Hi
Here sanguinariojoe, probably the last remaining spring:1944 developer (I actually started developing it when it was almost abandoned). I think I can make some comments:
* Regarding the CC BY-NC license, it was a very unfortunate decision they took at the very beginning, which cannot be corrected now. Many developers are out of the radar, so collecting all the permission to get rid on that will be an endless story. There is even a tool (maintained by me) to import s3o models to blender:
https://github.com/sanguinariojoe/blender_s3o_import
I suspect Stan used that to import the models.
Unfortunately the models imported with Blender and exported to 0AD (collada) shall be binded to the same CC BY-NC license. I would never complain about you releasing the game with other license, of course. Indeed I tried really hard (and unsuccesfully) to get rid of that license. But let's face that, using them you will be in a slippery slope. Sorry.
* Regarding the game itself, they will not be actually similar to spring:1944. The main feature of spring is the ultra large scale combat:
This mod will be more similar to Brothers in arms. Nothing bad on that. Well, maybe is not working nice for naval battles.
* Related to that, it is interesting the suggestion of av93:
The Spanish civil war was featured by significantly closer combat theaters, mainly because the weaponry was not so developed. I started a project to make a spring game for the Spanish civil war: https://github.com/sanguinariojoe/s44-spain. I even created some models of the republican side, like the Tiznao, the RFT17, the T26, and the arellano gun. Those models you can use them right now.
Summarizing:
If you decide to go with a Spanish civil war mod, I might be interested on that. And I am very sorry for the stupid spring:1944 license (not my bad actually).
