Spring RTS Engine

First of all, my apologies if this topic has already been covered elsewhere, I've not been pouring over the messageboards.

I've played AOE 1,2,3. Dawn of War +exp, Earth2140+2150, Rise of Nations, Starcraft, Battle for middle earth, Empire Earth and dozens of other RTSes and of course OTA, and none of them come close to Spring.

The problem is, I found out about spring by browsing thru some obscure open source archive. Before that, I'd never ever heard of it, and thought that the best open source could do for gaming was Nexuiz :S
Spring seems to me fairly obscure, unless you have already heard of it.

Now with the new update, (my compliments to the devs) and spring looking better than ever, I was wondering if it's time for some kind of campaign by us non-coders to spread spring (perhaps like spreadfirefox)?

To that end, I also had a few more specific questions:

1) Does the spring community want massive amounts of attention in the first place?

2) Is spring up to the point were you are satisfied that it's not going to have any legal concerns with copywrite when it *really* takes off?

3) Is the learning curve for noobs too steep, and therefore would put off many potential players?

I'm not going to touch number one and two. But, in my opinion three is a definite no (as in: learning curve is not too steep). Newbies can usually find other newbies to play with. And the more people that come will increase the amount of newb games. Besides most people who have experience with other RTS games will catch on to spring very quickly. Espescially since the GUI is the best its ever been in this new version.

I believe spring still includes ota content, so the copyright issue is not yet resolved. However, Nanoblobs is competely copyright free, and Expand and Exterminate is nearing that point. Hopefully, it will soon be possible to have both Nanoblobs and E&E included in the installer and the ota content can be removed.

I would actually say that the learning curve can be preventatively steep. Not just in the mods that people play, as Noize says, there are a reasonable amount of other noobs around for them to learn with; but more in the 'pick up and play' nature of Spring.

Spring, being an open source hobby, can be very "rough around the edges", which can make it quite difficult to get up and running. That doesn't just mean open, but getting into a game and having fun. It's easy enough to work out if you stick at it, but for the gamer that gives it a cursory glance, if they can't get it working straight away with no hurdles, they're probably going to dismiss it. I have heard such complaints from several people - "It didn't seem to be worth the effort and time."

When I say 'getting a game up', I don't necessarily mean multiplayer either. Most people, when they grab a new game, are either going to look for a tutorial, or jump into a single-player set on easy to work things out. The first is impossible, and the second is not particularly straight forward (again, easy to work out if you're committed, but not worth the effort if you're just having a curious peruse).

Spring now has a distribution that is entirely copy write free. However most users who play download the game for it's TA content anyways, so minus the TA content we aren't anywhere near as popular as we are currently.

desertlynx wrote:... thought that the best open source could do for gaming was Nexuiz :S
...

There is better, actually. Check Glest, OpenArena, Battle for Wesnoth. http://www.Happypenguin.org .

desertlynx wrote:...
1) Does the spring community want massive amounts of attention in the first place?
...

I think it still does. As a general. Bringing more players, more mod makers, more people interested in helping development, etc.
With some care to not get things over the top (like a suden break down in the capacity of the servers).
It has been discussed many times the possibility of better promotion of Spring but things kept beeing delayed until Spring is «free» and fully deployable in Linux destributions.

desertlynx wrote:...
2) Is spring up to the point were you are satisfied that it's not going to have any legal concerns with copywrite when it *really* takes off?
...

Not yet. Close but not yet.

desertlynx wrote:...
3) Is the learning curve for noobs too steep, and therefore would put off many potential players?

I would say yes and a minor no. To the most part, it is too steep for people who haven't played the original TA.
The economical system is one of the hardest to adapt in any RTS i've played (and no, having a gazilion of diferent resource types is not harder, resource income/expenditure per second is the hardest). The variety of unit types and strategies, as well as the scale of battle (cannons firing many screens across) is hard to addapt to, the managment system has *alot* to be learnt (queuing orders with shift, de-queuing them, making rows of buildings, etc, etc, etc).

At least, not without some good tutorial and/or video.

I guess that any advertising of Spring has to begin before supcom goes out. Any and all potential newbies will pick it up instead, so if you want to widen the community, now is the time.

desertlynx wrote:...

