Author

This game was built and is maintained by

raaar / Rui Gusmão (Portugal)

Metal Factions relies on the great features of the SpringRTS open source game engine and its Recoil fork and also on other open source software from the community that grew around it. It's work done by many people and shared across several games:
  • Multiplayer lobby clients, server and battle room hosts
  • Content sharing system
  • Maps, UI widgets and other scripts


  
Context

I've played many RTS games since the early 1990s, some of them online, most notably Blizzard's Starcraft, Warcraft 3 and their sequels and Cavedog's Total Annihilation. Often I'd play around with the game editors and make custom maps and modifications. At some point I had made lots of custom units for Total Annihilation and played on LAN with friends.

Eventually I found the SpringRTS community.

Since 2011, I've been discretely building CLAW and SPHERE factions on a game called TA Factions, which built upon XTA (itself a conversion of the old Total Annihilation game to the Spring engine). In 2014, I decided to move away from TA intellectual property and make a more serious attempt at an original game with great gameplay and acceptable graphics. I changed the name to Metal Factions and replaced the TA factions with AVEN and GEAR, remade most of the animations, added new units and made lots of other improvements.

I also made a game-specific LUA AI (MFAI) and an algorithm to automatically set costs for units based on their attributes. This is to try and balance the game first without relying so much on community feedback. For this reason, prices of many units can change slightly from one version to the next.
Copyright

This started as a TA mod. It's moving away from TA IP but it's not there yet. Still has some textures and many of the TA sounds.

The license for original content and artwork is CC-BY-ND, so other game devs are not allowed to make mods of this game or add the units to other games.

Unit scripts, lua widgets and gadgets, including MFAI have their own licences though, which is usually "Public Domain" (PD - the default) and GPL for some, so other game devs can use them for their own purposes.

(check LICENSE.txt inside the game package for more information)

The game source is available on github.