State Of The Mod

Greetings everyone,
after a talk with Mootant and Krenzo I have learned several things.

Firstly, Krenzo will leave the development of Empires to Mootant and Dizzyone. According to Mootant, Krenzo still retains the copyrights to Empires and its content. Krenzo will be developing an independant game for money, because he needs it to go to university. I wish him the best of luck.

Secondly, Mootant and Dizzyone will be developing the Orange Box version of Empires. Their goals are the following:
1. Get the current version of Empires working on the Orange Box Source SDK Base, which means fixing bugs.
2. Balance Empires for fun and diverse tank combat.

Mootant has no plans for supporting Empires after this (or so he has told me).

You may also have noticed the lack of aircraft in their plans. This is where Krenzo's conversation comes in:

(A summary of the conversation can be found below.)

In short, this is what he said:

1. The aircraft flying code is more or less fully operational. Aircraft still crash when colliding into something due to a Valve physics bug. Krenzo has no access to the Valve physics code and was thus unable to fix this problem.
Note: Cyber-Kun noted that Eternal Silence managed to get aircraft in without crashes, perhaps we could ask for some help around there?
2. Aircraft use less or an equal amount of bandwidth as vehicles.
3. The cockpit code is incomplete.
4. The code to shrink everything else down is also incomplete.
5. Megel might allow another modeler to finish his aircraft models.


Now, Mootant said that he will allow a secondary dev team to try their hand at aircraft and that it will be implemented if succesful.

So if we want to see aircraft in Empires, we will need the following:
* Coders
* Modelers
* Texture Artists

As you can see, aircraft aren't hopelessly lost as they are thought to be, but it will still be a large problem to tackle to get them in a stable state. I am requesting everyone who is interested in helping to reply to this thread. We will then discuss further actions with Mootant and Dizzyone, as I believe they are now the current dev team.

I will use my admin powers to regulate this thread and keep out spam and off-topic chat, so this discussion can go as smoothly as possible.

Get your hands dirty for Empires.

 

This space is reserved for links to later discussions.

 

Hello. I am Reef, Your new coder (I have access to SVN).

I plan to help Mootant achieve the goals metioned by Beerdude26.

 

I am Supaste, with some spoon fed help from dizzy I managed to get a textured cube into the source engine. I think I would be perfect for working on aircraft because of this.

 

I think currently its very unrealistic to work on Aircraft, I say lets not waste time on it, instead spend our time on the current features and tying those into gameplay better.

I would also like to mention, everyone here who is willing to cooperate with the new balance ideas, you may PM me and see if you can help in any way, it is highly appreciated, just keep in mind that we're working on a new design and a lot of it has already been decided over.

 

I could potentially help with coding sometime late this year/early next year (I'm taking a programming course that uses video game design as the template).

Modelling: I have moderate skill, but would desperately need to practise and learn the more advanced features of the software before I made anything worthy of being official.

Texture artists: I'm pretty good in photoshop and with my DSLR, so while I may not be able make a working texture map, I could probably fulfill needs for texture patterns and such.

Slightly Off-topic, but still related:
If DonMegel won't have time to work on Empires, what about story? Although story doesn't directly tie in (MP only), it is important to any game. If it weren't for the backstory to Empires, a lot of the feel of the epicness would be lost, and I really would hate for the storyline to curl up and die because no-one is working on it. I'd love to write FOR Empires, this mod's backstory alone ignited my passion for writing.

 

I'd like to help out on the coding/bug-fixing side,
I have my Comp degree, and have been programming for years.
(+ I've a working copy of VS2008-Prof at home, huzzah)

Am clueless on the modelling/art side of things

 

I am the other JMS and I will gladly betatest every shit that you throw at me.

 

I am Evan and I'd like to nominate KnightTemplar and myself as PR people on the dev team

 

I'm no coding guru, and have no specific game experience, but I've done quite a bit of work in C++ and C# in addition to a variety of other languages. I also have a considerable amount of free time this summer.

 

Krenzo pretty much explicitly asked those of us in different countries to translate the text of Empires. We need to start that translation project. I am unclear as to whether or not the code is in Empires to support language files. Can someone -- Dizzyone, Mootant, or Beerdude -- confirm this?

I fully support the new developers of this mod -- congratulations Dizzyone and Mootant for earning the respect and trust of Krenzo, and thank you both for taking on the significant workload the Empires community represents... most often in terms of the demands it places on those who sit in what are now YOUR chairs.

I volunteer to lead the translation project, by seeking out and aggregating foreign language speakers, and asking them to help translate the in-game text content.

Unless I hear otherwise, I will be putting up an instance of Mantis and starting a Git tree of the i18n/l10n files.

If you know two languages, and are willing to translate content, contact me at nebajoth@gmail.com.

Thanks.

 

I'm KnightTemplar and I'm your Liberal Arts grad

 

I already have SVN access to the OB code, but I've not done much with it to date. If someone wants to throw work my way I'll put time into it....but thus far the best response I have gotten is "look at existing bugs"...and some lead down to vehicle physics and all.

 

Rampant, since you have source access, you could answer my question as to the status of localization support in the existing codebase.

How hard is it going to be to add it?

 

Not really sure. I never looked for where the constants are defined.

 

You have to change all internal text from chars to wide chars and call a function to fetch the external text defined in a script file. All of the support is in HL2. Someone has to go through the code and change out every place that has text that is printed in-game. It's a tedious process but not difficult.

 

Thanks, Krenzo.

 

everyone should just learn English... on to aircraft!

 

I will continue to do everything/nothing at the same time, and try unsuccessfully to recruit modelers/animators.

Also, I want moar info on Krenzo's new game.

 

If you want aircrafts you need to find out if Megel wants to give you unfinished ones and if there are enough people to finish them.