection. Uh... well I can't give any more examples, I'm not familiar enough. But high-speed internet is clearly becoming more and more readily available to the average person.

What's the single most popular multiplayer game on the planet? Counterstrike, of course. You can't play that worth a damn on anything less than high speed. Hundreds of thousands of people play it, from all over the world.

People who play Spring on low-speed internet are in the minority. If you all want to develop things with ancient computers and slow internet connections in mind, that's up to you. But as for me, I'm going to aim for maps which can compete with the best any other game has to offer. Same for G/E/M. It's no secret that it's going to be a large mod. I'm not going to make compromises in the name of making the mod more easily playable for an extra 5% of Spring players.

Forward-looking development is the right thing for this project as well as anything developed for this project.

My major qualms with how spring is distributed installed works are not graphical.

Simply runnign a game requires exploration.

So I propose a few simple steps:

- Putting Spring Multiplayer and Singleplayer shortcuts on the desktop
- Adding SpringSP to the install package and svn, and working on porting it to linux
- Re-arranging the battle screen in the lobby, I spent 5 mintues trying to figure out howto add a bot the first time I did an NTAI multiplayer demonstration. There simply arent any logical mappings betwene user action and GUI.
- Skinning the Lobby GUI
- A truckload of thigns more about the lobbys interface design that I could rite an entire thread about.
- Autoreporting. When we get a crash and a report is generated, it should check if there's a net connection and fire an email off with it as the attatchement.
- Some New GUI related stuff
- A front page that isnt a huge block of text
- And likewise a redesign for how this site looks currently, it's alright, but it isnt specifically user friendly.

1 gb = 1024 mb -> 1024/25 =~ 40*25mb maps , not 40'000 :)
And I played 2 years Starcraft with a 28k , and it was not so poorly.

If everybody say "we have as many mb that we want" we will shortly have 100 mb maps.
Plus I don't want a 5gb spring folder like UT2004.
IHMO a good quality map should have a reduce size. Like a good game don't waste your CPU cycle..even if it could run on a 200mhz.