Felix the Cat wrote:But if you want my further opinion - there shouldn't be "Spring publicity" unless we're trying to get game studios to use Spring as an engine. Which, let's face it, as much as we love Spring, they're not - it's yesterday's technology, sometimes the day before's.
Spring from a graphics perspective is lacking a lot, but from a technical perspective there is a ton you take for granted.
Take a look at these articles about supcom:
http://altdevblogaday.com/2011/07/09/sy ... f-desyncs/
http://altdevblogaday.com/2011/07/24/sy ... nc-harder/
Read the woes about desyncs and disconnects. Sure, there have been spring desync problems in the past, but I haven't seen one in ages, and the engine is extremely robust then it comes to handling huge lag spikes. And people routinely play games with upwards of
20-30 players, with 100+ units each. That's insane, there are no true RTS games I know of that allow that many players at once, much less a physics-based RTS.
For a player to join mid-game the entire game state would have to be sync’d. If the game has 3000 units that’s just too much.
Not for motherfucking spring it isn't.
Sometimes a player drops, a teammate takes his stuff and then just hands it back to him when he rejoins and catches up. It's really slick, and you just can't do that anywhere else.
Not to mention, I don't think there are any official benchmarks anywhere, but spring engine is fast as hell. I get significantly more FPS than roughly equivalent graphics settings on Starcraft 2 or either Supcom (mostly lowest settings on those two).
Ok, so when it comes to the graphics end, LOS view is ugly as hell and so slow to update (slower than actual LOS), and animations tend to be weak because you are coding by hand and no skeletal animation system, etc etc. So spring isn't the God Engine that will bring all its gamers into their heavenly paradise. It has areas it badly needs improvement to catch up to modern games.
TL;DR
Don't make vague generalizing blanket statements about Spring because you want to be the Cynical Cool Guy Who Sees Things Objectively When Everyone Else Is Confused By Emotional Attachment.
(especially if you haven't played any of the games recently)