As some of you know, the unreal 3 engine is now free and is called the "Unreal Development Kit". This is great news for Empires' future as it would over come many of the limitations of the Source engine (aircraft, large levels, level height,multicore goodness) and allow 64 player battles. I know this is a great task but in the long run it is worth it. The entire way the Commander works needs to be redone and here are my suggestions: 1). visible fog of war on the commanders view so he knows what he can see and what he can't see (but can still clearly see the map) Everyone hates not knowing what they can see. 2). New system for the commander to see enemies (see figure 1) In the new system you there is a circle around the player which the commander can see enemies and there is a ray check in the players entire field of view to all the enemies and if it passes they are in view too. If the enemies are crouching or prone and are not moving they are not seen in the commander view unless they pass the ray check on one of the players. if they fire though they would be visible. I propose the scout would have a larger circle and enemies spotted with the binoculars would be visible longer 3). Redo the player way to see enemies. Right now in empires commanders have to constantly highlight his players and highlight the field to give attack orders to the players so they can see the enemies on the map. My idea is to have it done automatically with various colors. red is for enemies on which their known location is seen in real-time, some other color (like green or something) is for their last know location between 1-10 seconds(the amount of time would probably change with testing), and possibly another color for vehicles. Also have a larger rectile (spelling?) and a different color for targets the commander wants gone. 4). Change the way gun turrets work. Right now the gun turrets work by sending a pin point beam of bullets (although they don't do much damage) at you. (Do empires turrets even shoot projectiles, or is is just a ray?) I suggest to increase view distance of all the gun turrets but add some bullet spreed and increase damage a little. That is all I have for now, I would love for who ever is operating the svn to make a quick folder for UDK and give me access. As for me I'm working on all the unreal script for buildings right now.
Only if I get to be lead dev. (I will declare a reasonable line of succession, for those of you worried about periods of inactivity.)
Really, I wouldn't get your hopes up about any major movement by the devs. If you want something done you really have to do it yourself.
No. You can't include external libraries in UDK w/o engine access. I still want to review Irrlicht tho and maybe experiment a bit; the engine is OSS under BSD-style license IIRC. Edit: I'll make a Git repo for you. Edit2: So I downloaded Irrlicht. Community seems quite active, now looking at the source.
Empires turrets shoot like any other bullet weapon, insta-hit bullets. Basically, util_traceline and apply damage to resulting object if cbasecombatcharacter.
Don't some guns have bullet speed? I remember scripting gmod sweaps or some other mod had a bullet speed variable
You don't need any SVN folder or anything to play with UDK. If you really think about such thing, you need to reexport models and materials to Unreal formats. I'm not sure if anything that you mentioned is easier to do with UDK/Unreal than Source. What's more practical is to help us finish 2.25 so we can get our version with optimizations to the world. I don't have time for anything lately. Neither do most (all?) devs.
Traces or Ray Traces are used for all sorts of things, lighting, vision detection etc. A hitscan is a ray trace that does damage yeah
WE ARE ALL DOOMED. The next holidays are right around the corner, and holidays means a lot of time. Don't worry :D
