Total Annihillation was my favorite game since growing up in 90s i think the remake here is better than Supreme Commander because the realistic strategy is here AND Super Cool Units and Strategic and Tactical Combat.

I have to play against AIs and It is just heartbreaking that The Game Crashes but what is Unplayable is No Save Game. Could be a billion using spring and a billion playing Total Annihilation in 3D with No Saves to make up for Game crashes it makes ALL of this effort a complete Waste by all who worked on this.

Spring is a failure as a engine with no saves for people who cannot sit for 10 hours and play a game and it is all a waste when in hour 1 -2 or 5 the game will crash.

Could have been the best Strategy game made and done by independent group but not a company.


NOTA Is a Perfect Recreation of TA and would die to play it

Anyway, what does work as per saves atm? I've heard conflicting things about that ('never worked' 'worked but got broken' 'never worked by doable with lua' 'worked with lua but that lua got broken' 'there is working lua for saves')?

Please provide evidence, such that we may fix these crashes you speak of.

Good to know that you have given us your EXPERT ASSESSMENT..

engine or game make up your mind

no it isn't. It's better.

I Like How You Capitalize All The Words!

Spring Is Not Made By A Company.

There Is No Single Player ATM, So You Probably Dont Need 10 Hours For Just One Game On A Map.

Feel Free To Learn How To Program (Right After You Learn ProPeR EnGliSh) And Fix The Save Funtionality!!!


Welcome To The Forums By The Way!

Do You Think It Is A Troll? Would Be Pretty Disappointing If It Was.

Nope its someone new who isn't accustomed to our 'forum culture', and will probably leave very soon because of posts like the above, as is usually the case when people who may or may not be productive come along.

welcome, welcome at all
Read "how to report bugs" and maybe people will be able to help you.

Don't be silly. You know very well the Spring engine doesn't handle save/load. It's not a bug. It's by design.

You struck a nerve of immediate irritation. Here is why.

Spring is an Engine.

Spring has many games playable on it.

The games that resemble Total Annihilation are nothing like Total Annihilation and play completely differently.

Spring is not Total Annihilation.

Spring is not an attempt to "play TA in 3d".

There is no real single player and most of the AIs you see, only work with BA (There are a few exceptions).

You mix insults with whining.

refering to the game crashing, that is not by design. Or is it? Never know these days!
Anyway, if Spring crashes 5 times in 1 hour (thats how i read the posting?) then that is unusual.

That's what modders around here want to believe, but that is not how Spring is perceived by the outside, nor even by its players.



Oh right I misread, indeed lykergus mentions having crash outside of the save/load, and these crash could indeed use some bug report.

Noooo!!! Don't anti-troll him away. The fact that he capitalizes every word means that he is a super-programmer who most probably will serialize the whole engine and makes it possible to save TA singleplayer games as he wished.

Only thing I'm irritated is that he actually used spaces between the words.

I don't recall exactly if it was 'never worked' or 'worked but got broken', but if savegames done by the engine worked, it was so many many years ago it's irrelevant now. If it ever worked, the engine evolved so much by then that it would have made completly saving the entire game state a huge complicated mess. Not sure you noticed, but almost all Spring engine-dev and Spring game/mod-dev are mainly interested in the multiplayer aspect, but not much in the single player aspect. So there's no engine dev willing to spend monthes working on the tough problem that implementing a savegame would be.

But there were a couple people that realised that anyway we don't have to store every single shots in mid-air or every unit script variables, that a crude system that only restore units, at their positions, with their health and their orders (ok, a couple more things too), would be largely enough, and this could be done in Lua! So about ten month ago, Argh, for P.U.R.E., and me, for Kernel Panic independantly released a gadget, or rather a bundle of Lua files, to implement some sort of savegames. It's not perfect, it's a little hacky on the side, but it more or less get the job done. However, since it is implemented by Lua gadgets & widgets, it is part of a mod (/game), not of the engine!

I offered to port it to other mod, but the interested was generally low. I got my savegame system in Kernel Panic, (because I stole Kernel Panic from KDR_11k), in Gundam RTS and Evolution RTS (because Smoth and Forboding Angel carelessly left me access to their game SVN), but that's about it. My attempts at giving away save/load mutators to other games were mostly left as scorned attachment in this forum.

Then some lead engine dev realised this was the best way to go anyway, and cleansed the engine save/game of most of its (non working anway) broken code. So nowaday, when you use the engine command or hotkey to save/load, it handles heighmap deformation, it calls a couple Lua callins, and it handles the zipping and writing into a file. But what ought to be saved is defered to these new Lua callins. Except, no one ever made use of these new Lua callins. I had already written my solution before they were added, and, beside using the way dev meant to be used, it would add nothing of value to me, worse I'll lose having my nice savegames filenames and menus. As for Argh, he left shortly after and we haven't heard of him much since.

I did write a ZK gadget for the new save/load system a month or so back, but it's still very primitive (only handles units and their commands, no features, RulesParams or info specific to other gadgets; doesn't even remember which way units were facing).
Never really had time to work on it further, though I do now for a couple of months at least.

ah very touchy. I know spring is the engine and NOTA is a mod. A much better tactical game. Not going to respond to hate but is sad game is on a engine not made for Single Player. has all the great units and scale that would make for the most amazing combat. Sorry multiplayers i respect u and glad you guys made perfect game for your group.

So wish Nota was on a system able to handle the huge amount of action that goes on. Sorry it is so impossible to code. wishes are all there are with such complexity.

i would be happy with just units positioned saved. projectiles would not need to be saved to make a great save system. Just unit positions and commands. but just a dream i guess. I apologize to all those who are offended. Just spent days trying to get it to work right when i discovered NOTA and cant get it to work. Pissed with not being able to play such a terrific concept. Just like PDS was the most amazing mod for homeworld 2.

It's not that it's impossible, it's that spring makes it very very difficult to do it properly. It's not like that is no wish for proper saves and loads, its that doing so is not an easy task.

Z's sp menu does it, but to get to that you have to start spring directly, which is it's primary flaw (I'm not calling it bad code, it's jsut that going via spring.exe to get to the menu is bleh, unless the lobby were ingame as well. in that case i would shut my trap).

That would make so much more sense that i honestly can't wait to get my hands on a working lualobby.

We have what amounts to a save/load system that works for every game, it just doesn't have a nice UI.

To Save:

• Close Spring
• Go to spring\demos and rename the most recent replay

To Load:

• Drag your replay file onto Spring.exe
• Once ingame type '/cheat'
• Type '/team 0', in some cases you may have to replace 0 with a different number
• Type '/skip 10000' until you are at the point you left off
• Type '/cheat'

For hour long games this may take a while, it is not a quicksave.

hmm if the replay saves the actual state of a game, why cant a save file store the same information? with the added functionality.

Id say its possible.