Hello everybody... Been silent for too long and so I want to clear some stuff up.
I just want to know how you plan on balancing a 2-race RTS where one race is almost exclusively ranged combat, and the other almost exclusively melee. A large part of Tremulous is the environment... have you considered how you're going to utilize dim lighting, hallways, and WALLWALK?
Do all human units have to make a pit stop at the armory structure before they can be of any use, and will there be binds, or will you have to go through a godforsaken menu every time? Do humans not have any radar/minimap at all until they've killed a sufficient number of aliens? Will you still have a 100bp cap? Will your aliens hop around? How accurate will the various units be? Can one human with a massdriver single-handedly win the game? Can alien structures be built on the walls and ceiling? How vulnerable will the reactor be to base-hopping? WILL THERE BE A HOVEL?!!
Obviously we will have to tweak the races to make them play better as an RTS so it has fun, exciting, gameplay; not just an FPS viewed from above! By this we are adding a few more aliens and making them very cheap. Think of aliens as the Russian race from Age of Empires 3: cheap units that can be trained en masse and favour hit and run, ambush tactics. Of course there will be really big alien units as well for those who have the dedication to get there like Princes, Tyrants and (although not as combat orientated but can convert into new Overminds) Queens. Aliens we are planning to have a stacked training queue like in AoE3. Humans will be trained in squads like in Dawn of War and to unlock new squads you will have to research their weapons and armour (e.g. you have to research a Shotgun before you can train shotgun wielding infantry.) Humans spawn with all their weapons as per the squad (e.g. if you are an aerial unit you spawn with jetpacks) and at the moment we are planning to not have the armoury required for getting more ammo. Because of the large combination of weapons in Trem, there will be a large variety of squads you can train. Also, thee are tanks and aircraft to make it more like a standard RTS. So aliens are more rush/ambush than in Trem and humans a lot more squad orientated like the Space Marines in DoW than their counterparts in Trem that can solo things... Build points are a resource so can be harvested from the environment and the reactor provides a trickle of resources. There for it is more like a traditional RTS wood resource. I'm afraid I cannot commit to any HUD at the time seeing as though we are still in the resource and asset design phase and are slowly working on he basic game engine; no fancy stuff yet but I assure you we will try to cram as many features into it as a commercial RTS.
Just bear in mind that when your RTS ends up being complete shit, like it inevitably will, you'll have a vast international community pissing all over you. Please give me your e-mail address now, I want to have plenty of time to prepare my hate-mail for the release date.
I find your lack of faith disturbing, young paduan.
I have some experience with the spring engine. What I won't have till start of next year is much time - but I'll be sure to follow this 
!
Question (though I realise you probably already set on the engine decision): What sort of scale are you thinking of - ie do you want to keep the size of the game similiar to Tremulous, with maybe 30 - 60 units a side, or larger. I'm asking because my feeling is that the Spring engine lends itself well to large/epic scale games, but only so-so for more limi ted ones. Hmm, I think the impression also has to do with the size you want to represent... I could be mistaken though.
I would have thought Glest might be your better bet, to be honest, but then, I have no idea how much flexibility that has on the Engine side.
Well, see you round in any case 
!
Sean
P.S. Spring does not yet support Skeletal animation - probably quite a drawback for any game that want's Organic movement (no idea what Glest does).
You are correct; we are aiming for very large games limited only by your skill and by your CPU. Spring supports tens of thousands of units and we want that sort of capabilities open to those who really love large armies (like me; I can't stand unit caps and only in Spring can I let my inner masser come out in earnest)! And as with you, I could not find out the sort of stuff Glest had to offer; there was no real "Features" section on the webpage. And for the skeletal animation, as far as I know Spring has 3rd party options to allow it to support skeletal animation and official support is being developed right now. This means that it should be out by the time we are ready. If not, 3rd party extras will serve just as well. I like skeletal animation because of inverse kinetics and easy integration with a physics engine; something I think would really benefit a Trem RTS. Also, Spring has a large-ish community so it will be fairly easy to ge the odd bits of support when needed.
Attack1, tell him to join forces with Blood_god and his team =]
We are always looking for help with such a large undertaking.
