I dunno about the constant updates unless its thru steamworks so it requires no patching. But I knew empires would live on. Thank you and good luck spawwn!
Constant updates will be a perk of Steamworks, until then updates will have to be spaced out a bit more for bandwidth/user maintainence concerns. Going on a year is a bit much though. I'd like to see a new version roll out every 3 months until Steamworks, and every month there's something worth presenting thereafter. Add in general developer over-optimism and that'll probably pan out to 2-3 releases a year
Not magically, but it reduces the download size each release (because less needs done to be deemed "worthy" of releasing) and as a direct result that means you don't have to download as much at any one time. Steamworks won't make your overall usage go down (If you're paying a flat rate per mb then this wouldn't help) but downloading 10-20mb here and there is way less taxing on a person (and their patience) than 100-200mb when they really want to just play. Also, auto-updating means that your computer may experience the download while you are at work or sleeping, so as far as you are concerned there was no download, that's efffectively free bandwidth. Maybe bandwidth was the wrong word, but I dont' think so... it's about how much data you need to move in a specified period. Specific to this case, how many megs do I need to download to play "right damn now", and with Steamworks the download is more likely to be already done, so the answer would be "none" instead of "lots".
Soundspawn you sound motivated, i like that. I also agree that this mod really needs a updated Website, because if you look on sucsessful mods in that genre, you will notice that they have blog updated like 2 times a week at least. The dev team should also introduce itself, not beeing ghosts. You could start with posting how much people are actually working on this mod again, who else is needed as support and maybe some personal things of the active devs. This things should be publicated on a new Empires website so current development gets a face.
You're gonna want to assign someone the role of creating a tutorial map. Look at allegiance, that game is one hell hole of a complicated game. It is like empires where you have an overhead human commander telling you to do stuff, there is resource managment, even the vehicles are mad customizable. Now with that said, allegiance has a really bad learning curve, so does empires, Allegiance had really descriptive tutorials that can help any newbie kill a veteran. so why not empires? empires needs to have tutorials teaching basics like res nodes, raxes, buildings, flags, ammo boxes, the mortar and how to use it properly and vehicles. You stroll into the ELC to help around with the newbies, and you find that a lot of them don't even read the chat, or have any idea about infantry tactics(example of an infantry tactic being how on earth to kill a tank as a rifleman or a grenadier). Though you can say it is the newbies fault for not listening. but the problem is is that there are like 30 people on that server daily, a tutorial or set of tutorials could render the ELC obsolete, meaning more players for the big servers. If someone is going to make a tutorial, THERE MUST BE VOICE, since no one reads the chat or will notice it. A good example is the dystopia tutorial, really helpful for a somewhat confusing game.
People don't "learn" anything on the ELC that they wouldn't have learned elsewhere. The concept of a "training server" is deeply flawed in this particular mod. I think the community has been asking for a tutorial for... Two years now?
I think we're in good hands here. When I suggested that (the blogs at least) to the last dev team, you would've thought I asked them to port Empires to another engine. So when is your balancer going to become part of Empires? And forced on everyone so we can play fair for once? With the massive newb influx from a Steamworks release, there will be plenty of players (that way it won't matter when the hard core stackers rage quit).
if u think this game is hard on noobs u should try hon and it has 30-40 thousand players on at any given time and its only in beta
If you are serious about using it or checking it out (can disable the forcing of teams and just monitor how it ranks your players) I could prep it for distribution, wouldn't take long. In all honesty I'd like to see it work with a bigger sampling than House of Rage has been getting. I'm unsure about building a system directly in to Empires for a few reasons: 1) If staying with SQL database, must choose between centrialized stats or force servers to manage their own SQL databases which may or may not already be in place. A few hurdles either direction. 2) If moving away from SQL database, no ability to group your servers for centrialized stats (for example our test server and live server share the same ratings). Also likely to lose efficiency by abandoning the SQL product and trying to develop one in house. I like SM for this for the same reasons I like it for Sourcebans and Admin controls in general.
Perhaps we should meet on TS or Steam sometime next week and discuss it. 1) Global / centralized stats have been discussed before. It's the best way to run a balancer. However, there are security implications with untrusted servers if you use SQL as the client-server communication layer. 2) Given how small Empires is (two major server networks), we could (and partially have in the past) roll out global trusted stats (the data for your balancer) based on SQL rather easily.
I try to keep in mind that if all goes well the mod grows, so while I agree with you, centalized systems becomes difficult. Between hacking attempts (and thus additional code to stop them) secure connections sucking up additional bandwidth, etc... I think separate stats with support for clustering may be the best option (essentially your option 2). The only thing I should do with the code is go from Query to TQuery so I don't lag servers running outside of my lan and I could set you up with connection info to cluster in Whenever works for you we can discuss.
