Games

Games using the Spring Engine

Introduction

Spring has many different games and mods available to play. Spring is simply the platform for these games to be built upon, and not a game per se. This is a common misconception. Spring was originally built to support the game Total Annihilation in 3D, but now it has grown far beyond that into a very good general RTS game engine.

Games, Mods, what's the difference?

The reason for the distinction between Games and Mods are because Games are classified as works that were started from the ground up and contain no content legally binding to any other person or publisher.

The term "mod" with regards to the Spring Engine is generally applied to games which use the content from Total Annihilation (© 1997 Cavedog Entertainment). Regardless of how different they may be, the fact that the content legality is called into question and therefore cannot be considered Games that stand upon their own two feet.

The question of the legality of Total Annihilation intellectual property (IP) has plagued the Spring community for quite some time. At the moment we are not even sure of who owns the Total Annihilation IP, as Atari (parent company of Cavedog Entertainment and publisher of TA) denies knowledge of even owning the content/trademark. As a result, the use of this content is questionable at best. It is a rather safe bet that Atari does not care about some of the mods for Spring using the Total Annihilation content, but because of the lack of clear definition, we do not refer to them as "Games" per se.

Installing Games and Mods in Spring

The files for these content packages generally go in the spring\mods directory of your spring install. Some of the games have automatically updating installers, and some of them simply provide links to the packages which must be installed manually. Below is a list of some of the most popular games and mods developed for Spring, separated accordingly.

Games and Mods available to play

Below is a short list of the most popular and active mods to download. For a more detailed look at each game or mod, either go to their page link on the list below, or go to this page here for a summary of all games and mods, including ones not in active development.

Games

• P.U.R.E.
• Gundam RTS
• Star Wars: Imperial Winter
• Evolution RTS
• Spring: 1944
• Kernel Panic
• Under Pressure
• Expand and Exterminate

Mods

• XTA (The Original Public Mod released with first versions of Spring)
• Balanced Annihilation
• Complete Annihilation (currently working towards being TA-IP free and thus an original work)
• Not Original Total Annihilation (Usually abbreviated to NOTA)
• Supreme Annihilation
• Maximum Annihilation

Game and Mod development

Interested in having a go at making a game or mod? Feel free to do so. For help, go to our development pages to check out information on the formatting specification for games and mods, as well as information on creating units, making scripts in Lua, and much more.