Spring RTS Engine

Fang received a lot of hate, threw his finger at the lot of you, and went on his merry way. Can't blame him too much.

THere is a reason I rarely post anything largely EvoRTS related here. All you get is a bunch of haters from BA trying to squash anything.

Look at all the hate argh and smoth get when they post stuff. It's over the top and this place is a cesspool of crappy people and worse attitudes, it's no great wonder that spring has such a small playerbase due to the way that newbies get treated.

Moddevs not working on *A rarely get straight answers from any of the devs excepting lurker and tobi, and the other active devs mostly stay in the background.

I'm not sure harsh forum moderation would do the trick tbh. THis place is just rife with horrible attitudes and constant epeenor contests, it's pretty sad tbh.

Imo what spring needs is a project to replace all TA IP. The goal would not be to make an actual mod, rather a repository with every model, sound, texture and whatnot inherited from ota replaced with a new one. The models should be essentially completely new units, but able to fill the role of an ota unit, so *A mods could use the new unit and maintain balance. It would be more than a bunch of random resources, it should have some planning, a common artistic style, etc.

I don't expect anyone to start working on such project, however. Just some thoughts.

The problem I see is that mod developers tend to develop huge egos and lash out at people way too quickly, forming paranoid delusions that everybody's turning their mod into BA just because they complain that some gameplay element isn't working out.

First of all, Spring devs (the real kind, who actually produce real stuff) need to chill out. Every game that has ever been modded has its share of people showing up asking that x be created or wanting help with y. It's just a fact of life.

And OP, you have to realize that there are very few people out there in the world, and especially here, who'd be willing to join projects on the fly. Most of Spring's modder community is quite busy as-is, and those with the talent who aren't held down on projects usually have their own ideas and need a little motivation to want to do anything else. You've got to have atleast something to pitch, be it models or art, a thoroughly-written GDD, etc. This requires essentially going it alone for the start and hoping interested persons rotate towards your efforts (or, if you've got "friends", starting with them). Sometimes you'll pick up loose developers, other times you'll pick up freelance work from semi-interested chaps, other times you may get no interest whatsoever.

Just take a look at the team makeup of many of the most active games:

Gundam - Is pretty much Smoth single-handedly conquering the world.
P.U.R.E. - Mainly Argh with a lot of modelling help from GMN.
Evolution RTS - Just Forb, with some lua nabs/charity.
Kernel Panic - Pretty much zwzsg, the one-man programming army.
Spring: 1944 - Myself, Flozi and Nemo, maybe the physically largest permanent "team" (3 people!), with a lot of charity from lua programmers here and there. Though really Flozi and I are half a member each because we're both astonishingly lazy.
Imperial Winter - Gnomre and Zsinj, with bits and pieces from various part-time devs.

So really, the only thing you can do right now is bust your ass and take the initiative and become the project lead. Nobody's going to lead your project for you. You've got to come up with some solid, well-thought-out ideas, preferably with some art to back it up, and most importantly, don't expect or rely on help, because changes are it'll be awhile coming.

And lol@KDR. I think you're onto something there.

KDR_11k wrote:The problem I see is that mod developers tend to develop huge egos and lash out at people way too quickly, forming paranoid delusions that everybody's turning their mod into BA just because they complain that some gameplay element isn't working out.

so true

i agree with spikedhelmet too, but i find it pretty amusing that he's the one telling people to chill out : )

SpikedHelmet wrote:First of all, Spring devs (the real kind, who actually produce real stuff) need to chill out. Every game that has ever been modded has its share of people showing up asking that x be created or wanting help with y. It's just a fact of life.

And OP, you have to realize that there are very few people out there in the world, and especially here, who'd be willing to join projects on the fly. Most of Spring's modder community is quite busy as-is, and those with the talent who aren't held down on projects usually have their own ideas and need a little motivation to want to do anything else. You've got to have atleast something to pitch, be it models or art, a thoroughly-written GDD, etc. This requires essentially going it alone for the start and hoping interested persons rotate towards your efforts (or, if you've got "friends", starting with them). Sometimes you'll pick up loose developers, other times you'll pick up freelance work from semi-interested chaps, other times you may get no interest whatsoever.

Just take a look at the team makeup of many of the most active games:

Gundam - Is pretty much Smoth single-handedly conquering the world.
P.U.R.E. - Mainly Argh with a lot of modelling help from GMN.
Evolution RTS - Just Forb, with some lua nabs/charity.
Kernel Panic - Pretty much zwzsg, the one-man programming army.
Spring: 1944 - Myself, Flozi and Nemo, maybe the physically largest permanent "team" (3 people!), with a lot of charity from lua programmers here and there. Though really Flozi and I are half a member each because we're both astonishingly lazy.
Imperial Winter - Gnomre and Zsinj, with bits and pieces from various part-time devs.

So really, the only thing you can do right now is bust your ass and take the initiative and become the project lead. Nobody's going to lead your project for you. You've got to come up with some solid, well-thought-out ideas, preferably with some art to back it up, and most importantly, don't expect or rely on help, because changes are it'll be awhile coming.

And lol@KDR. I think you're onto something there.

the most active game in dev is CA ... and it has more than one modder

Teutooni wrote:Imo what spring needs is a project to replace all TA IP. The goal would not be to make an actual mod, rather a repository with every model, sound, texture and whatnot inherited from ota replaced with a new one. The models should be essentially completely new units, but able to fill the role of an ota unit, so *A mods could use the new unit and maintain balance. It would be more than a bunch of random resources, it should have some planning, a common artistic style, etc.

