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Hobbyist 'Spring' RTS Engine Takes Shape
Dragon45 writes "Some interesting developments have just occurred on the hobbyist RTS game engine scene. The Swedish Yankspankers, long known within the Total Annihilation community for their professional-caliber modifications and add-ons, have released the first screenshots and videos of Spring, a 3D RTS engine under development (and under wraps) for quite some time. It works. Apparently, real-time terrain deformation (Before|After) and network play are already working. Spring HQ has more information, and needless to say, this one is definitely worth a look." The official FAQ explains: "We aim to get an early test release out quite soon (within a month or so)", and the 'About' page explains that, as an initial starting point: "TA Spring reads the [Total Annihilation data] formats directly without conversions needed."
if I played video games. I'm just programming/script-writing nerd, not the other kind.
-- There is no spoon. Only fork.
Sounds cool, and the screenshots look awsome, I just hope it isn't your standard RTS that has been defined by warcraft.... I'm gonna keep an eye on this one though, looks promising..... Oh, and it says that they haven't decided wether or not to go opensource, so maybe a little poliet encouragement from /.'ers would help? ;) It would be nice to have it OSS tho', I don't think there are any other opensource RTS's, and there is a large untapped market for MMORTS games like Mankind (the company would just have to run it better than Mankind was)
And hobbyist means what, exactly? Free? Open? If it hits big it'll be turned into a commercial project? The last is the one I suspect. I hate to be a zealot, but I'd be more impressed if it were open-source. I've switched to Linux for 90% of the work that I do (I work on cross-platform software development, so I occasionally have to work on windows and OS X.) As such, I only get really excited when I see exciting new developments or Linux gaming.
To counter-balance my curmudgeonly opinions, this is probably a very good thing in the eyes of fledgeling game developers, as it shows there are paths into gaming other than the standard, so I say bravo ti the team, and (hint, hint) when are we gonna see a Linux port? (Even if it's not open source?)
Hey! Isn't the first three screenshots using the El Alamein height map and texture map from BF1942? That's the German base looking north east, is it not?
Actually I've used these texture/heightmaps for testing purposes as well. At first I thought perhaps they'd just done a photoshop job using BF1942 engine; but it looks like it's for real. Excellent! I loved TA; especially when we had a four player game lasting several hours; it started with a one hour base building/no attack period (no Krogoth at the time, fortunately).
Is it just me, or are they using the BF1942 map El Alamein for the three battle screenshots?
They are not sure if it will be open source. If they open sources it right now, with the slash-dot interest, then they may have a linux client quite soon.
Closed development - for a free game? I am not sure why they are doing this... it seems the most of thier work has been spent loading TA models and information... again, something I find a little bemusing. Of course, if it means all the models and gfx created in mods for TA will work in this, then that sounds good.
I must say thier terrain deformation looks spiffing.
Good luck to them! Oh, I am not 'hardcore' RTS anywho...
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
WC3 was not particularly innovative IMHO, even in the graphics department. Ground Control was waaay prettier and had better controls etc.
Even after playing WC3 I still return to Total Annihilation and Red Alert 2, surely two of the very best RTS games. I wish developers would realise that it is the gameplay and character of a RTS game that is crucial, not the pandering to D&D nerds with 'super' characters or allowing/forcing you to view the action from about 2 feet off the ground.
If I could change one thing about current RTS games, it would be to let me see the action from the same altitude as Total Annihilation running at 1280x1024... I want command and control, dammit, not a nice view of my soldiers faces as they get slaughtered because I am not zoomed out enough to see attacks coming. C&C Generals and WC3 were both particularly guilty of this - in Generals you can barely fit 3 buildings in one screen. In TA I could fit dozens of buildings in a screen and still know wtf was going on.
Read Pynchon.
Exactly.
I heard rumors the Palito team is going to re-activate their Free TA-inspired (not clone) project soon...
If at all possible, they should run the game engine from TA with the new, 3D interface over the top. I realise this may not be possible, but it should be possible to emulate it with a very high degree of precision, because every single thing in TA was logically structured. For example, any unit could guard any other object in the game. If I set unit A to guard unit B, and B to guard C, the game could handle this with ease.
