Spring RTS Engine

Redfish wrote:I have a feeling Atari won't bother with Spring until it starts to get popular and money gets involved.

Yep....so the sooner we can get legal the better. :)

Tim Blokdijk wrote:As long as we don't have the cash for legal advice my personal advice would be to move away from total annihilation.
(Yes, I do love the game but the risk is (to) high...)
Or make sure the Spring Project is seperated from mod's that violate copyrights.

(My first post on the forum - hello to all)

Rolls eyes, if they do that many of will leave. Myself included. Part of the fun of spring is that it *SUPPORTS* OTA. For christs sake... what you are suggesting is asinine. IT would be easier to get some people together to "re-do" the ota textures and sounds. If we as a community did anything that would be a good first step.

When I am done with my TA mod I have the intent of COMPLETELY converting OTA which means new menu GFX, sounds textures and models. So far my mod uses only the OTA missile models but that too will change. Sounds are already being replaced. Many of the textures are new and several OTA textures are completely ignored. As far as sprites go.. I am leaving the OTA ones since spring has it's own sprite set.

What you are suggesting would take equally if not more time then creating some textures that are similar to ota and sounds that are similar. After all OTA is acient and if the SYs increase the ammount of textures spring can support that means the OTA textures can be redone at a higher size providing a better quality.

I don't see why you people are shiting yourselves over the OTA support. It is really ludicrious, spring is ok. so what if it supports OTA stuff. I am telling you that atari probably doesn't give a crap. However, the ONLY precaution SY needs to do is to remove the OTA content and replace it with their own.

Starting from scratch would be stupid for mods. I really don't see alot of people doing mods for spring any time soon. The thing is a beta, which means there are alot of bugs etc. so it could take forever to develop a mod for it and with all the version changes it will likely play hell with ballance. Plus most of the people out there cannot play spring correctly due to video card issues.

SO... since I am in a hurry(errands to run) why don't we organize a group to redo the damn textures as that is a start? Oh wait that would take effort... yes it would.

I am going to start a thread for it. Anyone interested in help the SYs by producing a texture set FEEL FREE TO REPLY. I will post details in the thread.

*edit*
ok, I'll be back this evening.
see thread here in the art forum


oh, and forgive the harsh language and spelling I am in a hurry and have no time to edit. I will edit later.
*end edit*

I really think the SY's should give us some of their thoughts about this copywrite issue..

Spring must come with all the data needed to play. You must be able to download Spring, install it, and play straight away.

If once spring is installed, you have to go look for your TA CD or some TA third party mods, then Spring will forever remains a small confidential project. And I'd like Spring to grow big.

If Spring doesn't come with units in the base installer, then 92.3% of people will give up when they'll found out that need to fetch more data before being able to play, and 7.1% people will manage to find out the needed additional units files only to give up after finding out that no one use the same mod.

However yes it's slightly annoying to distributed the OTA units, with all their textures, models, sound and all along with Spring.

Some are concerned that HPI and other file format are copyrighted. I'm don't know precisely but I had the idea that it's ok to release a program able to read any format.

Some people suggest to redo the models, the sound, the textures, of the TA units so as not to have any Cavedog material in Spring. To me that's a bad idea. As long as the units are inspired by TA, there is ground for legal actions: There was an Alien vs Predator mod for I-don't-remember-which-RTS, it was forced to close down by the company which owned AvP right. Even if that mod wasn't using any textures from licensed AvP game. There was a Dragon Ball Z Half Life mod, they were forced to remove any reference that it was based on DBZ.

Currently the SY seem to thinks that Spring "since the TA mod XTA has been available for download from http://www.clan-sy.com for many years, and since TA itself can be freely downloaded from abandonware sites", Atari doesn't care. It's probably ok to do like that for the first releases, but Atari doesn't caring now doesn't mean it'll never care. Also, I'll be more at ease advertising Spring on every forum if I could say it's totally free and works without TA. Most people don't seem to get the subtle "You need TA legally but not technically".

What I'd like would be:
- Have Spring works better with 3rd party units currently anything non-conventionnal has a high probability of not working or crashing. And custom projectiles are ignored, moveinfo.tdf are refused, etc...
- Then I'm sure TA modders will do Spring mods.
- We'll then need to have one or two very high quality total conversion or races.
- Then we'll need to have the SY replace the data shipped with Spring installer by those races or TC.
- Then we'd need to have people stop bitching about how OTA is superior to anything else and agree to move on to something else.
Quite difficult, and many stages at which it could fail, but not impossible.

Laws are much more tricky than we thought. Is there an actual lawyer in the forum?

zwzsg wrote:There was an Alien vs Predator mod for I-don't-remember-which-RTS, it was forced to close down by the company which owned AvP right. Even if that mod wasn't using any textures from licensed AvP game. There was a Dragon Ball Z Half Life mod, they were forced to remove any reference that it was based on DBZ.

There was a mod CALLED BID FOR POWER.. however, the people an "fun"imation sent a ceast and decist letter to them. I think it was linked to the fact that those budokai games were coming out. Also monolith was producing avp as a FPS and at the time the mod was a posible competitor.... anyway...

They are not making something at the moment to my knowledge over at atari. I have seen similar things happen to other great games *cough duke nukem for(n)ever* I think that getting better textures in spring is a good idea anyway since we are now looking closer at the units. there have been many people willing to do it over the period of ota.. but the improvement would have gone unoticed. In spring it will not :). The models getting updated also would be better. I loved the TA evo project and would equally love better models in spring.

I understand what you were saying about people being lazy(I know you were not saying it in a negative fashion)... or should I be more considerate and call people... ignorant or impatient. I concur. that is why I started the textures project. That way we have file for them and they will not have to understand squat. it'll be at least free of the textures from OTA which puts spring that much more in the green.

i play spring because its total annihilation units and gameplay. Atari probly wont give a shit about ta because well all their attempts at ta franchise seem to have fallen flat on their face and appear to have nothing in development.

Whos going to make something better? Spring rides off ta, theres other free rts's out there with 3d engines like glest. And in the end who cares, if they act change things then. In the end i suspect any new replacement race would probly just be clones with differnt names and slightly differnt models.

In the end i suspect any new replacement race would probly just be clones with differnt names and slightly differnt models.

And thats a bad thing how?

[K.B.] Napalm Cobra wrote:

In the end i suspect any new replacement race would probly just be clones with differnt names and slightly differnt models.

And thats a bad thing how?

And thats a good thing how?

Min3mat wrote:

[K.B.] Napalm Cobra wrote:

In the end i suspect any new replacement race would probly just be clones with differnt names and slightly differnt models.

And thats a bad thing how?

And thats a good thing how?

You avoid copyright infringement this way...