I'd be delighted to have Rhyoss, Rumad and TLL instead of Arm and Core being shipped with Spring.
For info, TLL has much more naval units than arm and core. Rhyoss too has a complete naval line. Only Rumad navy needs to get more units. But, save for Rumand Navy, these three races are the most complete TA races around there, each of them being even more complete than Arm and Core.
All three of these races come with custom textures. I'll expand that line:
- The Lost Legacy uses custom TLL textures
- Rumad uses custom Alpha Textures
- Rhyoss uses custom Rhyoss Textures
I'm not sure about custom sound. There seem to be some custom .wav in their rev31.gp3, but very few. And I think they're not custom sounds but just the Necro sound.
It doesn't mean we can download these race and straight away plug them into TA. Much work is needed, to:
- Find their authors, see if there are interested in helping, or at least get their approval. M.A.D. TA has been dormant for a few years now, but once in a while Rampage and Brother Alpha post in TAU or PA forums. Maybe Spring could give them the will to resume working on Rumad? M3G was very busy with TLL last year, but he hasn't given sign of activity since. Maybe just because he realised that TLL is finished? Surely he'll like to port TLL to spring himself. (No I don't want Reynald to take over TLL, seeing what he's done to TAAN). As for Rhyoss, I don't even know who made it.
- Fix the scripts, fbi, weapons, and every other things that works differently in Spring. Sound easy like that, but it's actually a huge task. We'll probably even need the Swedish Yankspanker help for that. To speed up you could just temporarly disable the units not working in first release, hoping most of units work fine.
- In conjunction with work on the Spring sourcecode, create appropriate weapons graphic effects. Because the custom explosion .gaf can't be reused in Spring.
- Hunt down the TA textures that remains in use and produce replacement. Because even if these races come with custom textures, I'm not certain they only use those custom textures.
- Create new sounds. Or simply use Mynn's ones.
- Create a Rumand navy. The difficulty lying in ensuring it's rumad-style. But bah, if 1/3 of races is a bit lacking in the sea units in the first release, it's no big deal. Let's just call it a balancing to compensate for better other units and making races more different from each other.
- Make sure the balance is consistent between races. For instance, damagemodifier against planes. Bad exemple since Spring doesn't use TA damagemodifier system, but you get the idea.
- Make sure it's playable, and tweak the units so it's fair and balanced. But without wasting all the energy into forum flaming, and without betraying the original races.
Still, even if it'll require much work, it'll be much easier and quicker than starting new races from scratch once again. Another strong point in using Rhyoss, Rumad and TLL is that each of these three races has a unique style, coherent within the race but much different to other races. That's a big advantage over trying to make arm and core replacment from a patchwork of stray units. Also, they are already a complete line of units, with factories, commanders, level 1 units, mexxes, etc... Most third party units are level 2 or level 3 attack units, third party level 1 windgens are very rare! And these 3 races are of the highest quality.
A quick look into free_mynn3.hpi seem to show it indeeds use its own set of textures and sound. Other races use custom sounds, but only Mynn seem to have replaced things like metal extraction sound, autodestruction sound, selection sound, etc... So using Mynn is probably the easiest way to get a 100% cavedog-material-free race. However, Mynn units are very low poly, so even if I like them, they won't look good in Spring. Still, in case you need sound replacement, ask Chris Jorgensen aka Xenoclone and use Mynn sound.
For reference:
Rumad
The lost legacy
Rhyoss
Mynn
.... See i alsway's imagiended it like so
