Problems with Zero-K

What is the plan for the future? Will there be a final release? Will spring even be around much longer?

Problems:

1. Lack of players. While this may not be too much of a problem in itself it seems to be stopping other problems from being solved.

2. Engine problems. The engine seems to be the biggest problem we have. Half of the things we want seem to be blocked by the engine. Also it seems that the engine may not even be around much longer, Zerver even got his commit rights revoked for supporting MT.

3. The community. The community is full of people who cause a lot of problems, trolling and harassing. This must be putting off the new people who we really need.

4. Bugs. This is such a problem that we have had numerous incidents of people leaving because of them and then we roll back to a previous version of everything.

5. Lack of Intel graphics compatibility. This is a rare one but it affects me so i will say it ;). In 91.0 us users of Intel graphics cards have the most awful problems.

Potential Solutions:

1. We need some awesome advertising material and we need to get it out to as many people as possible. I mean magazines and blogs, as many places as we can. I believe we got a review in some German tech magazine a while back? That is the kind of thing I mean.

2. I think that the only answer to this is to get some c++ programmers and fork the engine and develop our own version.

3. More stringent rules. Like Urban Terror or Xonotic, maybe not quite like UrT though where you can get banned for having a name that offends an admin.

4. I don't think that we can solve this while we are always changing engine. I think we should be working to an ultimate objective where we have all the features people want and then fix the outstanding bugs, that could be the final release.

5. Our own engine, see no. 2.

That is what I think. What do others think?

quote: 3. The community. The community is full of people who cause a lot of problems, trolling and harassing. This must be putting off the new people who we really need.

Are you serious? Zero-k has the best community I have even countered playing any game. I hardly ever see "hard trolls" or people who cause problems even when there is a lot of space to troll. I have never seen anybody speccheat on purpose, never. A few times someone teamkilled enemy, but that was very rare. Instead we have nice people to play with. Your argument is invalid.

We'd just need someone to work on the fixes which are actually important to us. The engine devs get around to most bugs eventually but not in an order which prevents extended periods of us using an old engine. There are things that would be easier or faster to do in ZK gadgets with some (generic) engine support.

IMO this material for multiple threads, not a fan of "multiple subjects in one thead" since they always end choatic.

quote: 1. We need some awesome advertising material and we need to get it out to as many people as possible.

When bored I spend too much time observing how Spring is doing on the interweb, I noticed that advertising is not the problem.
Spring/zero-K actually seems to be well-known among gamers.
Basically every gaming forum has threads or posting about spring/zK. If there is a thread titled "Please list some free games" or "Are there free RTS?" spring/zK is usually mentioned.
Also Planetary Annihilation is a big thing at the moment, every forum has a thread about it: spring or zero-K are always mentioned. Similiar happend when Supreme Commander was released.

The name is definatly "out there."
Problem is, the name of Spring/its games among gamers is very bad. Over the years it has build a reputation of being buggy, crashing and difficult to use. I have seen forums where someone very nicely posted videos and everything, then someone literally posts a warning like "Do not waste your time with these games, [long list of bugs], they are not that great anyway." We can jump and down shouting how everything is better now, but then the same was said 2 years ago.

I only ever found one forum where people actually started playing Spring. It was so cool that I had to bookmark it! http://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=113900.0
But shows a new problem: Seems they only played in passworded, private games.
I could imagine it happens similiar in other forums or among friends (LAN party for example)
Thus they do not really contribute to the "more players bring more players"-growth since there is no interaction between the groups.

In my opinion we need to advertise zero-k not spring.

edit: Just realised that most of us excluding devs including me do more talking what should be done than actually do something to improve game :P

Yes, I think "Spring not zK" might be the reason for posts such as:
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=3025&pid=41598#pid41598 (at end)
but even there the poster writes "bad interface both in-game and out of it, the package manager-style game handling, terrible bugs in and out, many other problems" - bugs in and out of game. zK is not free of those bugs and not all have reason in wrong configs from engine install.

The threads advertising zero-K do not really do better:
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=3256
https://www.winhistory-forum.net/showthread.php?tid=8094

zK and zKL exists since 3 years, think of all the bugs that were fixed during this time. But back then those bugs still existed and "burned" players. Also Linux zKL is very new and still so-so.

If you look at the blockland thread you see they were playing all kind of games, even the strange ones like Fibre. I think what many players wanted (want?) at this point was just a way to easily play all these games without hassle. I noticed even new zKL-using players try out multiple games. (copy their name into (currently broken?) search on replays site)
It is a two-sided situation, the different games make/keep it interessting but on the other hand when starting out are confusing.

quote: forces the user to use a working engine version.

Needs wupget that warns the player when wrong engine version is used:

if (Game.version~="91.0") then
big fat error message on blinking red screen
SendCommands ("forcequit") --or whatever it is
end

Graphics card problems can only be fixed if many people test and report. None of the devs have a large range of cards to test on.

quote: What needs testing?

graphic card related, there is this atm:
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=30629
Not sure how useful it will be but only takes two minutes to do.

quote: Pathfinding and army management (keeping units from firing on each other's backs, for instance) are also a problem. Therefore, the problem isn't ZK, but Spring itself.

For some things it is a problem of zK though. For example "large amount of cheap units (like dirtbags, fleas) can lag the game" is a zK problem. The limits of engine are known so one can not make a game that allows each player to easily make hundreds of units and cause lag.
Some might say "but in engine version XY, we could build 300 fleas, now it already lags at 150!": If 300 fleas were to run smoothly then players would just build 600 fleas to make it lag again.

There seems to be an urge to always push everything to its limit without any design or regard of consequences. Both on players side and on modders side.
More units! Remember when 4vs4 meant a large game in RTS? 6vs6! 11vs11! Still not enough for some! Bigger maps, yes please! Total Gluttolation!

well spoken, luckywaldo7

By the sound of it there is something to be said for holding back a game until release. ZK has slowly grown, if only we knew the magic keyword "alpha" beforehand. But we couldn't know because CA started before being alpha was cool and it would look pretty silly to suddenly become alpha.