Spring RTS Engine

Now I know the TA:Spring creators have no intention of porting this piece of delight to other platforms. But the fact that TA's gameplay executes perfectly on Spring (I haven't tested this myself yet, but reports look very encouraging) means that us Mac users may finally have a foot in the door towards Windows-Mac multiplayer...

Would this assumption be correct? I.e. if the code _were_ ported, TA:Spring on a Mac could play vs TA:Spring on a PC? Of course if I have made an ignrant assumption (such as assuming that DirectX is not used in Spring), do correct me...

they are using opengl, and i dont c why u cant play it on a mac against pc game. if u can emulate windows, which macs can. the networking bit relies on tcp/ip or udp which are standard protocols and thus macs can commuinicate with windows. although why would anyone want a mac in the first place is another question...

Dave of this forum and other persons are trying to port the game on Linux. There is a chance that it can be ported to Mac afterwards. The big difficulty is to allow games being played between Unixes and PCs, as the compiler is different. Compilers and processors (in the case of Macs) being different, the floating point calculations will differ slightly, making synchronization between the platforms very complex or next to impossible. That's the analysis of SJ.

Note that the original TA had the exact same limitation, the Mac version didn't allow to pla against PC users.

The only workaround I see to this problem is to force calculations to be IEEE754 compliant and have the same roundings on all platforms. I don't know if it's possible, and I don't know if it would not seriously tamper performances on some platforms.

The only workaround I see to this problem is to force calculations to be IEEE754 compliant and have the same roundings on all platforms. I don't know if it's possible, and I don't know if it would not seriously tamper performances on some platforms.

It is possible, in the worst case via a software Library using only the Integer Unit instead of the FPU. Of course doing so would be a too high performance penalty. It would be faster to use some kind of pseudo floats, like factions based on integers.
The easiest way migth be to use more precise floats than needed e.g double precision instead of single precision so that the rounding errors wont sum up so fast. Combined with more syncing i think inter platform games shouldnt be a big issue.
The issue is also only critical for stuff ike map position, unit movement and firing vectors, which should not cost too much cpu power. All the grafics stuff can be impementet wathever is the best for the according platform.

As far as what I've read, the reason the original TA did not allow Mac to Windows play was because DirectPlay was used. This surely isn't a problem with Spring?

kneeslasher wrote:As far as what I've read, the reason the original TA did not allow Mac to Windows play was because DirectPlay was used. This surely isn't a problem with Spring?

The netcode will need to be messed with a little bit, because they used Winsock. Spring doesn't use DirectPlay.

So there is hope...

Well, let me add my voice to those hoping for a Mac port -- I own a Powerbook for location video editing work, and I'd love to be able to load up Spring to kill time in the many places where I've got downtime and WiFi but nothing else amusing to do..

You know this is a sad indictment for the gaming industry as a whole. If a bunch of geeks can get together with no money and create (alright, REcreate) this, then what the devil has the gaming industry been doing since 1997?

Here's hoping for a Mac port.

kneelasher, what do you think it would do?

I wonder also why nobody has been done a remake from OTA in commercial. I'm happy thought somebody made it for free instead. This game washes everything from age of empires and empire earth into warcraft 3 and Warlords battlecry and another different varitations.

I can say that old games are better, because I didn't know this is a remake version before I saw it. It were so intresting that I continued on the forums and begun to play it every time when I didn't wanted to do anything and I had free time.

Please don't talk about game industry as global. There are much of different companies which everyone have different politics. I wonder what's with it too, they should have great amount of experienced programmers from old years, and these programmers should have unbeliable intresting and innovative ideas which would get really much reputation.

Thought many company seems to target into an easy money, find out how many company releases games with some number behind the name without reason. It's not that simple thought because there are no -game-developer constant, they all are different.

Edit: And don't forget these all same looking FPS games releasing almost daily. Who buys them?