Paid Coding For Spring?

[koshi]

for the lazy people there's project cost at https://www.ohloh.net/p/springrts

[Neddie]

Note that this only covers the engine itself, and refers to the value of the code alone.

[smoth]

Spring engine has hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
An average programmer writes about 300 lines of code in a workday, a conservative wage is 20$/hour.
Ill let you do the rest of the math...

Lol, I was billed out @ around 100$ an hour

[hrmph]

One of the main issues with "paying for the engine" is how to divide the money. Donations have the same problem, unless you are donating for a specific server, or an individual for writing a specific piece of code, or creating a game, map, etc.

I'm guessing the bounty system that was attempted back in the day didn't work very well.

[Cheesecan]

Too bad this community sucks so hard that we have people working on vanity games(some of which also use copyright franchises, lol) that nobody actually wants to play in a million years, when they could be collaborating to develop a game that people want to play.

Cute now go male a game right now without any one of those "suck" people.

There is ample collaboration and the part you fail to see is that outside of argh most of us pd or gpl our work so large parts are already done if you bothered to look at shit beyond ba you would see my code in evo, ca and cursed. But whatever I make a fan game which obviously doesn't benefit the community at all

It's really the community that sucks not the people.

I am making a game by myself, but not in Spring though. (I'm a programmer so I can't really have Spring mods with next to no coding in them as a portfolio, I have to write my engine, logic etc).

Mods I've played are Nanoblobs, CA, War Evolution and EE. The common denominator has been that they didn't have enough depth to become addictive like BA(TA). Gundam probably has a lot of depth seeing as how you have lots of units, but I was never into Gundam as a kid so I don't find the whole mecha universe thing very thrilling. As you say you're a big fan, and that's why you're making it. But I think if you, argh, Fang and gang worked together you could have made a commercially successful game for Spring by now if you had wanted to.

Too bad this community sucks so hard that we have people working on vanity games(some of which also use copyright franchises, lol) that nobody actually wants to play in a million years, when they could be collaborating to develop a game that people want to play.

Im one of those people, frinching valve, not giving a fuck what you want or like. Deal with it

Maybe gota make your own spring fork,noobbody is stoping anyone.

Touch├®. For some of us there are more gratifying projects to work on than Spring. But the people who do work on Spring, should be collaborating to make something spectacular instead.

Part of the problem with open source licenses these days is that nerds are not getting paid for their hard work anymore. In the old days companies used to have to buy them up to get their intellectual property or at least their skills.

Sure it's fun to have a free game but in the end paying 50 bucks to own a copy of a game you love to play isn't a big deal.

If each dev got paid $35k a year working on the Spring engine then the break even would be at
$ 3478834 / $ 50 game = 69 576.68 copies sold.
That amount of sales probably isn't feasible to reach without piggybacking on an established (minor) publisher, but it's not a lot either.

For comparison Machinarium sold 20,000 copies priced between $20 to $5 and they estimated that only 5-15% of players actually bought the game(!). Their marketing budget was only $1000.
That was for a singleplayer game made in Flash. A multiplayer game like Spring can prevent piracy a lot better since it's possible for a multiplayer lobby server(e.g. battle.net) to verify the legitimacy of a game copy.

Anyway making the case for this is pointless since Spring is GPL for all future but I'm just explaining how Spring could have been a better/paying project for the devs, for the sake of argument.

[smoth]

I am making a game by myself, but not in Spring though. (I'm a programmer so I can't really have Spring mods with next to no coding in them as a portfolio, I have to write my engine, logic etc).

you do realize gundam:
economy is lua driven?
has a research system?
has it's own feature placement?
has map options that can change the gundam maps?
has custom unit abilities?
units that change when they die?

I am missing stuff but I feel you are getting the point. Evo has a lot of custom lua stuff as well. As does KP and CA and cursed....

just saying that there is logic coding involved. honestly, the whole one man team thing is not very impressive to a potential boss. However, collaboration with many individuals shows the ability to work in a team and get a job done. Projects in the real world are too big for one person to take on and honestly they don't want some loner guy on a project because he will not work well with the team. PS I am a programmer also in case you missed it.

P.S. I frown on commercial projects so I would have refused to work with any spring commercial projects. I think money taints things.

[Licho]

We all are..
And yeah I did more of actual fun game coding in Spring than i did during my time as pro engine developer. It would certainly count as reference :)

There is not much development going into BA, most interesting things happen for other games.
You got S44, CA/ZK, EvoRTS, Gundam, Cursed, CAK etc - all are pretty independent from basic standard BA and try to make proper game.

S44 and CA have bigger developer teams collaborating together. There is no point to complain, if you want to work, there are projects to join.

[FLOZi]

Isn't CA lua source comparable to Spring engine source in number of lines anyway?

"I can't really have Spring mods with next to no coding in them" Is a complete nonsense.

