Remake

[plastictree]

Hey guys

I was wondering if Don and Andy, or anyone else for that matter, have considered rebuilding the game from scratch.

Is there technical or legal reasons preventing that? I figure it would be a bit more work to begin with (that being a gross understatement, of course), but would also allow you to make changes without having to worry about what is hard-coded and what isn't, which would save a lot of time in the long haul, especially if it could be built from the ground up to facilitate easy editing of code.

While I'm on this slightly drunken flight of fancy, isometric or a basic 3d view would be tops

I know from my own experience in development that it often pays to tear it all down and start again on major work, rather than still be expending all that effort modifying an existing and painfully inflexible code base for version 3,581.

[Marek_Tucan]

Why isometric or 3D for any reasons but eye candy? Top-down is better to orientate on the battlefield, esp. with major hills and other terrain features

[plastictree]

I do agree, but isometric or 3d would be nice as an option, especially because it can give you a quicker and more intuitive sense of LOS.

Nonetheless, graphics would only be for added eye candy, whether that be top down or not, I'm more talking about a remake in terms of the game engine itself, to allow all these things that always have to be met with a "Its hardcoded" response.

It would mean that Don, Andy and the community as a whole could build the game they want, rather than making compromises due to the existing engine.

[Wdll]

The only reason I would also prefer an option for some 3D graphics would be great for the LOS. It's still difficult to know for sure as it is. Then of course that could be solved with something similar as to what happens with the game to show you where the unit can move. An overlay? of different colour or something.


Having said that, I doubt we will see any remake any time soon.

[Horses]

Probably there is also a possibility to optimize the code.
The Cpu load is in windowed mode very high-even on very fast machines.

[Mobhack]

Horses said:
Probably there is also a possibility to optimize the code.
The Cpu load is in windowed mode very high-even on very fast machines.

Well, of course it is as it is a game.

While (running)
pump graphics to screen
if (check things)react to things
end;

At a minimum, it will be cycling the colour palette even if you are not doing anything (like moving units) - so you can have nice billowing smoke and water effects etc.

The only games that will not do this are those based on the windows message loop principle - do nothing, wait till the end user pokes a key. Only simple little card games and so on can use that strategy (like those provided with windows - minesweeper etc).

If you want an example of the simple windows application at work - run the GameOptions dialogue (not the game) and check CPU usage, as that is a simple windows app, reacting to user mouse pokes.

[Mobhack]

A simple 3-D vehicle mesh (without skins) seems to command about $50-$100 from various websites - I had a look a couple of years back for general interest. Most such meshes on offer were of course, M1, T80 and Shermans etc - nobody is going to have a BTR-Tz or a J-22 Orao available as a 'stock' item!. So my bet is any 'custom' jobs like that would be more expensive as 'to-order' items.

So - if we bought in sufficient third-party meshes to fit every unique unit we model, that could be maybe $3 million plus. It's a few man-years of effort to make them either oneself, or by hiring some artists for $$$. I'll leave the number of actual game units required to be sold simply to break even for the art assets (let alone distribution & manufacturing or even game engine development) of such an enterprise to the gentle reader to guess at.

And we allow games to have a few hundred different vehicles active at one time - load more than a few 3D meshes into a 3D game engine and you will cause the machine to choke, or load one with a few too many polygons, ditto. (Try the Sims with too many people on a lot, or adding a custom 3rd party hair style with a few thousand polys in it! )

Guess why most modern '3D' type wargames have a few tens of different (and common - no SturmTigers!) unit types modelled and/or split things into several sub-theatres with a relatively few units in each game sub-package (France 40, Western Front, Eastern Front, Desert, Italy etc, etc), and have maps that are postage stamp sized (2km by 2km maybe), and allow you maybe 30-40 active units a side?.

Cheers
Andy

[DRG]

There was one other item I forgot to mention will be in the next patch for both games but this item is for CD owners only and will not be available in the DL version.

-PBEM Campaigns that allow from 3 to 21 battles per campaign

Don

OOPS... wrong spot!

[Marek_Tucan]

I think most 3D models (reasonably textured) I saw together were in some epic battles in modded Star Wars: Empire at War space battles. Needless to say, my PC sometimes acts a bit weirdly under the load. Now I'd say that with full capacities there may be several hundreds (if counting laser bolts etc) models on-screen at the same time but it's simply too much at times.

Besides, I think that for the level SP is best at - ie Bn-to-Bde - the top-down view simulates best what the commander really knows. He don't see what the units see in 3D, he has to rely on map. The units may report him their LOS. Top-down view simulates the paper map the best way IMO.

[plastictree]

"So - if we bought in sufficient third-party meshes to fit every unique unit we model, that could be maybe $3 million plus. It's a few man-years of effort to make them either oneself, or by hiring some artists for $$$. I'll leave the number of actual game units required to be sold simply to break even for the art assets (let alone distribution & manufacturing or even game engine development) of such an enterprise to the gentle reader to guess at. "

Andy, thats fair enough. I reckon there would be plenty of people out there willing to create the meshes/textures/etc., but I agree that with thousands of different units even the basic 3d view I was thinking of (ie. zoomed right out, very low polygon counts) would be a hell of a lot of work.

Still, potential new graphic schemes, as I've mentioned, would only be a bonus.

In my question, I am more focusing on the game engine, such as the big picture stuff like the AI being not great, to the little things like how smoke and vision functions, etc. that are currently chokepoints in how much you can actually get SP to be as realistic as possible. I reckon with what the team has done so far working with the limitations and the vagaries and weirdness of the SP engine, you could make a truly classic wargame (more so) if you could go nuts with it from the start.