Just been messing about with assets and such. Personally I think the recently released UE4 is much better suited to Empires' gameplay than Source. What do you guys think? (Sorry about big image)
We should get a group of people together to port empires. It'll be great we'll work together with no leadership structure and kind of just do our own thing. This is going to bee great. Then in 6 months we can have another post like this and repeat the whole process over again.
The materials could do with tweaking to make them less plasticy. Also there aren't any specular maps to work with, they are useful for masking out reflections in places where they look weird.
no, thats a matter of specularity. since the time we got programmable shaders, aka the time dx9 got released, its no longer the engine itself deciding the looks. with enough tweaking you could reproduce empires look 1:1 (but why would you want that)
It took the post-Krenzo devs like 3-4 years to agree on what they wanted the game to be, that's mainly the reason these projects dissolve: everyone pulls in a different direction
Plus we all have jobs. If a member of the community is a business angel and wants to fund a year of development with a team of 5 people then it's possible. Otherwise I doubt anyone is willing to put in a full time effort into it.
But we do have a lot of people that can put part time effort into it. Would just need some "one" to keep it organized. How much code is unfinished with factions? We have enough people here willing to contribute. Just lack of people for coding. Unless candles or beerdude is willing????
You really dont have enough people to contribute. Tell you what. Pick a task to improve something on the current version of empires with these people. I'm willing to bet that nothing will ever be produced. Talk is cheap. Especially so when it comes to empires forums
Like I said it would depend on what is already finished with the code. Most things from empires can be converted to work in factions. Models, materials, sounds. Empires mas could be templates for be ones. Even if someone wanted to start hosting a factions server. Just something to screw around in. We could over time add to it.
I want to point out, having had such a conversation numerous times with numerous people involved in Empires development, that the idea that one engine will be "better" than another engine is painfully wrong. Empires, at its core, combines two genres of games, FPS and RTS. Many modern and easily accessible engines have great support for FPS games, but they sorely lake in the RTS department. Empires is such a unique game that until an engine comes out that doesn't require us to hack in an RTS component from almost nothing, there won't be a good, or even just a decent, engine for it. (One of the things about Source 2 that interests me, by the way, is that it'd have innate RTS support because of Valve's work with DotA.) On top of that, Factions is done in UDK, not UE4. For those who don't know, UDK is free and is the Unreal 3 engine, while UE4 has much more complicated licensing terms and a monthly cost per license. Which means development would be from scratch and not building off already-coded work. And seriously. UDK uses UnrealScript. I'd prefer that you'd just shoot me now instead of waiting for me to do it myself if I had to touch that shit.
There are people here who said they would collectively fund one years worth of programming.... nothing ever happened.
Is it me or is this thread a little more ballsy than they usually are? Or is that just because of binary name dude?
I would but currently using a shitty PC. So hosting from home isn't an option. that's why I said maybe viper or epic might cuz they already pay for more servers then needed. even if maybe azk or who ever is in charge of viper's would consider renting one at a discounted rate. @candles I truly understand where your coming from. The only thing a new engine would have over source is more complications. Source is the ideal engine for empires. But people working on projects like this might bring new idea, content, and possibly new talent to empires. As for people saying that new engine would bring more people....... source is one of the most used engines. I mean come on tf2, dota,gmod,CSS. Hard to find one PC gamer that don't have one of them games already. Source is the only free engine that has this much mod support and freedom. Was basically just stating that if someone wanted to work on factions or another engine that I'm willing to help in my free time. I can do basic modeling, textures, and code. Granted I'm not good with code but have a pretty good understanding.
Source has significant ups and downs. As you say... probably most PC gamers have a game made with source. Source is fairly good in its FPS area of expertise. It's RTS ability is slightly lacking however, nothing that can't be made up for with clever (albeit sloppy) coding that was done like in empires and NS1. There are a few large sink-holes to the rolling verdant hills that are Source engine: vehicles (It is some seriously hacky shit) physics engine (Some things rather great other things... wut?) sound engine (Too many sounds playing cause shit to happen. WTF? no other professional game engine has that issue that I have heard of. Or perhaps its our lack of coding to cut down number of sounds played at once.) and vehicles (They refuse to release proper documentation. Seriously... wtf?). That said... it probably be easier to port to source 2 rather then anything else. I really hope they hit on some things that are screwy as noted above and that source 2 can be our savior. Although I can't hold out for that. Each major port we did was supposed to save us. While in a way they did... just not the way we hoped. Then again... porting to anything else and you might as well start from scratch while keeping the resources. Things can only go up from there... provided your constitution for punishment holds out.
Because they wouldn't. Because people like to talk about things but they don't actually like doing them. It's a lot easier for people to say "yeah I'd code that if it was open source", "yeah I'd pay for that", "yeah I'd host a server for that" than actually doing it.
The issue isn't mostly money. I honestly believe the Empires forum could rustle up 10k in funding. While that's not a lot, a lot of people don't live very expensive lives and it might be enough to fund someone for a good 6-9 months. The real issue is finding somebody dedicated enough to take on the project of revamping Empires. They would need to be hardworking, know the community and people who can help out, and be very organised. They would need to actively be engaged in the project and keep their own morale high when things inevitably get shit. They would need a stable consistent life which doesn't interrupt them on a day-to-day basis. I don't believe anybody on the forums has these qualities, another krenzo would be impossible to find.
