Spring RTS Engine

I hope lobby feature requests are ok in here, I checked the guidelines, it only said mod requests weren't allowed.

I'm referring to the TASClient.exe but I encourage other clients to use these ideas too.

[Change the colour of mods that are not installed]

Much like how maps are displayed in red when they are not installed, the mods should be displayed in red when the are not installed, and perhaps a different colour when its a newer version of what you have.

[Players column]

Add the rank icon before the names, this will make it easier to look at the ranks of the players in the gameroom, it will also make it easer to see each individual player (sometimes it looks like a players name is a combination of two).

[Preview games]

Being able to view more detailed information about a gameroom, for example having a list of people in the game with info like are they AFK, time playing spring, what team they are on, and other info. Also info about the gameroom like how long its been open and an image of the map.

[Filtering gameroom list]

Being able to hide games that are full/active/locked/ran by bot/passworded/specific mod/specific map/specific name/specific player/etc.

Also improving this filter idea would be to add tabs to the gameroom list with each tab as a different filter.

And please, remove the Join arrow on the left of the list, its just an eyesore.

[Chat]

Player names should have their rank icon next to. Also the games listed in the room should be for the currently selected or currently in channels.

[Game Room]

-Able make multiple boxes per team.
-Able to make circular boxes *mind implodes*
-Autohost-based commands for the host (like fixcolours, and balance)
-Being able to tell if a player has the map or not.
-Automatic assigning of teams (eg if only two team's boxes on map the client assigns the player to the team with the least amount of players)
-Able to view the metal on the map.
-P2P map transfer

[Misc]

Also theres many obvious missing features like more advanced ranking system.

Just to clarify some of the points and add my own oppinion

Following require changes / additions to unitsync.so / unitsync.dll

Beening able to view metal on map. Would settle for for displaying water correctly first. As we can already can get metal radius & max metal values reported from unitsync.

Beening able to tell if player has map, i.e if in choosing maps, would mean a nice bit of bandwidth to transfer map listings to server and then passed to the host. Image if host / user has hundreds of maps.
Already possible with Lobby Protocol for a client to figure out if its a mod / map that is causing it to be outof sync.


Following require changes / additions to Spring itself
Circluar / Mulitple starting positions. And minor changes to lobby protocol to support multiple starting positions

Changes to Lobby Protocol
Note about ranking system == inaccurate at best. I would disable it completey in UnityLobby if didnt expect people to complain out right.
Win / Lose Ratio, would be best solution imo, and resets every so often, with top100 winners displayed somewhere for each time its reset.

To display all BATTLEINFO for all battles and not 1 user is in is alot more bandwidth usage, and will really only increase cpu usage of clients. And since clients run in background while spring is playing == bad idea imo

P2P map transfer, will need a centre map repo, prob Bittorrent p2p is best solution. So avoid whole thing been polluted with stuff that isnt a map / mod.
Hell atm would settle for clients beening able to send checksum ( to avoid issues about same name & different versions )for map/mod to a website & get a http link to webpage containing the mod / map. But havent heard back from iamacup, seems to be ignoring me about this request completey. Maybe someone else can convince him its a good idea.

Ranks should be linked to a ladder of sorts. Thats what I plan for AFLobby, and I'll have 16 ranks.

I take it you can swap around the columns in the playerlist tables of unitylobby?

Orakios java client was able to open the maps up directly and view the heightmap and show it as an image. Perhaps you'd find that useful. You'll find it in the AFLobby source at the end of Misc.java.

Yes I know alot of stuff wont be easily implemented, I was just putting the ideas out there.

Anyway with getting more in depth info about a gameroom. It would be when the player requests the info by right clicking it or something (similar to CS: S). I would use that when checking to see if I want to swap to a different gameroom without losing my spot.

additional requests:

• please attach a flag to the player names in the battle window, also a host-determined flag in the games browser window could help determine pings beforehand
• in the chat window -> playerslist: searching /jumping with the keyboard would be nice
• a notes feature for individual players would be great, so i can make notes about early quitters or other things, there should also be an icon that reminds me about the note in the game, and also a rate feature, from -5 to 5 or just a setting to specify several types of players (good / avg / noob / teamkiller / quitter ..whatever) with different icons/colors (this all is just visible to myself, stored maybe in special type of logfile, also you _could_ make it public, but i'm not certain this would be a good idea)