PPE what kinds of things do you think you could get working on the server side to go along with new client side features?
none... it's Marius' code and he's mostly retired.
erver side things it if people could have thier flim uploaded to the server after a game and the server would read what veterans of what kind of units there were, and put them in some kind of bank or something. like we could each (if vets are turned on in game) save 10 guys or something. Be nice to have that warrior that got 75 kills and leveld up the day before and use him in a game of COOP.
The changes needed to enable this are so ridiculously drastic that I sincerely doubt it ever sees the light of day.... though it WOULD be sweet to have film uploads directly from the server, something I've thought about begging for myself. The vet thing though.... that could be done, almost... but it requires those vets to be reported by the client, not from the server parsing a file... then that data would have to get written to the user profile and stored with them when they are logged in..... then the game client just needs to set it as a local variable for use during the next game.
** REJOIN A GAME IN PROGRESS!**
That is all client side, has mostly nothing at all to be done on the server side of things..... the biggest problem here is going to be avoiding lag for everyone still in the game on the re-join, and preventing OOS. The only change server side should be not marking a game as unjoinable.
***automatic downloads of plugins ***
more client side stuff, nothing to do with the server
**Most plugins have a URL embedded in them allready, **
and most of those URLs are just homepages ... and the ones that aren't are dead links these days.
Ok, now the "fun" part....
You guys seem to want to distribute myth so much... all the people who make stuff for myth allready do that right now. I dont get it what are you looking forward to if its free to distribute? giving legal copies of it to your buddies you know so they can play it with you? Are the high 4 dollar price tags keeping myth out of their reach? when i want people to check out myth i distribute it by giving them one of my legal copies i have happened to pick up over the years...even if they take you up on it they will most likely get whisked away by some uber fancy WOW or something half life part 12 or such thing.
I want to get permission to FREELY Distribute it because if folks can just click a link to get it, it DRASTICALLY increases the number of new people that will try it. ... and I'm NOT talking about the guy I know down the street that I could hand a disc to, but the thousands of people I've never seen or met that might see a free download for a full game and decide to check it out.
Do you guys know much about making games?
Making an ALL new engine requires years of development and a huge
F-ing staff these days. and millions of dollars.
No shit... now you're starting to understand what I'm saying.
A company could use the m2 engine and add some stuff to it like your 32 bit color you want, and artists would be able to make much nicer looking maps. and get the rights to use it or buy it from T2. They could make an all new game with a bunch of new features and crap in it ! The most it should cost a wise company is around half a million dollars.
Interesting how you scoff at Millions of dollars above, but you now casually dismiss a Half Million Dollars as if it is not a MAJOR investment... in AN ANTIQUATED ENGINE. ANYTHING that happens with an eye toward ANY game that would actually make money would be with a 3-D engine because THAT is what gamers (ya know, the people that are going to repay this ridiculous investment by actually buying the thing) not just want, but EXPECT.
Ok, the rest of your babbling is unqualified bullshit..... I don't care how many game engines you think you've played with, your business sense is worthless. You either haven't been honest with yourself in looking at things or you just choose to ignore it.
Before you reply, think about a few things in regard to the economics of this:
Myth II - The Installer Bug in v1.0 of Soulblighter cost Bungie roughly their *entire* profits for this game, which is what set up the Take2 buy-in and M$ buyout in general. That should let you know how narrow the margins are. It's a billion dollar a year industry because of economy of scale with mega-hits like WoW, HalfLife, Call of Duty, etc... not because of titles with a marginal, niche audience.
Myth III - reportedly had a budget in the ballpark of $1 Million (twice your purported max for the mathematically challenged among us)... and they shut down, doors closed and company defunct because it was a total loss. They could not, with some of the best people from this community involved, put out a product on time with enough quality to even break even. What patches did come out were done without pay by members of the Dev Team that felt bad about being involved with such a crappy product.
O yea and its 240 colors for colormaps (16 used to mark it up)
and 256 colors for the units per frame of animation.
Who cares what the actual number is? It's low enough that it completely sucks. That is all that any prospective buyer would care about. It would get ripped apart by Reviewers and noone would drop a penny on it. Like MythIII, its release would be a still-birth.
You want to spout about how much expertise you have with game engines (to which I say, big deal, what does that have to do with anything?), but do you have any clue at all on things like salaries? A good C Programmer is going to cost you AT LEAST $60,000 a year. Whomever runs the show is going to want at least that much as a salary. After your costs of getting the license to use the thing, now you have to find an office (do you *really* think an investor is going to drop that kinda change when he can't walk into a building and see his investment working??) and then you now have enough left to pay the salaries of perhaps 6 people at that $60k rate. That will buy you One Year of operations at MOST..... and that isn't even getting int the costs associated with Distribution and getting it on store shelves.
Again, you can take your misplaceed air of superiority about game engines and do whatever you feel is appropriate, but don't go getting all uppity because you don't want to face economic realities.
Anyway, this is all nonsense and an exercise in academic futility as noone is going to do anything.... though I'll happily eat crow if someone actually does manage to convince an investor to drop that kind of money into this game.