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."

Comments

Re:Hmm

[eddy]

I just hope it isn't your standard RTS that has been defined by warcraft....

RTS is "defined" by Total Annihilation, not *craft or Red Alert or any other game/series.

Hobbyist?

[dmayle]

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?)

Re:Hobbyist?

[cyxxon]

Another point is that I do not entirey see a motivation (I do not, they obviously do) to recreate TA, even make it load TAs resources, and then not release it as open source. I mean, there already is a closed source application that can do that, namely TA itself, and if this new one stays closed source, it will not be any better in terms of "runs on new and different OSs" and all that, because it will do so only at their goodwill, just like the original TA.

All the other open source game engines (freecraft, scummvm, ...) had the goal to make it possible for users of new or different operating systems to play some old games, what is their goal? Just learning to code an engine is fine too, sure thing. Is that it though? Am I missing something here?

Re:Hobbyist?

[hal2814]

Wait just a minute here. You're criticising the Yankspankers for not GPLing his project, but then you're talking about what works as opensource and you mention a company that only GPLs older products? Why aren't Quake III and Doom 3 opensource yet? I thought that game engines "just fit perfectly" into the opensource model. It seems to me that OLDER game engines fit into this model (at least that's iD's take on it). Your argument is very valid, but your heavy mentioning of iD shows a bit of a bias on your part that's really not fair to the Yankspankers. For all we know they might GPL this engine after it gets to be the age of the Quake III engine.