Spring RTS Engine

There are currently over 20 TA variants available for spring. All but 3 of them suck (those 3 being BA, Bota, and Nota).

Therefore the odds of this not sucking are very stacked.


Redking, you seem to have a good personality and seem to be a decent guy, so let me give you a bit of advice. Go ahead and mess aroung with TA units in spring. It will be a good springboard later on for other things, HOWEVER, don't make the tragic mistake of once again simply recreating TA in spring. We have that. It's old, it's tired and all out boring.

When you have a little experience start working on your own gamepack/mod project, with your own content (that means using 0% of any TA content).

In the above, I wish you luck.

@min3mat:

Oh of course. I forgot that you're the shining paradigm of society

Pah! you can never have too many ta mods!
Don't worry Red, most of the TA playing community, unlike what smoth said, aren't sick of ta mods, they are open minded and will play your mod, it just has to be good thats all. ^^

Have fun

Officially, I am sick of TA mods. They are a great way to cut your teeth, as lots of TA mods have been made and you get to look at them and fiddle with them and that's all good. Then, you should do something original, something CRAZY. It might not work. It might be really dumb. But at least it'll be funny.

And a word of warning: It's really easy to crash and burn into the ground and give up. I did it! I'm going to try again some day...really, I am. But I hope you avoid the mountain of 'not releasing your mod' and soar high in the skies of 'It's done! Now I get to listen to a thousand different reasons why it sucks!"

Come on then Steve, pull the other one, you know that I support the other moders. In this community you know the reason that people adopted BA so readily was 2 factors

Caydr purposefully sabotaging AA
and BA becoming the "better" Next version of AA.

The only reason I didn't help Caydr was that he first and foremost refused to allow me. I offered to help him. If you were a moder you would understand that always help where I can. I would hate to see another moder waisting his time, we have somewhere like >10 TA variants. That is a lot of TA. Most of the time on the server it is this order BA, XTA, LAST AA, prior version of AA... and past that whatever mod that is the flavor of the moment.

I seldom see battlefleet, bota, nota or other TA like mods get played. It is depressing. I wish all the TA teams would join up with some of them remodeling stuff, some changing effects, some touching up scripts and others tweaking gameplay. It boggles my mind how TA based mod take soo long, lack soo much eyecandy and get generally little work outside of stats changes.

It is mind boggling. This coming from someone who has a mod that you your self has said was a good mod. I don't even really know what to say about gundam or the others but there is a certain... hive mindset to most TA mod players. There are only a handful of good players like yourself from the old clan(was it THX or THC?).

Smoth...
what is the address of your site (G-Spring forum) . ?? I cant find it anymore
I only remember it something like cs.edu or such

RedKing wrote:also to zwzsg:
these we'ren't fan made the person who got these up can't MAKE units he simply recoded ones that were locked because of clashes with other systems.. made it so that they don't clash and unlocked them but thanks for the explanation anyways on everything else o.o

They ARE fan made. I know those units:

Mouse's readme wrote:M.A.D. TA's Arm Mouse 1.1
[...]
Credits:

Concept, model, textures, walk script - Nube!

Script, fbi/weapons, sounds, pic - M. Kenyon.

Playtesting - Kenyon
[...]
Contact:

Complements, suggestions, critics, bug report or simply your thought on our unit, please send to nube.d@tiscalinet.it(Nube), kenyon@gofree.indigo.ie (M Kenyon), telefragged@bol.com.br (Rocko). Visit M.A.D. TA at http://www.unituniverse.com/madta


Copyright 2001 by M.A.D. TA (whatever this line may mean)

Nube & Kenyon are old unit makers, from the TA fan community, not from Cavedog.


The wording "unlocked" is wrong. Unlocked suggest they were present in official TA files and your friend made them buildable. This is NOT the case. The mouse, and every other M.A.D. TA units, were NOT hidden into official TA files. They were modelled, textured, scripted by fans. Who then made them freely downloadable on their site.

The clashes you are talking about are of two types:
- Two units sharing the same button on the buildmenu.
- Two units sharing the same weapons ID.
Note that the Spring engine doesn't care about weapon ID, so fixing weapons ID clash is useless for Spring.

When an end user download many TA units from many place, there's bound to have some of those clash, so for instance one unit will be unavailable because its button in the buildmenu will be taken by another unit, and you have to do some special fix so both are available, but the term "unlock" is still incorrect, because "unlock" suggest the unit was intentionnaly locked in the first place, while sane unit maker make sure their units do not conflict with a standard install, and most conflict and hidden units results from interference between 3rd party units from varied source, because player got greedy and installed too many units at once, not from the unit maker intention.


I never said they were made by your friend. What your friend did was to download them from the internet, then run Conflict Crusher. (Conflict Crusher is a fan made tool that automatically crush clash such as the two above).

So my point is that what you have in possession is nothing special. Anyone can download all M.A.D. units then run Conflict Crusher. Ok, MAD TA website apparently has BW problem, but you can get their units from www.UnitUniverse.com, as well as varied other places. (Technically, some MAD TA units requires the "mad ta stuff", which I'm not sure where to get elsewhere than on madta website wich is currently unavailable, but that's nitpicking).

Also, half of rebalancing / large unit pack TA mods contains MAD TA units, cause they were good and had nice units in early times.

I suppose Conflict Crusher won't work if you throw too many units at it and exceed the 256 weapon ID limit?

Forboding Angel wrote:There are currently over 20 TA variants available for spring. All but 3 of them suck (those 3 being BA, Bota, and Nota).

