Spring RTS Engine

The way you should see it --- This is basically Total Annihilation remake, but some guys wanted to tweak it very much and produce non-TA stuff, so in the end it became rather flexible

zerver wrote:The way you should see it --- This is basically Total Annihilation remake,

No.

zerver wrote:but some guys wanted to tweak it very much and produce non-TA stuff, so in the end it became rather flexible

NO

smoth wrote:NO

Elaborate please. The original version was a pure TA remake, nothing more. Made by one of my fellow Swedish programmers BTW.

zerver wrote:

smoth wrote:NO

Elaborate please. The original version was a pure TA remake, nothing more.

I like how people demand I repeat an explanation to correct their incorrect assumptions.

No spring started as some weird engine with little dudes and rifles. afterwards they got it to play SOME ta content and starwars. It never was meant to be a ta remake as much as it was just an engine that could run a bunch of ta stuff kinda sorta. They then built on that.

It is not TA 2, never was meant to be.

zerver wrote:Made by one of my fellow Swedish programmers BTW.

Because you are swedish that doesn't make you any more correct.

smoth wrote:I like how people demand I repeat an explanation to correct their incorrect assumptions.

No spring started as some weird engine with little dudes and rifles. afterwards they got it to play SOME ta content and starwars. It never was meant to be a ta remake as much as it was just an engine that could run a bunch of ta stuff kinda sorta. They then built on that.

It is not TA 2, never was meant to be.

You may want to keep things precise but you fail here imo...
Zerver and his "way you should see it" is right. So yes - Spring basically is a TA remake. How so? Simple: We're talking about the engine here - not the content. After the TA Demo Recorder things formed into sort of a remake of the TA engine being able to use all the TA content while being 3D, having a multiplayer lobby & stuff...

The point Spring really got able to do more than just doing something that doesn't exceed the standard TA gameplay rules was the introduction of Lua as a scripting language which imo was one of the most striking influences to make Spring something not connected to TA to the former extent but more of a "real engine for RTS games of any kind"...

Master-Athmos wrote:You may want to keep things precise but you fail here imo...

Nope.

Master-Athmos wrote:Zerver and his "way you should see it" is right. So yes - Spring basically is a TA remake.

Nope, Spring didn't remake any ta shit.

Master-Athmos wrote: How so? Simple: We're talking about the engine here - not the content.

Which means NOT TA.

Master-Athmos wrote: After the TA Demo Recorder things formed into sort of a remake of the TA engine being able to use all the TA content while being 3D, having a multiplayer lobby & stuff...

IIRC the demo recorder and spring are not really related beyond the same group was behind them.

Master-Athmos wrote: The point Spring really got able to do more than just doing something that doesn't exceed the standard TA gameplay rules

Really? I think you have it wrong. Spring started exceeding TA long before lua. MANY THINGS including line and block building were not in TA.

Master-Athmos wrote:was the introduction of Lua as a scripting language which imo was one of the most striking influences to make Spring something not connected to TA to the former extent but more of a "real engine for RTS games of any kind"...

Lua allows us to do a lot but there were a lot of things done NOT for ta emulation. For gundam alone there were several tags including airhover, fireplatform and unit limits. WELL BEFORE LUA. Don't get me wrong, lua lets us do a lot but I think you have a rather forgetful history.

smoth wrote:IIRC the demo recorder and spring are not really related beyond the same group was behind them.

Correct.

(Well, Fnordia once said he may or may not have recycled some cob-related stuff. He couldn't remember when I asked him.)

Unnecessary flamewar is unnecessary.

and IIRC, the SYs specifically said that the goal was to make their own RTS engine, but that support for TA was the middle-step. So it's both, really - something close to a remake of the TA engine that grew to be a general-purpose physics-oriented RTS engine... as it was intended to be.

Either way, at this point, now that there's Lua unit scripting, TA mostly appears as warts rather than core.

No spring started as some weird engine with little dudes and rifles.

What game was that, and where can I get it?

Spring was initially created to to be a Gundam game.

so the way i see it, basically it was a TA remake, but then some guys wanted to tweak it and produce non-TA stuff, so in the end it became rather flexible.

BTW, where is that ancient rifle game before "ta spring" was tossed around, i am interested in seeing the difference in cpu usage.

