Spring RTS Engine

As you might know or suspect or be infuriated about, the FileUniverse expansion//developement has somewhat stagnated the last four-five months due to excessive lack of time and ambition on my behalf. However, news are at the tiding as I bring word from the legendary Datanut, the guy that was here way before TAMEC and who's artwork has thus far been greatly appreciated. Him and Rabidmongoose have singlehandedly indexed, sorted and organized the entire TA maps and tileset sections, up to and including uploading minimaps to everything that needed one. A great aid to me and an impressive service to the broad audience.

Now, these two heroes have planned to move onto the Spring section, but have fallen short on their limited knowledge of that area. The Spring maps page is largely overhoarded, poorly upkept and maintained, for which I would like to take the opportunity to apologise. Several similar versions of same maps hang alongside each other, certain are quite frankly outdated, several don't even work. What I would like is someone to guide those two regarding information to what extentions and versions belong where - as for example, we have a whole folder full of maps that no one can play anymore (tip of the day in that regard is to download those that you would wish to save because they will most likely be nuked shortly). Also, they have requested specification on whereon to sort the different maps - by size, type or author, and in those cases which?

Further on, quite the while ago I left some stray promises to certain people that had contributed a whole lot to upgrade them to govern certain parts of the site, and among other things getting their own folders. While I have long ago installed the basic capability for that, I have forgotten to retun and upgrade those that deserved it, for that yet again, I apologise. All authors with more than ten maps on their conscience will most likely have their own sections enabled by default (if you guys consider author-based sorting to be the right decision). Regardless, drop me a note and I will work out some kind of benefit from FU as a kind of thanks for actually putting down so much time for no pay just to make others happy.

What I require from you people is two names that have a reasonable amount of time and will to help the community. Those will be upgraded to moderators to watch over the currently completely unattended Spring section and be granted the powers to move edit or delete precisely anything in their jurisdiction. In return, I'm asking for not more than half an hour per week to fix broken links, move things to the right places or delete stuff that better not have seen the light. A moment for many is a lifetime for one. I simply don't have the time (or working computer) to adress these issues anymore.

Also, to Betalord: As we are soon to categorise maps in one way or another, I will enable section names on our lobby code feed and put the titles between <.div class=section> <./div> tags. While the transformation isn't done yet, you might want to include that part to display as some kind of section break (like a grey line saying "aGorm's maps" and then list a bunch of his maps in normal form, like current). I would also like your lobby to somehow send back a signal to make the counters work - the current download statistics are vividly misguided and I need the information. I don't know how your program works or how to do that, but if you have any ideas on how to trig a PHP script from the lobby, tell me.

Hi Everyone

While rummaging through the Spring Section I noticed there are Spring maps
that work only with versions 0.51b1 and lower. These maps are in the same
directory as maps that work with 0.60b1 OR NEWER VERSIONS.
This is not a good situation. The older maps should be in there own folders.

FEATURED ARTIST IN SPRING
I noticed in the TA Spring map area you have no featured Artist as you have in
the Original TA area. I could fix this up for you if you want this. Only I do not
know who would be a featured artist in the Spring world. I could setup their
folders and put their maps into them, but this puts me back to where the server
needs to be cleaned up first so I can Identify non linked files and that I can be
sure what a file is such as a map, ai, media, mods, utils, features, Etc.!

I would like to see the most recognized map makers of Spring maps get into a
featured map area. I could setup a thread and let you say who you would like to
have as a featured map maker and then vote on it if you wish.

For The TA Community

Datanut

Original topic here.

Also, before we are done, I would like to take the opportunity to whine about the economical situation of the *Universe network. As you might know, there is one single guy - Nexus (Mike Warner by birth) that forks out money by truckloads out of his own pocket just to keep you guys happy. I don't have the current statistics, but last I checked (in the end of -feb) we dealed out 23Gb worth of data per day. That's quite a number, especially considering that we have an explosively exponential download growth due to larger and larger files. That bandwidth doesn't come free and it certainly doesn't come cheap, so make yourself a little service and keep the site floating for a little longer by clicking the ads. Once a day, really... That's all it takes. Shortly we'll install a paypal function and if any of you got a stray dollar tumbling around on the internet, send it this way. I know it sounds kinda strange considering that you of all people are the ones that should be paid, but heh, since when has life been logical?

I require:

• Sorting system suggestions.
• Two new moderators.
• Anyone that made ten or more maps.
• Cookies.

Current modship applicants:

• Forboding Angel

*hands over a special FU cookie*

Would it be possible to have multiple categorie for maps, like "metal", "Tournament 1vs1", "Big map", "official 2006" etc...
And to download all the map from a category with the lobby in a row?

