Rich: I’m speaking with Matthias Ableitner, who is a developer on the Spring RTS Engine.

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Rich: Thanks so much for speaking with me. Could you tell us what your project is?

Matthias: It’s hard to say. It’s not a single project, it consists of many small projects. We have some game developers, we have some engine developers. There’s also some infrastructure, like a download site where game developers or map developers can upload their stuff and the lobby client can automatically download the files. Players can use the lobby to directly connect to the lobby server, and the client can automatically catch these files that the game developer made.

Our project tries to make a really good platform for strategy games.

Rich: This is a framework – an engine for building games on top of. Is that correct?

Matthias: Yeah, that’s correct.

Rich: What games are currently available on this platform?

Matthias: There are about ten well-maintained games. It’s difficult to say, as there are also many modifications of those games. On the biggest download page there are many 50 games, but some of them are unplayable.

Rich: How long have you been working on this project?

Matthias: I joined the project in 2010, and I’m the newest developer. I had contact with the game developers, and I wrote some stuff to the content platform – to Spring files. So I know many of the people who made the games, too. It’s a very nice and big community.

Rich: When someone simply plays a game it’s not obvious to them the complexity of what’s behind that – the game server, the game engine, all of the different parts that go together for that. As someone that just plays the game, it’s amazing to see all the layers of complexity that are behind it. The Spring RTS project itself is the game engine, is that correct? And the games themselves are available elsewhere. Am I understanding that correctly?

Matthias: If you want to be exact, Spring is the engine only. Spring was first a game called T. A. Spring.

Rich: What things are in the future for the project. What are you goals?

Matthias: Our current biggest goal is to make it easier to use. We have some small improvements. The biggest one on Windows, but it’s difficult to make it easy to use on Linux, because the engine has to be exactly the same version if you want to play online. We currently make many updates, and if want to make an update on Ubuntu, for example, first a package has to be built, and this takes time, and it’s hard to make it automatic for each platform.

Rich: If someone were interested in becoming part of your project, what could they do? What sort of skills would they need?

Matthias: It depends on what he wants to do. He can make a game, or he can help with the engine.

Some people wrote an AI for an exam, or for University.

We really need help in the engine currently, I think, but it’s very hard to get close to it. It’s very complex. We have about 300k lines of code. That’s not a few, so it’s not so easy to handle and understand.

Rich: I’ve noticed over the last few months that there are many different game engines on SourceForge. What distinguishes one game engine from another? Is it the type of game?

Matthias: Yes, there are many different engines. Spring is one of the few engines that works in sync. Floating operations are on calculated the same on all platforms. This means that only the commands of players are transferred over the network. This allows us to have many, many units on a game. Many other engines only transfer a few of the game states. There’s a game server and the game server sends position of units directly, and our engine transfers only the commands a player makes. This allows us to have many more units on a map, or on an online game. That’s a big difference. This is why it’s an RTS engine.

Rich: What do you in particular really like about working on this project?

Matthias: I enjoy that when I make something new, I can be sure to get some feedback. Often it’s not positive, but it’s awesome how much feedback you get. Sometimes it’s too much, but it’s really nice.

What I really like about the project is that it’s so easy to try out new things, for game makers. You can grab some already-written script and modify it, and easily make your own game with that. Or modify an existing game. It’s really nice. As we have a full infrastructure for that, game makers can focus on the things they want to make. I think that’s something really special.

Rich: Thank you very much for speaking with me.

Matthias: Thank you.