Spring RTS Engine

I originally titled this as "Anyone interested in bringing a newbie on?" but I realized at that point that I'd be more of a burden than any actual help. This might be more of a plea or a cry for help if anything.

A little background on myself, I'm 32 and a massive fan of the golden age of RTS, AOE, Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, Starcraft, the originals. I have a career in shipbuilding and machinery, as you can expect, this doesn't really transfer to any game development. The only thing this does help me with is the fact that I am used to tackling big projects, and I'm aware that this is going to take me years to succeed. I used to mess around with scripting and HTML, swapping assets out, and basic mudding back in the day, and Spring kind of has that feel to it - swapping files for others, learning LUA and editing scripts.

I decided I was going to try game design about four months ago during my off time, and I originally chose Unity because it's a 'friendly' developer. Unity is great and there are a lot of great things about the engine, however it still feels very limiting. The size and scale that I want has always fit better with SpringRTS, however the resources for learning spring are very limited. Peer to peer has often been the best way I've learned my trade, and if there's anyone that wouldn't mind letting a novice leech off their experience, it would be greatly appreciated.

I always try to do something every day after work, whether it's 3d modeling, learning simple C, or writing in the design document.

The best way to learn SpringRTS is to hang out in the Discord servers of games using the engine. The wiki is extremely useful, but not nearly as much as seeing the engine put to use in a game.

the games are 99% lua, so anyone can make a useful lua widget and have it added into the game if people like it

also if you make your own game you will end up making widgets too, so that could be a possible place to start

Instead of starting from scratch, try modding an existing game. I recommend checking the structure of a spring game package on the wiki, here and downloading and trying various games.

You can unzip .sd7 or .sdz game packages with 7zip and put the contents on a <yourGame>.sdd directory within your .../spring/games directory, edit the game name and version within the modinfo.lua file and then restart your lobby client : it should show up in the lobby clients as a separate game to choose.

Then you can learn by tinkering with the files within and using the wiki.

Peer to peer has often been the best way I've learned my trade, and if there's anyone that wouldn't mind letting a novice leech off their experience, it would be greatly appreciated.

Most of us leech off each other's experiences passively by reusing modules which are often self-contained or have few dependencies, namely the lua widgets and gadgets.

Even in games which may have copyright restrictions, the widgets and gadgets often come with their own licenses, usually GPL or PD, so they can be freely modified/reused.