They already have an engine. And art, and a game. You can go download it. This is money to make it better. (Don't let that fool you though, what they have now is very impressive. I'm pretty sure those are actual screenshots.)

http://play0ad.com/

SpringRTS has an engine, and art. There are multiple games on the SpringRTS engine that don't use poached Total Annihilation content - sadly, only one of them has a real playerbase (Zero-K).

The engine launched back in '06 and has changed developers a bunch of times, which means the code is heavily rotted and it needs a lot of love. It has legacy issues and tooling issues out the wazoo, so it really needs some love from a charity or a google-summer-of-code-style project. The problem is they suck at the organizational stuff so they've never managed to put together anything like that.

0ad is already a finished game so not sure what you're arguing about.

Heard of Planetary Annihilation http://www.uberent.com/pa/ ? Apparently some of their guys worked on TA back in the day..looks very promising to me!

I find it a direct(albeit spiritual) successor to TA-SC(Supreme Commander) spirits. I am so looking forward it.

The big one I love on the Spring engine is Zero-K. It's the one that provides the most "complete" experience of the Spring games and the one that takes the TA-style gameplay in the most interesting directions.

The problem is that, even as the best-developed Spring game it still needs a lot of polish and it's never going to be more than a labour of love for a few hundred players and a handful of devs. Their donations just keep the server running and that's about it.

0 A.D. has been around a long time, it's been quite a few years since my last commit to springrts repo and 0. A.D. had already been open source back then (it was closed source for a while IIRC.)

TA is a brilliant game.

There appears to be a renewed interest, with people playing the original TA on and offline.

Here's a site with information about many of the various mods, remakes, etc: (http://www.tauniverse.com/)

And here's a sub-site with lots of information about online play (http://tazone.tauniverse.com/)

Another fan here. Played them all a lot, from the original TA + expansions, TA Spring (loved how long-range bullets literally bounced back off the shields), and the Supreme Commander series.

So far I think the best in the series was Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (not Supreme Commander II).

I backed & am greatly looking forward to Planetary Annihilation (though not too excited about the cartoony art-work). Just made a donation to 0AD too.