[Licho]

Yeah, and source codes of support tools (editor, lobby, server-side stuff) is 6.5MB of C# sources :)

[knorke]

"I can't really have Spring mods with next to no coding in them (as a portfolio)" Is a complete nonsense.

Nah, I think Cheesecan is right.
Although some widgets/gadgets have some serious math I dont think the Lua of spring games is that complex, most is fairly simple logic, rest is blindly reused code or workarounds.

[Neddie]

I dont think programming is that complex, most is fairly simple logic, rest is blindly reused code or workarounds.

Here, I patched your statement for validity.

[Licho]

Exactly, you have to deal with complex algorithms or math rarely when coding. If you do it well and reuse existing stuff that is :) If you start with C and begin with writing memory heap manager and matrix multiplication I can imagine you end up doing complex stuff :)

Actually some widgets/gadgets/shaders contain complex algorithms or math - more than you normally encounter in enterprise products. Just check trueskill lol..

[Google_Frog]

Although some widgets/gadgets have some serious math I dont think the Lua of spring games is that complex, most is fairly simple logic, rest is blindly reused code or workarounds.

Speak for yourself. Some of my gadgets I would regard as pretty complex.

[KDR_11k]

What would people buy with their money? Just the engine? That's kinda useless. The engine and mods? Which mods? BA? Profiting off somebody else's work?

Plus Spring is GPL, it's legal to copy it as much as you want so charging for it would be stupid.

But I think if you, argh, Fang and gang worked together you could have made a commercially successful game for Spring by now if you had wanted to.

No. A team is more than just a sum of skills. You need teamwork and good chemistry. These individuals would not work together. Plus when you throw people together like that you get a clusterfuck like CA where everybody has his own ideas and no coordination exists.

[Licho]

Plus when you throw people together like that you get a clusterfuck like CA where everybody has his own ideas and no coordination exists.

What? Who of the CA team has commited thoughtcrime, tell me, tell me now, I will dispatch ideopolice unit at once!

[KDR_11k]

Plus when you throw people together like that you get a clusterfuck like CA where everybody has his own ideas and no coordination exists.

What? Who of the CA team has commited thoughtcrime, tell me, tell me now, I will dispatch ideopolice unit at once!

Commercial games follow a strict hierarchy of power, in an opensource project that's impossible for understandable reasons (it's a hobby, it has to be fun) but for making a commercial game with a large team it's pretty much mandatory since those require a primary vision to implement.

Also IMO Smoth alone would be enough of a team to make a commercial game given enough time, that's just not the goal people here are pursuing.

[Cheesecan]

I am making a game by myself, but not in Spring though. (I'm a programmer so I can't really have Spring mods with next to no coding in them as a portfolio, I have to write my engine, logic etc).

you do realize gundam:
economy is lua driven?
has a research system?
has it's own feature placement?
has map options that can change the gundam maps?
has custom unit abilities?
units that change when they die?

I am missing stuff but I feel you are getting the point. Evo has a lot of custom lua stuff as well. As does KP and CA and cursed....

just saying that there is logic coding involved. honestly, the whole one man team thing is not very impressive to a potential boss. However, collaboration with many individuals shows the ability to work in a team and get a job done. Projects in the real world are too big for one person to take on and honestly they don't want some loner guy on a project because he will not work well with the team. PS I am a programmer also in case you missed it.

Of course as you say, revealing that you make games in your spare time on a one man team is a sure way to make yourself pretty darn unattractive to many employers.

P.S. I frown on commercial projects so I would have refused to work with any spring commercial projects. I think money taints things.

I trivialized the amount of coding that goes into making a mod for emphasis, but there's definitely a lot more coding involved in developing a game from scratch, if you're into reinventing the whole wheel, engine and all. Not that reinventing the wheel is necessarily a good thing, it's just that some like to do it that way.

I think the case could be made in favor of both ways really. Many successful mods got people hired, an obvious example being Counterstrike. But then again that was a mod for a huge title backed by huge companies and not a small open source game.

People who want to become self-employed are probably more likely to start on commercial projects.

Anyway I'm not telling anyone how to do their business, just saying that in the best of worlds all the talented modders could have been working together to make one hell of a commercial title instead.

[Licho]

You are all welcome to join our friendly team!

Send me list of your skills or skills that you want to aquire, also how many hours/day are you willing to work for free and for how many years.

I can send you list of tasks.

Possible areas include:
* C++ engine coding,
* AI development,
* single player development (designer + realization),
* 2d art,
* webdesigner,
* writer,
* shader effect developer,
* game logic and GUI coder (mostly lua),
* other systems coder - lobby, planetwars etc (mostly C#, WPF),
* web developer - php, ASP.NET MVC3 (razor),
* sound engineer
* music composer
* PR manager

And a lot more ..