At any rate would Empires become a game instead of a heavy mod for source. It's not that it's bad but other engines e.g: Unreal Engine 4, Amazon Lumber Yard (Not sure about it.), Unity. my friends, Myself and many others I'm sure would easily pay money for a proper game if it was to be upgraded in terms of graphics and mechanics. I was just wondering since I'm pretty new to this game if that would be a planned idea for the future or if it will just be a source mod.
Yeah, thanks, we hadn't thought about it... Like everyone's been told, unless you want to gather a team and finance the project yourself, that's not going to happen... Ever...
Unfortunately the Emp community is a little bit too small to get some Kickstarter going. There already were several attempts to make Empires 2, but somehow they never get far...
That is a shame, but if the website it's funded on might provide some promotion to it... But that's a hit and miss advertisement... And if I'm not wrong it's a fairly old mod? So the community wont grow that much, if not at all?
Of course we have a plan for this game, that's why dev team hasn't dismissed yet. I'll get our lead developer to reply to this.
Empires is a standalone game, based on the source engine. Last weekend we switched our git history so that we can update easily, and updated to the latest commit thereof. I mention this to dispell any later confusion that we would have to "port" to Source 2. At some point, Valve will decide the engine now has major version number 2, and will perhaps market it as a new engine, but unless they also squash their git history - which I hope they will not, it will be no more difficult than any other engine update for us to manage. The confusion likely stems from the fact that we often call it "Empires mod". This is because there is no way we could ever compete in search engines on just "Empires". Empires is a completely separate game that does not require any other game to be installed. On the question of whether we plan to switch to a different engine; We have no definite plans. Although Unreal engine looks promising, so does the source engine. Switching engines would take a lot of developer time we don't currently have, so unless that is solved and the engine considered has benefits that are worth it, we will not switch engine. Upgrading the graphics and mechanics, as you mentioned, is ongoing, as always; have you seen Smithy's new camera and radar models?
No actually I haven't, I'll go take a look at that; I understand Source 2 is going to be a heavy possibility, but I understand what you mean by it being a stand alone game but adding a pinch of salt to how to perceive it seems to do the trick. It being a advertised as a mod actually deterred me from downloading it for a while, but when I did, oh boy I enjoyed it so much! But I understand that you are obviously not a big enough team to even start a whole new Engine, I was more leaning towards (I didn't really make it clear.) the idea that if in the possible future it was going to be a game with a different Engine but I actually forgot about Source 2 altogether and I guess we will have to wait and see any real decision can be made. It would probably be a good idea if it was changed from "EmpiresMod" to something more appealing, I said above that I was kind of hindered away from Empires since it was called mod, but when I played it I was more surprised how much better it was that expected.
id say its called empires mod because it was a mod for the longest time ... ... and aside of the url and steam entries, noone calls it empiresmod ever :D until you tried to import even the most simple art asset. <rant>even getting a texture into the game requires a goddam program which originally - since source is from prehistoric times - is a "convenient" command line tool (yeh, theres vtf edit, yet in todays engines, from a-z its all drag and drop). and god forbid you want models. worst probably is breakable stuff (you have to write a qc for each and every fucking gib).</rant> yeah :D
This. Source workflow for asset creation is so far behind modern engines. The shaders are bad and texture compression ruins any attempt to make anything nice looking.
and hammer and vvis and vrad and its quirks. and the fact that you have no realtime lighting in the editor and that its still a forward renderer and omg i could go on for hours (and im sure the api compaired to modern engine apis laughtable trivial and overly complex at the same time) ... ... but the best counter argument is that a "port" to another engine would take for fucking ever and that there is noone/not enough with enough time at hand to do it. also if you port over to something that could actually look like from this millenia, you most certainly also want new art assets and shit, so that also adds to the time and human resources required. is there someone rich around here? since you can buy work-time for money and if you can find an agreement with krenzo (and whoever else holds intelectual property), im sure a modern empires built on the experience of 10+ years would be a great success, so an investment could totally pay off. but sadly everyone suffers from this real-life dissease and one can only invest this much time. so as long as theres noone bored babysitting a reactor on some aircraft carrier ...
in this video complete_ posted in this other thread they say uss carl vinson and it looks pretty much like an aircraft carrier :D
