FAQ wrote: What is Spring?
Spring is a project to create the best RTS engine ever (no joke). There are three principle goals which we hope to achieve.
1. Build a flexible and powerful 3D RTS engine that can handle large numbers of units and state-of-the-art special effects and animation.
2. Support new games and maps with powerful built-in Lua language support that allows game designers to realize their goals and develop better and better games.
3. Support end-users, fix bugs and provide the best support we can.
When I started making stuff for spring I thought it would just be very high level stuff.
Just edit some unitDef files and write some fairly simple scripts like If (unit is in lava) then kill unit end
Basically not having to worry about writing your own engine, only having to make gamelogic and graphics. (kind of like love2d.org, yes spring is 3d and more complicated blabla)
The longer you look at the "game creation scene" of spring it is clear it does not work like this.
With no reliable documenation even basic stuff is guessswork, trial&error. I think game makers should not have to look at the engine source ever. Looking up a list of tag names is ok and sadly nessecary atm but that is not really that helpful anyway: what are valid values? what does the tag do? in combination with other tags?
If you can learn all that from the source, cool, I think 99% of potential game makers can not.
The engine gets more and more features but nobody knows how to use them. Or that they exist.
"powerful built-in Lua language support that allows game designers to realize their goals"
What use is being able to script custom gameplay logic if the first problem is where to find a working unitdef? Or a simple "base-mod" without unneeded stuff in it?
To me that explains why there have hardly been serious attempts at new spring games in the past 5 years. And the games that are playable now are mostly rooted in TA: either directly like BA, starting out on the TA engine (gundam) or the creator learned modding on TA.
yes of course its a useless baww thread. i always wanted to make one, too.
tl;dr
What do engine devs/mod makers think how new games should be created?
Do you feel there is enough stuff avaivable to help people start making new games?
Is 0.82 too early to start with the creation of playable content?
Is making the engine the fun part and games are by-products?
Are game makers just expected to have a deeper understanding of the engine? (i think zeroK team has some engine devs?)