Now the engine is sufficiently open to make an excellent Middle Earth mod if you want
No, it's
not. Otherwise, I'd consider building one. I don't have the engine features I consider necessary yet, though, and I'd really like to see a graphical animation preview available for S3O / BOS in UpSpring before committing the time/mental energy necessary to make that much content.
Maybe you just don't know what it takes to develop a mod. Look, NanoBlobs took me almost 3 months, of not sleeping very frequently, in between working to pay the bills and generally not having a life. That's what it takes, right now, to develop S3O-based mods. It's
hard work and the tools available are still pretty primitive.
To put it into perspective, I think the time investment right now to get a new model with a truely new animation into Spring is about the same time it takes to make a fully-rigged HL2 model

It's not a good situation, and until the tools for
developing content improve, it's not likely to get a lot better.
That's what it costs, at least for me, to bring you folks really beautiful content.
You want me to invest a
year of my time to deliver you the most kick-ass Middle Earth RTS ever? I could do it. I could rock your world.
But I am
not going to do it if it's not going to be what I want it to be. And I am not going to do it, if at the end of the project, after months of gradually making content, snaring and seducing artists, scriptors, and other talent to bring together enough sheer talent to make it happen... I get a fricking
ONE LINE NOTE on the main website, which takes people, if they notice and so incline, to a Forum post.
No sir, I am not going to do that.
I will do it, but only if on release, I have front-page coverage with some sort of picture to hook people, an announcement on the Daily News posted in the Lobby, etc. I am a game designer, not just some twink. If all I cared about was the "perfect game of OTA", then I'd just be a twink, ok? But I am delivering
free games because I want an audience. Don't deliver the audience... and I am not making free games for your game engine.
The release of NanoBlobs was
quite instructive. I'd start up games in the Lobby, and people would ask, "What's NanoBlobs?", which means that they aren't even looking at the Spring site's front-end any more, because it's mainly static, and contains little of immediate interest to a gamer, especially one who has already downloaded the game engine.
This is
not how things should work.
I think it's just not possible to have one mod/week, let alone one/day in the Spring community.
That's not a supportable answer, based on the facts. Freelancer is a closed-source game whose developers, like Cavedog, tried to mainly ignore modders.
Lancer's Reactor was the result of pure hard work and sheer willpower from hundreds of talented people, from model-format hackers to artists to script developers. In short, you're wrong- Freelancer has a large and still-vibrant online-play community, using a wild variety of mods. OK, it's not as large as it used to be, etc.- the engine's looking pretty old now, and X3 drew away the audience to a large degree. However, it's still pretty impressive, and nobody
there whines about "fragmentation"- instead, everybody's happy with the sheer variety available.
Another reason is, the more mods being played, the more broken the community becomes. I prefer to have 150 persons playing 2/3 very good mods at a time in the lobby than 150 persons playing 25 different mods.
This is a recipe for stagnation. Basically, you're telling me, and every other person who has the sheer talent, work ethic and time to build mods for people like you... that I should beg the existing mod developers for a spot on their bandwagon, because we don't want to "fracture the community".
I'll be nice, and just say,
no way. And I believe that Caydr, Smoth, FLOZi and the others, while they might feel that I'm putting it more strongly than they would... am basically saying it for everybody.
Look, there would not have been a Counter-Strike if VaLve had decided to steer all modders towards improving Half-Life Deathmatch, ok? That's a nonsense argument. You get great games when you deliberately allow more game designs. With VaLve, they did so by releasing map editors and a modding SDK, that allowed people to build whole new game designs in C++ running under the aegis of the HL.EXE. With Spring, if I want to go that far, I'm in the position of having to release a new version of Spring, basically. Instead of going either route, I think that mods should probably have a list of Spring code functions that they call as dependencies, so that mods that don't need the 1001 features that will eventually get included don't load them into memory- they just load the core functions plus the sections they actually need to support their gameplay.
Can we do that, right this minute? No. Before getting there, Spring's code needs to be unentangled and rationalized in a very large number of places, so that code isn't so interdependent. Do I think it's possible to get there? Yes, I do.