Recoil (RTS engine)

The live continuation of Spring, maintained by the Beyond All Reason team. Its README says what it is without ceremony: "Recoil is a fork and continuation of an RTS engine version 105.0", linking to github.com/spring/spring. C++, GPL (v2/v3), 654★ / pushed the day this page was written. Found during the 2026-08-15 freshness check, when the Spring page's claim of an "active project" failed re-verification.

Why the fork is the interesting object

Spring's own repository has not been pushed since 2024-03-31 while Recoil ships continuously, so the RTS corner of this wiki was pointing at the wrong artifact for two months. The names have already merged in practice: Zero-K — one of the three titles spring-rts lists — describes itself as "running on the Spring/Recoil engine", treating the pair as one platform with two names.

The star counts say something about who a genre engine serves. Recoil has 654★ against Spring's 3,963★, and the fork is the one under active development. For a general-purpose engine that gap would read as failure; here it reads as a content-package ecosystem where the engine's users are a handful of game teams rather than thousands of individual developers. Beyond All Reason and Zero-K each out-star the engine they run on (823★ for Zero-K alone). Compare openage at ~14.4k★, which is a reimplementation of a beloved commercial title and draws attention accordingly — the two RTS engines in this spoke are popular for opposite reasons.

What carried across the fork

Both axes spring-rts introduced survive intact: genre specialization (RTS-only, built for large-scale unit counts and deterministic multiplayer simulation) and copyleft licensing (GPL, against the permissive MIT/Apache end of godot-engine and o3de). A GPL engine forking to a new maintainer and keeping the licence is the copyleft axis doing its job — the continuation could not have closed the source even if the new team had wanted to.

Related

spring-rts · openage · godot-engine · o3de · love2d · synthesis