I asked a long time ago for t2 access so that I could tidy up the maps section. Never got a response

I must have missed it before, but your request has been acknowledged now.

Torrasque: That's what you guys are to decide right now. C'mon, make it a discussion. I mean, it's you guys that use this thing most of all.

btw storm, I would reccommend that you guys at fu make a rule that incorrectly archived maps, will be deleted on contact (rars, etc.). THis causes a lot of trouble for the end user not to mention confusion, because people then extract the map into their maps folder and that map will end up causing sync errors at times when playing other maps. It's just a bad situation.

Besides, any self respecting mapper should know better.

sorry for the double post... I forgot to mention. If the map uses features and is extracted into the maps folder, it causes a shitton of problems. Because those features will override features in other maps played.

I realized this when I had fixed canyonsfeatures after .70 came out. Decimator still had the inverted features, Reason was that he had previously extracted a version of conyons directly into his maps folder. This also caused him to desync in canyons, and any other map that used noize's rocks from painted desert.

Not cool.

Just want to point out, there is probablie no-one that has made 10 maps (apart from maybe geenblood)... Hell I think I only have 6 out for the current version. However, floders for people with several maps and the ability to controll this content would be cool.

I offer to mod, except that right now, I think it would be better for someone else with more spare time to. As currently whenever I start somthing, it dont get finished, which is prob nott he best thing for a mod. However I do agree Forboding would have an exelent knogledge of all things map, and so would be a great choice.

Can I have a section even without 10 maps?#

aGorm

I have well over 10 maps, agorm... :D

u need to brag more obviously :D

I think I have over 10 as well (not all of them are good of course :))

We need a set of drop down boxes to classify a map when its being uploaded, or even in the smd to allow sorting in tas client.

Storm you bloody bum, I've pointed this out like ten times on the FU forum already:

http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthr ... r_Dragon45

So basically lemme redo some stuff i said...

What we are essentially working with here is metadata- how to allow users to assign metadata tags, what tags should be allowed, how they should be displayed, etc.


Storm you cna prolly whip something to associate variosu metadata tags (via comments or something if you want or whatever) with any given file uploaded... I would also suggest that users can post their own metadata classifications of stuff, wiki-style. What would be needed is a METADATA field and ADD METADATA thing so that we could arbitrarily searhc for shit as we want it.

But a few mandatory fields as i mentioned in my previous post:

1) Minimap
2) Name
3) Number of People
4) Size

If your interested, I have made a PHP script that parses basically all the Spring text files, including SMD files. This means that meta-data could be read directly from the map file with a little bit of work. This includes its proper name, description, and stuff like that.

Also, if your interested, Ive written a replay parser that could be used to more efficiently upload and sort replays. Also, whatever happened to that totally rewritten FileUniverse pakage I sent you? I never even got a comment back about that.

hrmph wrote:I think I have over 10 as well (not all of them are good of course :))

Same here

Not exactly all mine are gems.

Dragon, taken, but we still have to rank the maps on the maps page a bit, because otherwise it just becomes tedious to look at (and I don't want hordes of pages to it, that'd just be unfair to everything not starting with a number or the first two letters in the alphabet.

Maelstrom, I can't work on the code as of now (no computer worko), but you're welcome to send it. That would probably solve Bruce's suggestion as well.

Last I checked I plowed the FU package you sent me into the site itself. Has there been another?

I have sent you two. One was sort of used, but the other one I dont think was even touched on. To late for it now anyways, as you have added lots more stuff so it would be incompatible. And that parser wasnt included, it was just a suggestion for later. When I have totally finished this replay parser that im working on, ill have another look at FU.

I can quite easily provide minimaps of all spring maps if you want.

Also, for anyone wanting to do simple scripting, dynamically generating minimaps, reading smf's etc, check out the unitsync python bindings (allowing you the same control over the maps/mods etc. as the official lobby client).

As of now, Forboding Angel and hrmph have been elected, and seeing as pretty many have backed them up, I skipped the section part and instate them as supermods, effect immediate. Don't break anything or I'll eat your heads

I would also like to upgrade Genblood and aGorm in any way since I already have promised that long ago - most likely their own sections. Noize is already an admin, abeit a very distant and lazy one, like the rest of them (that site wears people down like nothing else). I also recall setting Maelstrom as some kind of general wiseguy but he seemed to only be a T3 - fixed that.

I'm glad for any code snippet or good tutorial you guys send me, but I simply can't work on the page when I can't even access ftp adresses. That shouldn't stop you from bombarding me with suggestions.