https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/gamedev_spring_steam/

The talk was held by me (hokomoko, engine dev) in FOSDEM 2020 in Brussels.

I hope you find it entertaining and/or educational :-)

'Travel 2000 years to the “past” of Total Annihilation days, and engage on hard-fought battles with forgotten technology and special attacks. TA Prime is a fan-made prequel to the 1999 smash hit RTS, elected by GameSpy as the best Real-Time Strategy Game of all time.'

TA Prime - or TAP, for short - stacks an elaborate RPS (rock-paper-scissors) countering mechanism on top of the physics-based countering system of T.A., where projectiles realistically bounce and miss targets. This heavily favours early and continuous scouting (for appropriate mix-and-match) and micro-management of units for best effectiveness. On top of that, TAP uses a modern upgrade system involving Tech researches, morphs (allowing units to change shape and combat role), global and per-unit upgrades. Direct-fire, aim-able abilities play an important role in the game, with “Fire Rain” and “Neutron Strike” easily countering blobs of bots and vehicles respectively. Many quality-of-life features are included, like instant unit area-loading, “plane freeze” - which allows you to precisely maneuver and group fighters and bombers mid-air - and one-click morph queues, to make sure you don’t over-spend when resources are tight. Ground, Air, Navy, Artillery and Nuclear combat layers - it’s all in there with its own details and complexity for you to master. Learn about the game, how to get and install it, on our website: https://www.fluidplay.co/TAPrime

TAP is already on Rapid, we’ll have a release play party tomorrow (Xmas day, Dec 25th) @ 10AM PST / 3PM BRT, come join us at “TA Prime - Main Server”, which will be pw-unlocked half an hour before that.

Tourney: We’ll hold a 1v1 TAP tourney, with $250 dollars in prizes ($150 for the winner). The tourney is slated for the Second Week of January. More details to be provided soon in our site and here in the SpringRTS forums.

Disclaimer: TA Prime is totally free to play, there are no - and there will never be - in-game purchases or fees to play on our self-funded servers. All rights on the Total Annihilation trademark and art are reserved to Wargaming.net.

its a long time since the last release of springlobby because the build environment which was required to a make a release broke. To fix it, the setup had to be adjusted to the current versions of tools to make it work. As the old maintainer Koshi didn't have time / the resources to run it, also a new server was required, this made this much more troublesome than expected. Also lot of old stuff was cleaned up and simplified so it should be much easier to set it up the next time.

Thanks a lot Koshi for the old server / build setup who run there stable for years and a lot thanks to TurBoss for the setting up and running the new build server!

Because of the changes, springlobby.info moved to https://springlobby.springrts.com/

The automatic updater should prompt for updating to 0.268 and after this update all downloads of the updater should point to springlobby.springrts.com.

The release contains some mostly bugfixes:

- add support for showing client versions per user
- remove cpu info support
- fix #894 (unhandled exception & other errors when typing LEAVE commands into the server window)
- implement multi version support for relayhost
- lobby protocol updates
- update prdownloader: fix rapid caching check / fix rapid downloads with very small repos (<8 files)

If you find a bug, as before, please report to https://github.com/springlobby/springlobby/issues

Happy updating! :cool:

Recently MapConvNG was added to the spring git repository. MapConvNG is a tool to create maps for the spring engine.

This introduced some windows build errors which were recently fixed by hokomoko by updating mingwlibs64.


For now the win64 build is basicly untested, so feedback is welcome:

official spring spring build with mapconvng

A short documentation of mapconvng exists at the wiki.

It is that time of the year again which is a good opportunity to thank the people of this community for their involvement whether by playing, testing, developing or contributing in any other way. You are the reason why this project is still live and kicking after so many years.

In the past year we've observed Zero-K's successful launch on steam, two LD games (with another coming this weekend!) and ongoing work and releases by many of our games (BA, TechA, S44, Evo, MF to name a few).

On the engine front there were 1761 commits since 104.0, the GL4 migration is in an advanced state and save/load support is fully implemented.

Next year? It's all up to you! We live in exciting times :)

Happy Birthday!