Spring RTS Engine

pretty much starting from scratch... i'm just wondering

Long.

S44 in its current form has been approximately 3 years in the making.

uh oh

a couple hundred man-hours for something small, like KP. much more for anything bigger (unless you just put together a bazillion units and call that a mod.)

aah, that would have been my seccond question: how about if the models are very simple...

but... i haven't got the time or the attention span.

My two small games (Dark Side of the Spring, Kapital) were probably ~20-40 hours each, I wasn't really counting. But they're also VERY simple games with few units and very simple rules.

If you have a very small and clear design idea that is reasonably suited to the engine/within your lua coding ability (and skills to make it happen without looking everything up/asking people) and aren't fussed about reusing art, you can make things fairly quickly.

That said, its not something for people with crappy attention spans.

yep... that's probably not me, becasue:

• if ever, i probably would have done it during the break (almost over)
  i use Ubuntu
  what's Lua?

^^ i like making lists!

A weekend.
http://jobjol.nl/1831

KDR doesn't count, when he sneezes, a mod comes out.

kburts wrote:pretty much starting from scratch... i'm just wondering

Just animating a unit in spring is a pain. A whole game (remember S44, PURE, SWIW - these aren't just mods) can take a long time even with a team of skilled people.

imbaczek wrote:KDR doesn't count, when he sneezes, a mod comes out.

Heaven help us if KDR ever gets hayfever ^_^

hrmph wrote:Just animating a unit in spring is a pain

Yes, part of the reason things take so long is because some (most?) of the development tools are either out of date/abandoned, of poor quality, are time consuming to use, or all of the above.

ooh... that is a bummer...

Generally it depends on the scale and complexity. A mod with a small number of different objects (units, important features, etc) and little new code can be done pretty quickly (few days usually), a mod with the now usual 200+ units and enough lua to reimplement the whole gameplay will take forever. Also depends on the complexity of your objects, if you want pro-level realistic graphics you'll spend weeks on each object. That's with full-time dedication, do it in your spare time beside your day job and making a pro-level 200+ unit mod would take so long by the time you're finished polygons are obsolete.

I would say that I've spent 5,000+ hours on IW (+SWS). Possibly well in excess of that, but it's hard to calculate.

It depends on the level of graphical complexity. Then again, even if you are only spending 2 hours modeling and texturing each unit in a mod the size of BA, that would make 400 hours just for modeling and texturing.

Then theres bos scripting, Lua coding and the other unit files. Depending on the complexity, and your skills, that could be upwards of 100 hours.

Even working on it like a full-time job (40 hours a week) thats 13 weeks. And then theres playtesting etc etc.

For a small mod using simple models/textures, basic scripting and no major Lua trickery (I'm just gonna go ahead and assume you know little or nothing about Lua) expect to spend a month or so (but dont expect it to look great, but it should be playable)

@Zsinj-IW does look amazing, and i heard you went to like graphics design school-or something like that so it's allowed to take a long time

@Pressure-that is a bummer... hmmmm

You didn't read my last paragraph did you?

To make a TA-styled gameplay clone, you could start with t1 vechs and aircraft (plus all the ancillary buildings, mex, solar, wind etc) to get the feel for modeling and texturing. That would only take a few weeks for me to do, the hardest part would be re-imagining the TA units.

Nemo wrote:S44 in its current form has been approximately 3 years in the making.

And of course is based in parts around AATA which started in 2001.

(Ok, it's really more of a successor now with no common content but )