Spring RTS Engine

MMrph... I'm probably being ignorant, but is a liscense neccesary on an SDK mod? It seems unlikely that anyone would release the SDK mod as-is, and wouldn't the liscensing be covered by the final product and the person making the final product, rather than whoever made the base it's built on?

Could the authors not just say "This is in the public domain"?

Or, you could merely say

"You may use the information inside of this folder for ANYTHING you wish. You may sell it for a million dollars, or print it out and wipe your ass with it, we don't care."

Public domain would work. Of course if the SDK had a license that could restrict what you can do with the SDK but that would kinda defeat the point.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/

link that as your official license, and let the good times role.

For units, id stick to one type of unit for each thing, to display the game fully with the minimum of effort.

For example, you only need one type of constructor, with all the different cosntructor-relevant tags (ressing, capturing, etc). Maybe two, to show how these tags can be mixed and matched (or to show one with a nano crane and one with a scripted building laser, etc).

Hell, you only need one energy producing structure- just stick tidal, wind, and an energy make on it all at the same time and comment them appropriately.

The geotherm can be some special kind of turret or factory or anything you like, and need not be a geothermal powerplant- best to mix it with other variables to show off as many tags as possible with each unit.

You also dont need a different laser tower/floating laser tower, as a single structure can be made to both float and be land-buildable (which shows off the ability to do that as well).

You only really need 2 types of factories, one land and one sea, to show off the different types of footprints (As there isnt that much variation in what you can do to a factory).

You should focus on discrete sets of tags and the minimum number of units they can be put in. There is no functional difference between a kbot lab and a vech lab, so there is really no reason to make both.

That makes sense. It might kindof defeat the point to have multiple sides with many units in an SDK mod, seeing as they're likely to be deleted anyhow. As long as they're well documented, a few units could do the job of many.

I suppose we could have a demonstration mod for noobs, showing everything with it all commented/documented, as well as a base mod download, which would have hardly anything. More work though, probably .

It would seem to me that making the SDK mod the same as the newbie training mod would be very helpful. The two benefit from the same things.

True... I guess that an empty mod file would be virtually useless, seeing as for quick testing and production as was originally proposed requires at least some kind of content.

I see what your saying and you have partially swayed my opinions.

What I was hopeing to do was to have the project have a demonstration of "everything" the game could do properly documentated and described and licensed in such a way that people could, without asking permission, throw everything the "Project" has into it...

There would also be the "Test Module" That would contain a Commander, contruction yard and everygy/metal buildings... it would contain one "replace this with your building" building and a "replace this with your unit" unit... Then we would create a step by step tutorial (probably cobbled together from various sources) that would explain how to add a unit to it... then there would be a folder included with this base mod containing all the other demo units created for the project and people could put them into the Test module as is or editted ... finally there would be a "Demo Game Module" produced by the "Project" that takes all of the demo units and put them together in a "playable" game. It would take a while to put together a playable game this way but the point would be to get people to understand the process.

Seems to me like it'd be a lot more fun to build the game itself while documenting the process.

"Everything the game can do" is unfeasible now that LUA is here... It would be easier to list things it can't do now.

between towerdefense and my planned features for gundam I could easily make a mini mod to give a way to the engine and you wackos could have at it!

I can still do the Lua, Zsinj cant stop me!

(Off topic)Speaking of tower defense, any news?

SwiftSpear wrote:"Everything the game can do" is unfeasible now that LUA is here... It would be easier to list things it can't do now.

I think "Everything the game can do without the use of LUA" with some examples of what can be done with LUA.

You could do something that wasn't really made in spring yet - a micro-intensive mod involving small amounts of units that have lots of active abilities (ie. performed on user request with a cooldown) ala WC3, but even more extreme. This would necessarily involve quite a lot of Lua, but you could get away with less of time consuming artistic work.

That would require heavy lua as a core premise. IMO, bad idea, you can teach them the lua after they learn the basic framework (though you could just as easily do most of it using on/off and d-guns, but again, the mod is meant to show off everything the engine does, not a few gimmicks).

That's doable without LUA, but involves rather annoyingly large amounts of fancy bos scripting. I have half a mod made floating around somewhere that's focused on player control of a single unit vs waves of enemies (like tower defense except with a mobile unit rather than tower placement), with upgrades and powerups and such, all without LUA.

It might even be a decent starting point for an SDK, minus the ridiculous artwork that I cobbled together from OTA units and the mildly fancy scripting of the main unit.

From what I can see, we don't want to do something new, or original. It could be very basic... The only things that you need to demonstrate are the basics a newbie wants to know. From there, they can figure out the rest. Even a generic mod with 8 poorly modeled units and buildings would work, as all you need to show are basic things, like how to put units ingame, and how factories weapons and commanders work.

A new, sleek, wc3 style mod would be cool, but also neither an SDK or a mod for newbs. It could be done, however, as an experiment to test the bounds of LUA and cob.

My 2 cents, at least.