Is spring a platform as well as an engine?

[Scor04]

Hello!

My name is Scott. I am a professional C++ developer, and a lifelong RTS fanatic. I am considering toying around with Spring.

Right now I am reading the documentation.

Specifically this page https://springrts.com/wiki/Read_Me_First

From what I have gathered there, it almost seems like Spring works like a mod platform, instead of a game engine that allows for stand alone games. Now I think I could be wrong in this assumption, but the language on the linked page suggests this.

Is this correct in any way?

It seems like spring is a game that loads "games" which are really like mods or sub games.

[gajop]

Welcome to the forums Scott!

Officially, Spring is an engine and you can use it to write games.

That said, historically, these games were called mods, and they were all similar to Total Annihilation (Spring, or TASpring itself was an attempt to make a 3D TA-like game). This is why a lot of current games are similar to one another and there are still some engine mechanics due to the original purpose of the engine (these mechanics are often called TAism). Recently however we've seen a greater diversity of games being built, so who knows what the future holds?

[FLOZi]

Hello!

My name is Scott. I am a professional C++ developer, and a lifelong RTS fanatic. I am considering toying around with Spring.

Right now I am reading the documentation.

Specifically this page https://springrts.com/wiki/Read_Me_First

From what I have gathered there, it almost seems like Spring works like a mod platform, instead of a game engine that allows for stand alone games. Now I think I could be wrong in this assumption, but the language on the linked page suggests this.

Is this correct in any way?

It seems like spring is a game that loads "games" which are really like mods or sub games.

To quote the first line of that page "Spring is an engine!"

Not sure how that is ambiguous.

As an engine it provides a certain amount of framework to quickly implement a game; certainly some of these are hold-overs from a distant past but they don't really get in the way of trying to do other things.

The lobby system is a platform in that it allows you to download and play any game that is registered to the system (either by uploading it or linking to a code repository on request), but those games can be substantially different, and may not even be an RTS.


The long and short of it is; What would you like Spring to do?

It can probably do it.

[Scor04]

Thanks for the replies.

Does the license affect any games developed on it? Or just code written in those games?

[Silentwings]

To an extent, it affects them - see viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17847.

[Scor04]

So any of the LUA scripts are under the GPL license, but the assets are not.

Could someone make a game with Spring and sell it for a fee, as well as make the code GPL?

Also, can you create a game and launch it without using spring lobby?

[Silentwings]

Could someone make a game with Spring and sell it for a fee, as well as make the code GPL?

Yes, it has been done (I think, once) in the past. The procedure is to make the code GPL but choose a suitable license for the art assets.

can you create a game and launch it without using spring lobby?

Yes. You can also create your own games menu via lua and have Spring display that on launch.

[zwzsg]

Yes, it has been done (I think, once) in the past.

Yes, there was Argh's P.U.R.E.

But it seems links to buy it went dead when impulse got bought from stardock to gamestop.
http://www.wolfegames.com/

[Google_Frog]

I think there is a part of the Spring project in general which wants to be a mod platform. This forum has a bit of a confused purpose because it acts as both a developer forum (engine, games, maps etc..) as well as a player forum for the games that lack their own standalone sites. The "Read Me First" page is written with players in mind and somewhat from the point of view of Spring as a platform.

Additionally, game and lobby development has mostly been separate for most of Springs history. Game developers stuck to the ingame experience and had no control over anything seen by the user until they are actually in a match. Everything you would except in the game menu of the average RTS (settings, singleplayer, finding matches etc..) was handled by generic lobbies which could connect to the main server and play any game. This makes the engine itself look more like a game with many mods when in fact there is no technical barrier to completely standalone games. The engine itself does not come with any meaningful amount of game content, there is no default game.

I hate to plug, but for a example of a standalone game you should just poke around in Zero-K: http://zero-k.info/Wiki/Download. As an added bonus it answers many "can Spring do this?" questions before they are asked.

[code_man]

Me, thinksome and abma chatted on occasion about the possibility of expanding spring to be a steam like foss platform, we concluded its certainly possible.
While it is not impossible it is not an easy task for sure either.
There are two main issues from my point of view that would need to be addressed however.

• First being the fact that while we do have a page for games, there is no springlobby integration, anyone who starts up sl is basically forced to buy the cat in the bag if he wants to play.
• The other problem is unitsync, while i only managed to scratch the surface so far, it seems like a very inflexible system.
  It makes too many assumptions about the nature of the game, however i cant propose an suitable alternative.

From my understanding springlobby allows to specify third party download locations trough git/rapid, if this is the case then its probably not a big issue for the infrastructure.

I would like to integrate tremulous into being launchable from sl, but so far i had things to do and couldnt catch abma on sl.
Perhaps if i could do that, i might be able to provide more information on this subject.

The main strength i see in spring is that its one common platform, the fact that it uses the same engine is coincidental by now form my perspective.
It would certainly be wise trying to expand this concept to other games too, sure we cant expect too much, but its worth a tug.

[AF]

I tried doing that with AFLobby, it had support for GLEST, and I experimented with limited OTA support. They were treated as options the same way that Spring games were. Suffice to say it never really went anywhere