Wow you guys really did forget. That's interesting. Dig around on 7 yr old TAU posts and you'll find that smoth was right. Spring and TA Demo Recorder were very different things.

The Reason the SY's decided to support TA content was simply that then they had tons of resources to use for their engine instead of having to make all from scratch. Seriously... how do you guys not know this stuff?

smoth wrote:

Master-Athmos wrote:Zerver and his "way you should see it" is right. So yes - Spring basically is a TA remake.

Nope, Spring didn't remake any ta shit.

Right - it didn't redo any TA shit. It has bos/cob as scripts, 3dos as models, fbis/tdfs for the definitions just as adapting all the realted calls and way e.g. weapons work. I don't know what your definition of a remake of the TA engine would look like but that's why imo it's valid to say that Spring in the beginning basically was a TA engine remake...

BTW: If it's basically a correct statement but not a precise one people also should change Spring's pages on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_project

The initial goal was to have the game run the mods and 3rd-party units from Total Annihilation. This goal is now mostly complete, and the project has moved on to including additional features, and serving as a more general RTS engine.

smoth wrote:Really? I think you have it wrong. Spring started exceeding TA long before lua. MANY THINGS including line and block building were not in TA.
[...]
Lua allows us to do a lot but there were a lot of things done NOT for ta emulation. For gundam alone there were several tags including airhover, fireplatform and unit limits. WELL BEFORE LUA. Don't get me wrong, lua lets us do a lot but I think you have a rather forgetful history.

You still were bound to the standard TA gameplay just as I said. Winning conditions or user interface were hard-coded and not really customizable and all the advanced things you e.g. see in KDR's mods and things S1944 uses for their gamplay were impossible (or even your new gundam resource system)...

Master-Athmos wrote:Right - it didn't redo any TA shit. It has bos/cob as scripts, 3dos as models, fbis/tdfs for the definitions just as adapting all the realted calls and way e.g. weapons work.

and s3o is made of unicorn farts.(also before lua btw)

Master-Athmos wrote:I don't know what your definition of a remake of the TA engine would look like but that's why imo it's valid to say that Spring in the beginning basically was a TA engine remake..

It is not valid because when spring first came out the only content was ported TA mods and/or TCs. Spring started with code also specificly designed to run starwars for ta. Meaning that spring was made to run TA mods and starwars. Also shortly after that release I had gundam running in it. You also ignore all the NON-TA mechanics that were added, I am not going to list them.

Master-Athmos wrote:BTW: If it's basically a correct statement but not a precise one people also should change Spring's pages on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_project

The initial goal was to have the game run the mods and 3rd-party units from Total Annihilation. This goal is now mostly complete, and the project has moved on to including additional features, and serving as a more general RTS engine.

Wikipedia is never a cite-able reference in academia. It is no more valid here. Some random person made that page and it is incorrect.

Master-Athmos wrote:You still were bound to the standard TA gameplay just as I said.

What is gameplay if not stats, units and the over arcing design. None of the projects currently in spring have ta gameplay and they didn't have similar gameplay before lua. It may have had some similarities to TA but it also had many similarities to other rts games. It ripped tons of features from supcom, added many other features that never existed in ta and the movement, pathing etc ALL work different. Spring might have allowed ta content to run but it did not mimick ta at all, never has. It was at best to be considered a retelling and not a sequal.

So no, it doesn't have TA gameplay. If you believe that, then you have an exceptionally narrow view of gameplay and all fps and table top games are the exact same game.

Spring is an engine that can run ta content, it has it's own rules for unit movement, it's own mechanics for unit placement, many many features ta never had and does not have a default game. Despite what you may think, there never was a game that was the default for spring. the closest game was XTA which was used as a "look it does stuff" demo piece.

Master-Athmos wrote:Winning conditions or user interface were hard-coded and not really customizable and all the advanced things you e.g. see in KDR's mods and things S1944 uses for their gamplay were impossible (or even your new gundam resource system)...

You do realize gundam is my project right?

you did read the points about the specific engine changes that were made for gundam and starwars?

S44 has some also.

ALL BEFORE LUA.

Well I won't say very much on this now. You actually validate everything that was said and still reject to agree. I guess you just misread the word "basically" here meant for giving a short & rough but still quite accurate explanation. You say yourself that in the beginning Spring was about being able to handle TA stuff (and yes - Star Wars was "just" a TA mod too). If you don't see this making it basically a remake of the TA engine (not the game!) - well then don't...

