Spring RTS Engine

Hi.

I'm one of those people who wanted to make a game using RTS engine back in 2018, but got scared and ran away before a single code is written or something. 3 years and many unrelated cancelled projects later, I decided to look back at this place.

Here's what I wonder: let's assume I were to say "ok, let's give it another chance" and make a game again, would you recommend Spring RTS engine as the foundation, or should I look elsewhere? I'm not planning to make this the "BEST NEW GAME 2021", if anything it's most likely just going to be a personal playground for me, but even then I want to make sure that I'm choosing the right engine that doesn't give me a headache or so.

For context: months ago, I spent time making models and textures and everything in between for the now-canceled (unsurprisingly) Zero Hour mod, and while the project was nowhere near done, I learned a bit of experience regarding how the engine of that game works, and the art style needed to make visuals for the mod. I'm on the fence between trying to dip my toes here again, and going back to a more familiar sage engine that while familiar, has its own constraints and weird bugs that even the veterans of the community can't figure it out.

I'm not seeing a question! Are you saying you want to help with the spring project (if so in what capacity?) or do you have questions about how it's implemented etc etc?

I'm mostly wondering of its capability compared to say, other engines, and the community behind it, if I ever need help and such (like discord server, where to ask for help, any given tutorials).

My involvement is mostly server/infra for one of the games but I've messaged one of the people working on the engine itself who can speak far more authoritatively than myself on the technical questions.

Three of the discords that may most interest you are:
https://discord.gg/8yaP8xne - Official spring engine discord
https://discord.gg/tb9ZwDgR - BAR, the game I'm most involved in
https://discord.gg/9jvzPSPs - ZeroK, one of the more popular spring games, they're on Steam!

I mostly played many springrts based games and followed mods/games development and did some proof of concept engine modification (to have flowing water), and my opinion is that considering how much effort is required to make a game best approach is to look for "the most similar game out there" and start by modifying that one.

I am not familiar with SAGE game engine, but the list of games based on springrts can be found at: https://springrts.com/wiki/Games . Is there something that is "alike" (in a broad sense) to what you want? Then maybe springrts is the engine for you.

On the feature set, I think the most important aspect of springrts is that it actually simulates physics and collisions quite realistically (plus things like gravity, impulse, line of sight, etc.). Watch-out though that you can not have tunnels/bridges. Does your game need/benefit from that? You are the only one that can decide.