Spring RTS Engine

There are probably hudnreds fo sites that would like to link to or reccomend or host/distribute spring but refuse to because of XTA and its legal issues with content from OTA.

This is including several well known linux distributions who have said in theri forums that XTA and OTA content is the main obstacle among other things preventing them from including spring.

If anythign the windows version should have no mod at all bundled with it.

Spoken like a true wise-man AF.

Well is there any plans for an open-source mod?

And what if we included a mod that doesn't use TA content by defualt for linux distros, with the mod authors permission of course.

Or are they really uptight and want the mod open?

I think no TA content & freely distributable is open enough, but I'm not 100% sure about that.

Also, yes there are mods without TA content: Xect vs. Mynn is totally OTA independent & NanoBlobs almost, it still depends on the OTA sound files.

Some more news, just played approx. 60 minutes AA 2.11 Mars game MinGW vs Linux, no sync errors at all.

What about the ealier problem you encoutered tobi, where you had the float error?

Do you know what caused it?

Yeah it appeared to be an overflow. Some "runaway missiles" ended up at positions like 5e+09 because of numerically unstable prediction algorithm. Worked around the now with a simple check that clamps the value to 50k max.

Ah i was reading your dev logs and was wondering what that was put in for.

Good to hear.

No pressure, we still need a few good open source mods

Nanoblobs and gundam?

Nice work on the sync!

Some ex-cavedog staff should opensource TA and declare the content abandonware. But I doubt this will ever happen...

cavedog doesnt own the rights to TA, atari does, and despite many petitions and calls for it to be released, Atari have held onto the source and kept it closed.

the very community itself and this spring engine is driving up interest in OTA content and making it profitable to hold onto the rights and the source of TA.

Should the OTA community and sites like TAUniverse become dead and spring becomes independant of OTA sources, maybe then Atari will label it abandonware and make it free.

AF wrote:cavedog doesnt own the rights to TA, atari does, and despite many petitions and calls for it to be released, Atari have held onto the source and kept it closed.

the very community itself and this spring engine is driving up interest in OTA content and making it profitable to hold onto the rights and the source of TA.

Should the OTA community and sites like TAUniverse become dead and spring becomes independant of OTA sources, maybe then Atari will label it abandonware and make it free.

AFAIK the term ´abandonware´ is not something made up by the game companies, but rather by ppl wanting to play the game and not being able to get it. It´s still illegal, though the ´abandonware´ community is trying to keep it in lines, so noone will complain.

AF wrote:cavedog doesnt own the rights to TA, atari does, and despite many petitions and calls for it to be released, Atari have held onto the source and kept it closed.

the very community itself and this spring engine is driving up interest in OTA content and making it profitable to hold onto the rights and the source of TA.

Should the OTA community and sites like TAUniverse become dead and spring becomes independant of OTA sources, maybe then Atari will label it abandonware and make it free.

They could just release the content into the public domain, and keep the engine proprietary. This would create more interest in TA2, and would prpbably increase sales of OTA. Do any springers have an in with Infogrames Entertainment IR? They own Atari these days...

I thought they renamed themselves Atari, or Atari bought them out.......

What's the point in keeping the content back? They don't sell this game anymore, nor is the engine being used in new games.
Even if a player actually buys TA to legally play Spring (I bet most people don't care anyway), they'll buy it from eBay or something. Atari won't make money this way. I just don't understand.
There actually is a bunch of games which source code was released. (Heavy Gear 2, Homeworld, Warzone 2100...) These games got ported to Linux and other platforms, and were played again. Of course you still needed the original CDs for the content. Release the source code and make the content available again. That's what I would do if I was Atari and wanted to still make money.

U be hard to convienve anyone to release thier work for free.
Remember business peep / lawylers run companys.

Very few places will allow u to use thier art / models etc for free.

They wont see profit in it, and they pretty much lose option to make a new release down the road, or sell of the game rights.
They got marketing money to spread the word. And also why allow a competitor to make one based off thier work for free.

They rather sit on the work, than risk opening it up. Could be persons job on the line, who makes the bad decision.

• Scenario 1
  Release work for free
  Release new commerical version of TA.
  New version == flop. Why gpl version still going strong. They cant afford to keep paying peep to develop game to add new features, without some source of income. Expansion dont go on forever.
  Person who make decision gets into a firing squad. Since they basicly gave competitor a free pass.
  
  Scenario 2
  Release work for free
  Dont release new commerical version of TA.
  Some good PR
  Dont release new TA

Asking alot in thier eyes for some good PR.
Only a few game companys released opensource versions of thier games, normally when they givin up on genre / much older version. And nearly always they hand onto thier art / models / sounds for dear life.

Plus some smaller contract out for art & are unable to open them up without artist permission

That and the more demand there appears to be the more attractive it is to keep ti clsoed.

Which is bad because demanding it be made free is demand in itself....

1. It's not Atari's work
2. TA has no competitors no more
So it's all about greedy/stupid businessmen. That's a shame :/

This is becoming kinda off-topic. I'll stop here.

HAARP wrote:So it's all about greedy/stupid businessmen.

Noone from Atari has (AFAIK) issued any cease and desist notices with respect to the vast amount of OTA content and IP contained in XTA, AA etc. So given that they're currentkly turning a blind eye to those mods, maybe you should have a little more respect.

If they where stupid, they would release it to GPL, why do i say that? Because for sure they still make a profit from TA, although small, it is still there.

Let us end all off-topic now, this is about testing the branch, not about TA, end it now please.

Atari isnt the immediate cocnern with OTA content.


Linux distributions and other websites are the main concern.

A lot of them wont touch spring as long as there's OTA content distributed with it because they dont wish to endanger their own legality and standing.

No matter how much I like XTA it needs removing from the spring installer regardless of wether there's a mod to replace it. So what if nanoblobz is too different or Xect vs Mynn looks crappy, I think we should replace it with nanoblobz in the next version or simply not include a mod and force users to download the mod as this has gone on long enough.