Furthermore, the use of actual ballistics for the guns was very cool - your units had to move their weapons, aim, and fire at an angle that would reach the destination. If there were obstacles in the way, the shots would fly across the map and smash into the hills around the target structure. And, as you would expect, the further away something was, the harder it got to hit.
If they can just take the game and give it 3D terrain, DirectX or OpenGL support, updated (but not redesigned) models and effects and modern multiplayer, I'll be in heaven. So will anyone else who likes RTS for the sake of playing.
In the mean time, if you have been into RTS games for a relatively short period of time, I urge you to go and get hold of Total Annihilation, Red Alert 1 and Red Alert 2. You don't know what you're missing!
Read Pynchon.
What am I going to need to run this? 4 Cray supercomputers?
I do belive this is a Krogoth Experimental Assault Kbot.
Ah, memories...
I remember the halcyon days of my youth, stomping across the countryside, totally annihilating things in this baby. I never thought I see her again, but there she is in all her OpenGL glory!
Read Pynchon.
Unfortunately when you get the dedicated fanboys in there doing the news for you, you miss some of the bigger picture. The TA community is much larger, and much more alive than the PlanetAnnihilation site would leave you to believe. (Why the last 3-5 topics there have all been about how that site is practically dead... and the webmaster there can't decide if he's coming or going.)
Just in case you didn't know about the "active" community, these are better places to visit:
http://tadesigners.com/
http://tauniverse.com/
And then there is always IRC for a potential game (newbies will be utterly whipped) on www.tauniverse.com:6667
It started back in Team Fortress Classic
A similar war game Boson is open source, playable, though not completely done.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I still don't see why everyone thinks WC is some kind of RTS benchmark. Don't get me wrong. It is fun, but limited. Warlords Battlecry is a superior fantasy RTS. Check out the latest release here. Believe me, if you give it a try you won't go back to WC.
I just hope this team can "pull it off".
The screenshots are nice; and i'm looking forward to try this one.
On other topic; am i the only one who considers Dune 2 the best RTS ever?
TA really has very little in common with Blizzard and Westwood/EA's RTS output.
Now Herzog Zwei (which predated Dune 2) and Z. Those are valid comparisons. They both share TA's agressive, freeform gameplay.
It seems unimportant to me wether the game is open source. What I care about is that it's good and does TA justice.
The Yankspankers have been the cornerstone of the community for years and I wouldn't bat an eyelid if they decided to sell the game anyway. There have been a thousand TA2 project announcements. Lots of talk and no action. The SY's get the work done and sidestep the hype. That's a rare and wonderful thing.
I really liked Dune II (Amiga). The thing that bothered me the most with the following CnC series was the crawling guys and 'balanced' units. I prefer games being balanced with physics and not arbitrary modifiers that try to mimic physics.
Herzog Zwei (Genesis/MegaDrive) is often mentioned as the first RTS game, and it's quite fun aswell.
TA is definately my favourite though! I mostly play it at high resolution, a 500 unit limit, 10 players on a metal map. Unfortunately the unit pathfinding gets a little jammed with that many units (Dark Reign 1 did the same).
As for the 3D engine in the article, I think it would be interesting if they used slope, altitude, and other map data to decide what texture is used. where. Craters should be dirt. Slopes that go into the water should not be grass, but beach or cliff depending on the angle. It would be interesting with several heightmaps on top of each other, forming geological layers that are used for the deformation stuff.
I'm definitely not feeling the graphics. The content they're loading is old and sad, and the terrain engine isn't using any of the techniques that really make terrain look sweet.
Has anyone taken a look at upcoming RTS games such as Dawn of War, or even just terrain engine demos, to see where the graphics are going? Props to the team, but in all seriousness the graphic engine isn't anything to lose your mind over.
The engine and content are indeed quite primitive looking. There's a version of the Spring engine that'll run prerecorded demos of TA multiplayer games and it runs beautifully on a P2 350 with 128mb RAM and a crap 3d card. And this is with a thousand units shuffling about.
Terrangen maps look a hell of alot better than that BF1942 example does. And we'd need to get people to remodel the units. Those are just placeholder ones until they get modders generating content.
Dawn of War is a game concerning squad tactics. We're talking 50 units at most. TA needs to support upwards of 2000.