I have been playing with Cryengine for about a two weeks now. And I wanted to try and remake SteetsofFire in the engine really to learn more about it. This will be more of a remake than a remaster, as I intend to keep the basic layout of SOF but bring it into 2018 If possible maybe drum up some fanfare or excitement towards moving Empires to a new engine (finally, maybe, probably not.) The end goal is to be able to play the default Cryengine teamDeathMatch in StreetsOfFire So I began by using Crafty to export SOFto an .obj then, I started the process of seperating the different faces into there own meshes for texturing. https://www.dropbox.com/s/tfybue0koaqe4hr/sof_blender.PNG?dl=0 I then decided to bring the meshes into Unity3d to see how it would look with the default renderer settings and just some basic texturing. It does not look very good, but it gave me idea of how the textures looked on some of the meshes. https://www.dropbox.com/s/7r03v5hth5tpfal/sof_unity.PNG?dl=0 Then I imported the meshes into Cryengine, but I can't seem to get CE5 to assign multiple materials to the .FBX once in CE5. So what I will probably end up doing is assigning the materials and textures in blender then exporting to CE5. https://www.dropbox.com/s/zij7uopoljnedzo/sof_cry.PNG?dl=0 Next step is I want to create all new buildings and props to add to the map to give it more of a lived in feel, but keep the sterile feel of the map
I found this thread and wanted to try it out as well, can anyone guess which map I've tried simulating?
That NF CV looks pretty neat. Did you make that because it can't be our current one. Seeing these screenshots makes me really want an empires 2 so badly. I see 2 IMG tags at the end of your post, did the pictures get lost?
The CV is an old model that was never used, from 2015 I think. So far it's just a few static meshes where you spawn in the barracks, I'm currently trying to learn the Flow Graph tool and just mess around really. The IMG tags were just me trying to upload the first two pictures and failing
Unity is the best choice for what to import into. I looked into it before, and it's theoretically possible to port *everything* straight into Unity via Blender. Unity is far more straightforward than any other engines out there, and particularly if you consider the hands Empires Mod has been in for the last ~10 years, learning curve is of paramount importance otherwise instead of developing the game the "developers" just dick around with script settings and never actually add new content because Source Engine is a bit of a clusterfuck. There are other reasons why Unity would be the best choice, but in short it's the most flexible with the most minimal learning curve and the two biggest issues with developing the current Empires Mod have always been learning cliff for development and lack of flexibility of the engine. CryEngine in particular, while beautiful, is very limited in terms of what it can do as an engine as well as being well known for some of the internals not being too straightforward and consistent. Source Engine in general is a bit of a clusterfuck in terms of how it stores data though, and given how many hands it's passed through, Empires Mod itself is a massive clusterfuck in how things are stored. If you import vehicles and characters into Blender you can actually retain the model data such as bones and pose data...theoretically you can import the animations as well but I've been previously unsuccessful at doing so. Though, Blender itself is kind of a mess too, albeit more because it's meant for daily use by professionals and not remotely user friendly whereas Source Engine has other reasons for being the way it is. There's been like 10 different attempts at porting Empires Mod, so if any project were to begin anew, a proof of concept MUST exist before you even officially announce or recruit people and the proof of concept needs to be solely the work of whoever is to be the project manager, meaning they need to know a fair bit about every single process you need to make a video game from modeling to coding. When I played around with Unity, I never mentioned it until now because I never finished developing a basic gameplay proof of concept with animated infantry and fighting mechanics, though I did have quite a lot of fun messing with Unity.
Indeed it is sad that many attempts have been made and some have gotten to semi-workable and then just get dumped.
Have there actually been ones that had gameplay demos though? From what I've seen so far, it's almost always people who don't know how to program that try and spearhead an empires project, and usually the only progress that gets done is all of the easy to port stuff.