Cus we need moar xta bashing kthx

P3374H wrote:

Forboding Angel wrote:There are currently over 20 TA variants available for spring. All but 3 of them suck (those 3 being BA, Bota, and Nota).

Cus we need moar xta bashing kthx

Please, don't start this up again. XTA has a long way to go, as do arguably all games ever produced.

neddiedrow wrote:Please, don't start this up again.

That was my point.

Well, consider that most TA variants are just "rebalancings" - would you really want people to divert their attentions to other mods? Imagine the flamewars that would ensure if there were piles of "re-balancing" mods of E&E or Gundam? The TA content is generally being used just as a starting-point for modders who're just dabbling. Better that sandbox than any other.

My thing is that they should sit down and redo it. for the most part after that most TA based stuff can be handled via a mutator and people can get 1 download for all of it.

Who have we got that's going to revamp the models, textures etc on a TA based mod like BA then?

I agree it would be a nice change to see some decent looking new/revamped models/textures but it seems to be a mammoth task considering the number of units in a mod like BA. Secondly, nobody seems to have come forward to offer to do this, and thirdly there has been no pro-active nudges by the community to try and get this done. BA players dont care about what the units look like for the most part. Its more about how the mod plays, although if BA got some graphical buffs then perhaps more people would be encouraged to download spring and BA, and perhaps with it mods like gundam and play them because they look good.

DemO wrote:Who have we got that's going to revamp the models, textures etc on a TA based mod like BA then?

I agree it would be a nice change to see some decent looking new/revamped models/textures but it seems to be a mammoth task considering the number of units in a mod like BA. Secondly, nobody seems to have come forward to offer to do this, and thirdly there has been no pro-active nudges by the community to try and get this done. BA players dont care about what the units look like for the most part. Its more about how the mod plays, although if BA got some graphical buffs then perhaps more people would be encouraged to download spring and BA, and perhaps with it mods like gundam and play them because they look good.

I'm working on the effects and sounds DemO.

Caydr is apparently attempting to rebuild the OTA unit-line from scratch, as a bizarro form of recursive fan-art (first there was a game, then a mod for that game, then a mod of that mod, then a new engine for the old mods, then a new mod for the new engine, then new content for the new engine for the old mod based on the old game..... and it's still technically Atari IP).

I consider this incotrivertible proof that he is insane.

DemO wrote:I agree it would be a nice change to see some decent looking new/revamped models/textures but it seems to be a mammoth task considering the number of units in a mod like BA.

*rolls eyes* not really man. It is mamoth for one guy yes, but think if you had 2-3 guys on it. What would I know I only modeled all of gundam.

DemO wrote: Secondly, nobody seems to have come forward to offer to do this, and thirdly there has been no pro-active nudges by the community to try and get this done.

Pile of bullshit, we have tried several times and noone stays with it or uses the work.

For example I was helping XTA with a texture(the flea) which noone else wants to use...
http://cs.selu.edu/~ssmith/gallery/main ... alNumber=1

DemO wrote: BA players dont care about what the units look like for the most part. Its more about how the mod plays, although if BA got some graphical buffs then perhaps more people would be encouraged to download spring and BA, and perhaps with it mods like gundam and play them because they look good.

That is also crap. People care about what their game looks like. Then again, I also do not know anything about gameplay right?

smoth wrote:

jackalope wrote: TA Spring is a project aiming to create a new RTS. The current goal is to make it run content from the game Total Annihilation.

Um, no that goal was met. Now they are moving on. You of all people should know they droped TA from Spriing some time ago.


Redking, we are just a bit sick of TA style mods. There are a lot of TA styled/based mods. It is starting to get too old and too numerous. There is a large community for TA mods but largely they play XTA or BA and frankly are hard pressed to open their minds to the plethora of other mods.

lol I just copied the website banner

lol, fair enough but note that they have changed the name to spring and the title of the page is The Spring project. I am just trying to tell ya man, they are not soo worried about TA anymore.

DemO wrote:Who have we got that's going to revamp the models, textures etc on a TA based mod like BA then?

I agree it would be a nice change to see some decent looking new/revamped models/textures but it seems to be a mammoth task considering the number of units in a mod like BA. Secondly, nobody seems to have come forward to offer to do this, and thirdly there has been no pro-active nudges by the community to try and get this done. BA players dont care about what the units look like for the most part. Its more about how the mod plays, although if BA got some graphical buffs then perhaps more people would be encouraged to download spring and BA, and perhaps with it mods like gundam and play them because they look good.

The reason no one sticks with it is because the guys that have the talent to do said work would much more prefer making something of their own that is original.

Sorry to bust your bubble, but the ta models are far from complex. Heh, look at the vehicles. They are one large box with smaller boxes welded on.

And also, the rumar has it that all caydr did was import the old model, click a button to add verticies and called it new (This is 100% speculation as it is a rumor, but it very well could be true, not that it really matters anyway).

...with it mods like gundam and play them because they look good.

Pardon? Gundam is THE single Best looking mod in spring. Get a decent computer and turn the settings in spring all the way up. Gundam is graphically amazing. Second to Gundam would be EE.

But what you're inferring here is that TA needs to be remodeled for other mods to see play? What? That makes no sense... People already see gundam. People already see EE. People don't play them not because they aren't damn good looking and damn good playing, but because the majority of people here came to play TA. Period.

These are the people that have refused to so much as try another RTS FAIRLY until TA2 comes out. And regardless of how good a mod is, if it's not TA, it will NEVER be good enough for said people.

It's sad. But it's true.

In before angry yelling...

O SHI....


Once the TA mod is mass produced!