You guys ever thought if moving to a new engine?
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Would want to see true simulation like deforming ground, friendly fire with AI not shooting allies or hills.
The project has forever in it, right? So, means you will eventually want to get a better engine.
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That's functionally a complete remake of the game. We have not the time, resources, manpower, skills, or legal rights to make such a thing.
Other than those few hurdles yeah let's do it.
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@deribus Even legal?
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A new engine is in no way possible or achievable for Supreme Commander in any future. Even excluding all technical impossibilities for one second, it would come with all legal trouble, because we do not own the intellectual property.
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@kilatamoro said in You guys ever thought if moving to a new engine?:
Would want to see true simulation like deforming ground, friendly fire with AI not shooting allies or hills.
All of this is already possible in the current engine. It did not happen yet because either we don't want it (terrain deformation), or we don't have contributors with the motivation to pick it up (AIs shooting at hills). In both cases there are mods for you out there that introduce/fix it however.
If we would hypothetically go into this direction then we'll probably take a similar approach to OpenRA. You use the assets of the original game. And you rebuild the engine, whether that is from the Spring RTS engine or from scratch. You also force people to have an original copy, just like both OpenRA and FAForever already do.
We'll casually ignore the fact that a lot of assets have various significant issues, such as invalid normal maps and strange use of texture channels.
If we use the Spring engine then we may just as well fork BAR, but whatever engine we end up with - it will take years to get to something that feels like a decent game. It took BAR 14 years to get where they are now.
Let us assume that we would hypothetically achieve 80% of Supreme Commander. Quite the achievement, but this is where you get to the point where a new problem emerges that is much more fundamental: once you're (almost) done replicating what is already there you may want to start improving on the original design. Fix some bugs. Improve the user experience. To name a few:
- (1) Some players complain about path finding
- (2) Some players complain about intel being a bit spotty
- (3) Some players want terrain deformations (as your post)
- (4) Some players want area commands
- ...
- (n) Some players complain about or want X
But what is a correct solution? Take path finding as an example. We can introduce flow fields in addition to steering behaviors. All the pathfinding problems would be fixed... except that the game now behaves a lot more like Starcraft II. And it becomes much more difficult to use the path finding to block units. So we may have 'fixed' the issue, but we introduced new issues.
These type of problems will always bring in pros and cons. And even if someone makes a decision with proper arguments there will always be players that feel they are entitled to be a complete, uuhh - you will get my point when you scroll through this topic. No sane developer wants to go through that in their spare time, next to life's responsibilities for years on end.
Oh, and all of this also casually ignores the fact that all existing contributions - whether that is in the form of maps, mods, replays, code, textures, meshes, animations, etc - they'd all probably not be backwards compatible. We'd lose a lot of content
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@jip OK, I get it: too much trouble. We will just ask superintelligent AI to do all this when it comes
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Some years ago (maybe 2019 or 2020) I remember asking a similar question on Reddit. I was out of the game for a decade and was surprised FAF existed. I remember one comment stuck out to me. The commenter basically told me that working on such a thing is a waste of time and resources, no one is interested in it, it wouldn't be as good as the original, I'm better off working on FAF, etc etc. The typical Negative Nancy shit you get from Reddit when you try to think differently.
Well a year or two later Sanctuary was announced and they've been at it ever since. People were excited for it from the discussions in their Discord. I often wondered if Sanctuary would exist if they asked their questions on Reddit instead of me. Would they have been discouraged and decided not to pursue their project? Would that random negative Redditor be even more proud of himself for shitting on another person's dream? (No jab at anyone here, I like you guys)
What I'm trying to say is give it a shot but understand that it maybe a serious commitment with very little return. But if you want a new game engine then make it happen. I've seen one other person try this but he was going alone and life caught up to him. Here is his Github:
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@eezyville You're absolutely right! Anyone who wants to give it a go definitely should, if anything it is a great learning experience. I've tried it in the past once, and eventually will try again. It's definitely not a waste of time, but you should not start the project with any expectations haha.
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The expectations are always what get you.
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@eezyville said in You guys ever thought if moving to a new engine?:
Would that random negative Redditor be even more proud of himself for shitting on another person's dream?
Hello that was me XD
I've never seen it as shitting on someone's dream, and I'm sorry you took it that way. It was meant to be an explanation of why it hasn't been done and why I don't think it's a good idea.
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@deribus said in You guys ever thought if moving to a new engine?:
@eezyville said in You guys ever thought if moving to a new engine?:
Would that random negative Redditor be even more proud of himself for shitting on another person's dream?
Hello that was me XD
I've never seen it as shitting on someone's dream, and I'm sorry you took it that way. It was meant to be an explanation of why it hasn't been done and why I don't think it's a good idea.
You didn't have to call yourself out and bring receipts! I wasn't gonna play detective. One of the commenters in that thread was tatsu and he was involved in Sanctuary. So even though I put my plans on temporary hold I'm glad tatsu forged forward.
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