Now with the new update, (my compliments to the devs) and spring looking better than ever, I was wondering if it's time for some kind of campaign by us non-coders to spread spring (perhaps like spreadfirefox)?

To that end, I also had a few more specific questions:

1) Does the spring community want massive amounts of attention in the first place?

2) Is spring up to the point were you are satisfied that it's not going to have any legal concerns with copywrite when it *really* takes off?

3) Is the learning curve for noobs too steep, and therefore would put off many potential players?

Thanks for the compliment, can't speak for others but nice to hear you like the new release. I do think we could use a spreadspring campaign, if you google for "taspring.clan-sy.com 0.73b1" you get just a few hits.

I can answer 1 & 2, we like to have growth but in a steady way, I (we) do this for fun and I have also other things to attend to. For question two, it's copyright and yes it's quite close. NanboBlobs is great open content, so that's done. To complete the current "near term" roadmap we still need a fully working Linux lobby and have win-lin multiplayer work. With that completed the idea is to move on to more drastic redesign of the engine.
But to bring it back on topic, I have two domains that can be used to promote Spring. Once Sprng is fully open source I will use them, It's just that I don't like people to break copyright law with a domain that is registered on my name.

As we are OS and non-commercial - we could Advertise (with one Big Picture for example in other Boards) - and ask those people there to place the Link in other Boards theyknow. Its like Mouth to Mouth propaganda, but with a Postcard Picture... cheap, but fast.. youtube is nice, but reaches way to many not-interested Peoplz...

A lot of other boards allow signatures with banners.. I personally love grass root promotions.

Is there no Board were Game Forum Mods hang around? Would be best to ask them - that Way you get maximus spread with just one Request...

I would say wait until the next version, .73b2 (guess). There are some significant bugs that have been introduced in this most recent version which will likely be fixed before too too long.

Not that it isn't still probably one of the best open-source game projects, just if we could get it a little more bug-free before people form their first opinion, it would be in the project's best interest IMO.

I worry that if it gets big, infogrames will sue. Has anyone ever contacted thier legal department to see about releasing ota content (not engine) into the public domain?

heh, if Spring gets packaged with Nanoblobs and/or Expand & Exterminate once it is finished being remade into something completely original, what can happen? the worst that could happen at that point is that AA and XTA would get a Cease & Desist order, right? Not much to worry about, imo.

Even if Spring got a C&D as a whole it can still be distributed without the TA stuff. After all Atari only controls the TA material, not the engine or anything added by the users.

With the new LUA scripting system in developement, Spring has capability for single player missions, which could include tutorials for newbies.
Not to mention single player missions.

The learning curve in this game is very high. You've got TA controls, plus TA Demo Recorder Controls, plus Spring controls. There are a ton of extra shortcut keys and functions. You've got three viewing modes: normal, metal and movement. 4 camera angles (3 of which are useless, and the other is more useful when the pitch is changed with the scroll wheel - or so I discovered after 4 months of play).

There are so many units in Absolute Annihilation I still haven't properly familiarised myself with all their uses. I often forget what units are Arm and what ones are Core. Hell, I don't think Cadyr knows what many of them are for.

Total Annihilation strategy evolved for years. Completely new approaches were being formulated and the gameplay changed unrecognisibly from year to year. And that was when the actual balance of the game wasn't changing from month to month.

If you wanted more newbies you'd need a more streamlined interface and flagship mod. But hey, I think we've got enough already. When I log in there's usually 150 people. About the same as Total Annihilation at its peak. Maybe you could have 1500 like Age of Empires, but I don't think you necessarily get a better play experience or community with those kinds of numbers.

Molloy wrote:You've got three viewing modes: normal, metal and movement.

and heightmap. And LoS.

Molloy wrote:4 camera angles (3 of which are useless, and the other is more useful when the pitch is changed with the scroll wheel - or so I discovered after 4 months of play).

And how, exactly, are they useless?

because you can see the Kbots and there really crappy designs when you look at them on a horizontal plane

(Seriously, those things need many more polies....)

Yeah...I'm probably going to do some remodelling for xta eventually, for at least the really terrible units, like the sniper.