no respect for spring

[dmhorus]

The title isnt saying I have no respect for spring, instead that there isnt enough respect for it within the community. This is sort of a rant, but it has a point. Im not flaming or baiting, but I have some passion about TA, Spring project and RTS in general.

Simply put, spring is the only free and open RTS engine available. Do as many searches as you like, all you will find are closed Starcraft 1 or Fallout 2 clones. Spring is the only 3D RTS engine available to RTS developers who cannot afford an entire dev team to code up a unique engine.

My passion is RTS. I take a look around and see C4 engine, Gamebryo, Torque, all of them designed and geared toward FPS. Spring is the only affordable (free) game engine out there available for RTS games that has an RTS following and strong community. For those of us who dev RTS, Spring is all we have.

I have lurked the spring community since it started and I have held with giddy expectation the day when spring comes into its own as a unique 3D RTS engine, the forums overflowing with original games, updates and additions to the engine coming every 6 months. But alas this has not happened. Spring remains more or less a TA clone client. Please dont take this as flamebait - but seriously - for the most part the Spring "engine" is really the Spring "only-way-to-play-TA-for-free" engine. If it is going to survive, expand and one day become what it could be, improvements must be made and I strongly encourage the community to help in this endeavor. It benefits the RTS community to do so.

It could be so much more.

We could have a very powerful RTS engine on our hands if it distanced itself from TA and developed more powerful dev tools and did a unique tech demo. Single player at the very least would be helpful and some sort of dev UI. Without advances such as these the only thing sustaining spring will be the demand for 3D TA which sadly will only continue to decrease.

This is me begging - as a professional, a fan, a dev and RTS lover - please for the love of god treat spring with the respect its position deserves. I hope the devs realize the kind of possibilities that could exist if this humble client were expanded into something on the level of Gamebryo or XNA. There are RTS games out there just waiting to be made and they need an engine like Spring. Please help them, help us.

[smoth]

Been saying this for years. There IS more to spring then just TA. Starwars and Spring 1944 are both ramping up for a HUGE RELEASE! Gundam chugs along as always and that is a pretty unique thing for RTS gaming. So we have a big project like starwars, a cool realistic project like s44 and gundam which can apease jackasses like me who like giant robots.

oh and lets not forget, EE, KP, FIBRE, EPIC LEGIONS and pure...

There are tons of people here making non-TA things. My site is ONE such place where a few mods call home. Star wars and S44 have thier own pages. Many of the non-ta mods moved away from this site due to the drama of this forum.

[LordMatt]

Most people liking BA, XTA, or CA does not mean they disrespect spring. Oo

[smoth]

I think most of the players know little past "this is a way to play TA in 3d" I think that was the OP's point.

[LordMatt]

I think most of the players know little past "this is a way to play TA in 3d" I think that was the OP's point.

That may be all they care to know.

[smoth]

or want to know. Some people are perfectly happy with TA and there is nothing wrong with it. I just wish people were more willing to give something a go before shooting it down because they wanted a TA mod with different models.

[SwiftSpear]

The reality is... at this point in time, it's not really the fault of engine developers, it's the fault of the community of content developers. We don't have a game in spring right now that really gives the OTA content a run for it's money. EE came SOOOO close way back when, but it's momentum petered out. SW:IW and S44 aren't really full scale yet, and the same is true for gundam. And most of the real promising projects in terms of original game development don't get too much farther than mini mod status. Games like fibre, nanoblobs, and simbase either don't go far enough to create a real art environment and universe for their titles, or they don't go far enough to create a dynamic full scale RTS experience, they are sort of like stripped down RTS minigames mostly.

The spring engine can right now do virtually anything through lua. Don't get me wrong, there are still a tonne of engine development stuff that could be improved... but it's at a point right now where it's good enough and really just waiting for the game builders to catch up to our progress.

[Felix the Cat]

IMO the REAL problem is that Spring has not expanded beyond the TA community. Everything else is derived from that.

The good news is that it's a marketing and branding problem rather than a programming problem. The bad news is that we have a lot of programmers here, and few if any marketers.

A start would be getting rid of the top right of the website banner.

[Argh]

the forums overflowing with original games, updates and additions to the engine coming every 6 months. But alas this has not happened

No offense, and I'm sorry in advance, because this is a sharp disagreement, nothing personal meant...

The engine's had major updates and additions on an average of every 4 months, and there are dozens of games now.

And it's certainly not that people aren't going balls-out, trying to develop stuff using Lua, to get out of the OTA gameplay trap. Early experimental works, like Kernel Panic and early builds of CA are gradually being superseded by more polished titles.

However, they involve long production times. It's simply unavoidable, when everybody works for free, and most of the wanna-be pros work with FPS engines, because they're sexier on your resume.

Donate me a half-million dollars, and I'll form a studio RIGHT NOW, hire a bunch of artists and coders for a few months who will do what I tell them to do, and build you a game that will stomp StarCraft II, with this engine. It can be done.

I simply lack enough time and mental energy to do it with my crew of me and the single artist I have who can work to the quality levels I expect.

The fact of the matter is that, for most projects, they're working on an absolute shoestring of qualified people, with limited time, so production cycles are a lot longer. Just how it is- the old engineer's quip about quality, cost and time.

The best single way you could help do something about the specific wants you listed, such as a single-player campaign, is to build the Lua sourcecode base people need, to start doing such things.

But don't preach. We're working, dammit.

If you wanna work, then work. If you're not sure what people need, ask, we can give you a list a mile long, of general-purpose, stock code that we need and almost nobody's writing (with the decided exception of user and the CA crew, and maybe a few others).

You can't change the basic facts of time, space and energy with rhetoric, however.