No one disputes the additions exceeding what OTA was able to do...

So no, it doesn't have TA gameplay. If you believe that, then you have an exceptionally narrow view of gameplay and all fps and table top games are the exact same game.

You just didn't understand me and maybe I should have been more clear. Unit stats and so on aren't really exclusive TA gameplay rules. It's a RTS - you move around your "boxes" which have different looks and stats. Changing some values doesn't change the gameplay rules which is about "boxes" fighting each other with specific abilities...

Try to do a third resource (or like the S1944 and afaik Star Wars system of owning "flags" for resources) without Lua. You can't but are bound to the hardcoded two-resource-system predetermined by the TA gameplay rules. Try not to have a single unit which spawns at the start but something different (like the deployment mode in e.g. CA) without Lua. You can't but are bound to the TA gameplay rule of one unit spawning at game start. Try to do an "uncloaking tower" which uncloaks units in a certain area (like in NOTA) without Lua. You can't but are bound to the TA way of how uncloaking worked and i.e. having a unit near it. Try to make a unique interface without Lua. You can't but are bound to a system next to identical to what TA had with some limited controls of tweaking something (EDIT: Okay - this is not relevant for gameplay rules). Just to give some examples...

Together with all the small widgets & gadgets giving some cool options and abilities this is why imo Lua probably was what gave Spring the biggest leap ahead not just on the gameplay rules side but also on all the other things like controls, interface and even rendering. You might be of a different opinion but that's okay...

Master-Athmos wrote: You just didn't understand me and maybe I should have been more clear. Unit stats and so on aren't really exclusive TA gameplay rules. It's a RTS - you move around your "boxes" which have different looks and stats. Changing some values doesn't change the gameplay rules which is about "boxes" fighting each other with specific abilities...

So BA and AA are the same game and starwars and gundam were just a ta skin. I think you are incorrect.

Master-Athmos wrote:Try to do a third resource (or like the S1944 and afaik Star Wars system of owning "flags" for resources) without Lua.

what like: /me makes patch to engine allows extra resources stops caring.

that is a paper thin argument.

Master-Athmos wrote:You can't but are bound to the hardcoded two-resource-system predetermined by the TA gameplay rules.

Gundam used to use a system where by factories consumed a specific amount of resources per second in each factory. So in order to support a factory, you knew the resources needed. That is very different from TA. Also there was not con assist on factories. Those are two major distinctions.

Master-Athmos wrote:Try not to have a single unit which spawns at the start but something different (like the deployment mode in e.g. CA) without Lua.

what like: /me makes patch to engine ....

Master-Athmos wrote: You can't but are bound to the TA gameplay rule of one unit spawning at game start. Try to do an "uncloaking tower" which uncloaks units in a certain area (like in NOTA) without Lua.

what like: /me makes patch to engine ....

Master-Athmos wrote:Try to make a unique interface without Lua. You can't but are bound to a system next to identical to what TA had with some limited controls of tweaking something (EDIT: Okay - this is not relevant for gameplay rules). Just to give some examples..

what like: /me makes patch to engine .... ui is part of gameplay and gundam in TA had it's own UI... funny how the engine didn't support that...

Master-Athmos wrote:Together with all the small widgets & gadgets giving some cool options and abilities this is why imo Lua probably was what gave Spring the biggest leap ahead not just on the gameplay rules side but also on all the other things like controls, interface and even rendering. You might be of a different opinion but that's okay...

Have you seen gundam? Seriously?

there are tons of TA unit tags that are also not supported Maneuver leash length being one of them.

saying spring is basically TA is like saying a dog is a human because they share mammalian characteristics.

I suggest you sleep on this and read the topic again tomorrow as you understood things wrong and I don't think explaining it again will make you see what you got wrong...

God damn children.

The oldest records of Spring have it as a robot battling game, where the robots are made of of springs and shit or something like that.

Spring was a custom hobbyist engine which surpassed the constraints of the OTA engine in design, but derived from it. This does not make it a remake, if it did, every commercial RTS engine from 1998 to 2005 was a Starcraft remake. It had OTA content ported to it early on due to the accessibility of said content and the background of the development team. This provided a mass of reliable users at the cost of radical growth, and has been holding the engine back pretty much ever since. Thread over.