I don't expect anyone to start working on such project, however. Just some thoughts.

Its been said before, projects like that dont really work, because everyone* just wants TA (see the early MrD threads and Smoths Morty thread for details)

*ok, not everyone, but you get the point

Once you replace it they'll like it

SpikedHelmet wrote:Kernel Panic - Pretty much KDR_11k, the one-man programming army.

Fixed!

About the topic, like has been said here, and many time before, posting in a thread about how you believe in free soft..game content and how others people should produce more of it to please you won't accomplish anything.

Either you need it so much, that you do it yourself (and not just writing a doc and calling your part done, I mean, be prepared to do everything yourself), either you just open your eyes, looks around, and acknowledge the existence of the free spring mods around. They might not fit totally all your wishes and expectation, but that's what you get for not having made them yourself.

Personaly, I think we don't need more libre games, but more players of existing non TA-ripped mods.

Satirik wrote: the most active game in dev is CA ... and it has more than one modder

CA is still ultimately TA and based on illegal use of someone else's IP with some fancy lua coding. It is not a game, it is a mod. Now stfu and gtfo nub.

zwzsg wrote:About the topic, like has been said here, and many time before, posting in a thread about how you believe in free soft..game content and how others people should produce more of it to please you won't accomplish anything.

Either you need it so much, that you do it yourself (and not just writing a doc and calling your part done, I mean, be prepared to do everything yourself), either you just open your eyes, looks around, and acknowledge the existence of the free spring mods around. They might not fit totally all your wishes and expectation, but that's what you get for not having made them yourself.

Zwzsg, Thank you.


@ Kdr, if I display ego like that I give you sole permission to verbally rape me in any thread for such behavior.

Clever, giving permission to the only person here who seems polite enough not to use it.

Pxtl wrote:Clever, giving permission to the only person here who is mature enough not to use it inappropriately.

fixed your post for you.

I trust kdr's judgment he is a very mature individual. There are a few others that I have no issue with their feedback. I am not name dropping but there are many on this forum that have enough fun making inappropriate attacks on my character

exactly how much would the OTA content need to be changed to avoid any legal issues? textures... models... unit names and behaviors... where can we draw the line and say "okay, we're in the clear!"

it's something that confuses me somewhat... where does the copyright extend to? after all... if we were to replace some names and textures... i'm thinking along the lines of "core beveller"... "arm pea-oui"... change the textures so they have pink and purple polkadots... change the unit sounds to lil jon saying "okayyyyy!" and change the scale of the models slightly...

would that bump OTA content down a legal danger notch from copyright infringement to merely a blatant ripoff? im just saying... if we ever get hit for infringement, maybe doing some fast fixing like what i just mentioned (although not nearly as silly) would pull us out of the hot water.

after all... OTA stands for Omigod Thats Awesome, right? no problems with copyright there, just a co-incidence that they are similar

stop basing shit of of the ota content etc. I.E. Start with only the stuff that was generated from scratch. New scripts, not ones based on old scripts. Replace all textures by drawing new versions from scratch. ETC. IF you want to be clear then you need to be clean.

I am making new header files and thing, will be PDing my clean scripts and most of my buildings to try and help some with this. I am even giving you lot the textures. All my effects are getting released and any lua script that can be PDed will be. However, that will happen some time after I release 1.2 as I have strict rules about taking nothing from the archive. So because of that I have to make a separate content release to avoid all confusion I know, I know, I take too long.

Anyway, I do not see you guys replacing ta anytime soon.

smoth wrote:stop basing shit of of the ota content etc

brb, making robotech mod based on gundam :D jk

well, I will be releasing all of the effects, building models, scripts and lua... so that means all you would have to do is the transformation anims and the models of the macross units.

go for it, start modeling your valkries.

Very few people here actually care about the legal status of *A hacks -- we look down on you more because of the blatant ripoff part. So, sure, changing everything so it's no longer illegal might get you some legal cred but most serious modders would still despise it for still being a vaguely-disguised TA ripoff.

Thanks for your informative and insightful posts. Great to hear Smoth, that you want to release alot of your content into the public domain!
Again, I do think there is alot of really good libre stuff out there already, and I agree with you Zwzsg, its hardly played enough (myself included there - though I haven't been playing Spring for a while now in any case).
Like SwiftSpear though, I see a gap in the lineup, that I think Spring could greatly benefit from if it were to be filled. [Like I said in my PM to you it was great to hear you would support an effort of this sort :).]

Because of this, and because I also must agree with what many here have pointed out - that begging is not the way to go - and because I guess two people is a team, I now really do want to get something started! I guess it would be good if we hashed out how much our visions actually have in common (Swiftspear).

At the moment I'm playing around with a smallish game idea to get a hang of how making games for Spring works.

We need to meet in a chatroom... there's too much to discuss back in forth one day to the next in a forum setting. Any time, for the most part, this weekend I can plan around. I'm in PST so it's pretty much the worst possible time zone's for it, but do you prefer getting up early in the morning or staying up late at night? About 8 PM or later your time is a pretty reasonable time for me, or 10 AM or earlier your time works as well.

If it's all the same, declare a time (and timezone for reference) and lets meet in #libre on lobby, so if other people decide they want to join in they are able to.