[Forboding Angel]

Thou shalt not forget Evolution Rts

We do what we can as fast as we can. That said, if you have your own project, you pretty much have to know how to do almost everything by yourself (in my case, except LUA).

And random models that ppl throw at me.

[[Krogoth86]]

Well imo there also is a technical sides which prevents many new projects because they are doomed to fail even before they started. I mean imagine to have a really good artist who is up to date with recent Max/Lightwave/Maya/Zbrush and whatsoever. Now go ahead and tell him there is no keyframe animation capability or things like bones. Tell him you have to do this by using a script which support rotating and moving parts of your model which has to be done in a 3ds hierarchy style and make him clear that there is no really working GUI for this...

Besides the fact that with this system things like "organic animations" are impossible, ugly-looking or at least hell of a work he'll already run away screaming in utter terror or just laugh because of the really old-school way this to this day is done in Spring. As a really decent artists you'll rather find yourself a good programmer which creates a nice pathfinding in Ogre or something like that so you can start using a rather up-to-date engine instead of a 3D-engine crafted towards importing and using content from the 1997 technology standard with some modern extensions here and there...

Even a lot of those more modern methods you see in Spring are done via LUA which really shouldn't be the way to go to integrate some basic engine features...

In the near (?) future it might get even worse because when you have a look at TA 3D you really have a very promising new contestant at least seen from the graphical / technological perspective...

[imbaczek]

IMO the REAL problem is that Spring has not expanded beyond the TA community. Everything else is derived from that.

Truth. They say that no matter what they tell you, it's a people problem, and that's exactly what we have here. People come here for TA, a lot of them don't get past speedmetal, hence they identify spring with tech to krog.

Mods like KP need some serious marketing love. SWS almost got that - shame UF failed at the exactly wrong moment.

[SwiftSpear]

I didn't really mention in my post the two projects I feel are closest to the formula of development spring needs right now because they weren't supportive to the point I was making. PURE and Evo. I have my own problems with both those projects personally... but I feel that in alot of ways they are mostly headed in the right direction.

Even if gameplay turns out to suck... fundamentally, they are original full scale projects with the intent of building something new and complete for spring. Those are the kind of projects IMO spring needs. So while I won't say that forb or argh are building my opinion of the ideal RTS game, they are building projects in the way that spring needs more projects to be built right now.

Either Evo or Pure turning out to be a success in the player base could change the face of the spring community massively for the better.

[Argh]

<snip> stupid cannot-delete-posts-in-this-forum thing...

[Vadi]

Simply put, spring is the only free and open RTS engine available.

Stop right there, and think on it.

It's open-source, and GPL'ed, for a reason. It's success is also because of this reason. This also means that the future formula for extending it, is to follow by the same reason.

If you're here to pitch in, go ahead, please get started. Otherwise, people here know what they're doing on their free, unpaid time.

(that said though, the engine's goals -do- need fixing. The one top-left of this page isn't exactly fitting anymore)

[FLOZi]

*snip* ... S44 isn't really full scale yet, ... *snip*

You haven't played it lately.

[malric]

I think that a nice RTS game can't start as a multiplayer RTS game.

Starcraft had a nice single player campaign. As I saw from Starcraft 2 trailer they focus on that also. Everybody played Starcraft single player and then switched to multiplayer eventually. (I personally liked single and disliked multi player)

I do not know of any Spring project that has single player support - you know like a nice campaign. Even Wesnoth has some story ...

How can you introduce a new player to Spring ? Playing with AI is not rewarding enough. Playing with an experienced human.... you know how it ends. CA is doing something about it but it is not like a campaign.

So, most of the players are TA players that already 'know' a lot about the game mechanics and units. The ones that don't and still play are probably just very passionate - but the community will not grow much based just on this type of people.

So, for whoever works on campaign hope to play one soon

[Pxtl]

I think Smoth knows the real reason the other mods don't catch on - no SP. Bot-stomping is still too hard to set up, and there's no real single-player. This means that, unless you have a plethora of games online to choose from, you can't play a 2nd-tier mod. And since the 2nd-tier mods are played by only a handful of enthusiasts, you'll get torn to shreds if you do manage to find a game.

Really, do you expect someone interested in, say, EE to wait for hours so they can spectate a game before they can even think about playing? Of course not.

None of these games are intuitive either - KP and EE started that way, but have been getting increasingly opaque with each release.

The simple fact of non-BA mods is that you CAN'T play them. No players, no bots, no single-player campaign.

[Argh]

The bad news is that we have a lot of programmers here, and few if any marketers.

Moreover, we have programmers who are actively hostile to using proven marketing techniques. Given a Steam-like advertising method in the Lobby client, completely optional for those who don't want to see advertisements, and I guarantee that we could gain traction for alternative game designs.

As it stands, if the next version's installer will not include pictures of the various games and a more-inviting interface that encourages users to look at all of the game choices, I'm going to boycott it, and market P.U.R.E. completely outside our box. I think that the current system is massive, obvious fail, and I don't want to be a part of Spring's installer if we're not going to fix it, I'd rather take my chances elsewhere.

The simple fact of non-BA mods is that you CAN'T play them. No players, no bots, no single-player campaign.

...which is why I've tried to keep P.U.R.E. bot-compatible, and am still working on a random-mission generator, so that I can have some sort of single-player / multiplayer coop experience, albeit not a full-blown campaign.

I agree, that's a major weakness. Hard to fix, though, we don't have a lot of the technology needed yet- there aren't any ways to generate a mission directly in Spring, for example, and even if there were, we'd lack all of the LUA glue needed to make it all work.

[Peet]

I think most of the players know little past "this is a way to play TA in 3d" I think that was the OP's point.

That may be all they care to know.

Isn't that the point of the thread?