Open Machines?
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@StonerHate said:
@Encrypted Can you do the voices of the silly Engineers and the Locators as well? xD
I might be able to. But it'll happen only if everyone wants me to do it.
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@StonerHate said:
sully
Oops. Seems like I accidentally used the wrong adjective. Not because I meant to use SILLY, but because I thought "sully" meant something wholly different... Well. Learned something new then ^^
And that would be awesome. You got my vote ;)
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Thanks for the vote. And, well, sully is a verb... I've just found it out.
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Okay. What's the fastest way to get up to speed? :)
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@Judas said:
Okay. What's the fastest way to get up to speed? :)
We were looking into making an open source recreation of Machines, and we started working on a prototype using SpringRTS, but then we started to look into other engines to use and had halted development. We're also trying to find who currently holds the rights to the Machines IP before making a final decision of what to do next.
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Ah.
- Acclaim Entertainment was the owner of the distribution rights. Nothing else.
- Charybdis Limited was the owner of the IP rights
- Charybdis was owned 75% by Hit & Run Music Publishing at time of liquidation.
- That makes them the current owner, probably?
Hit & Run Music Publishing Limited
25 Ives Street London SW3 2ND United Kingdom
+44 20 7590 2600(I'm not going to call. No, I'm going to send them... a letter)
- Try to acquire the rights nicely? Symbolic sum? They probably forgot about the game entirely.
- We're not making any money so we're not 'morally evil'
- It's a 16 year old game. There simply isn't money to be had by any party. There is no victim, there is no value.
- If there is some third party that wants to acquire the rights from Hit & Run, it wouldnt be cleber to kill of the hardcore fanbase of the game. Truly.
- We just change the name
- If we already have implemented a lot of goodness, we can remove the offending material and create new ones. But at least we already have other things in place (Maps, AI etc etc).
What I'm saying is that we should run with it and deal with the challenges along the way. Progress in development above all. The legal stuff we can worry about when it's a thing to worry about. Otherwise it's waste of time.
Continued! I'm all for the Unity 5 Engine (Or any other engine that's the 'best', even though it's not purely an RTS-engine). For one reason: Every year, there are thousands of kids (on insanely good computers) that try their hand on pc-game development. What engine do they use to start learning? Probably Unity 5. It's free, it insanely good.
Using one of the newest and best engines out there would be a sound business idea (even though this isn't business) simply because there are so many people with knowledge out there and many more that want to acquire knowledge about this engine for future careers. That's valuable. We supply them with the resources and watch magic happen.
Those are my thoughts 'n arguments. I invite your criticism.
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I am interested in working with issues along the way, however we want to call a couple more sources, which will be done soon. And it is not 100% decided if this is to be a commercial or non-commercial project.
Moving on, while I've used Unity for a long time, I don't think it would be fit as an engine for a Machines game because it does not work well with the developer when implementing modding tools. Also, as a personal opinion, I think the scripting method in Unity can get very unorganized.
I've been most interested in Unreal 4 (which became free in February) especially because of map making tools. Not only this, but with their new Unreal Tournament game, they've been creating lots of documentation on creating your own content for the game, using he Unreal editor. So I'm heavily leaning toward this engine because of the modding tools, and with a community like WFW I think that's very important.
We can do a more extensive comparison later today when I have time.
So if people want to get started, probably the best ways to begin would be for us decide on an engine, and go from there with getting used to it, working on art assets, etc.
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Seems like much things happen 'round. Let's just hope it'll work as it should.
And, yeah, Unreal Engine (insert number here) might be a good thing to re-make the Machines with.
Heck, I have so much ideas for new campaign missions (pre-Machines missions) that I don't even know where to begin from.
Guess it would be some nice stuff to have. -
Unreal Engine #X sounds fine by me. I'll back you guys up on that!
For the rest I think we should minimize the amount of creative stuff (Although I love the intent) but getting that engine running is really the single most-important priority we should have here. If we want any kind of game. (We have 9 years worth of creative stuff hehe)
How well versed are you guys with the Unreal Engine? Are you absolute Guru's? Is it easy to learn? How fast could somebody get up to speed with it?
I saw something SourceForge somewhere. How much effort went into there, does anybody have the link, how viable is that still?
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Well getting an RTS to work on Unreal is not going to be very difficult. It will obviously take time, but we definitely need 3D art. While I'm practicing 2D and 3D art I'm currently nowhere near good enough to do anything more than drawing up concepts. So creative works aren't out of the picture.
With Unreal I'm new, but I've tried stuff out, and it's not going too be difficult to learn. (for parts that are relevant to your field) We should be able to get up to speed with it pretty fast.
The SourceForge project does not really have anything of value for continuing a project, not too much effort was put into it. It was just a small attempt when we wanted to make changes afterward with switching engines and whatnot. Of course we had not moved on sooner because we had been busy.
Of course we will set up version control later; probably with git.
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Can we re-use all the old 3D models? (Should we?)
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@Judas
Do you mean from the original game or from the SourceForge project? The project has a minimal amount of models, and I don't know if they original ones would work. I guess it depends on what type of file can be extracted from the game. If we would want to start there we could, and then move on to original content later. -
@bilal said:
@Judas
Do you mean from the original game or from the SourceForge project? The project has a minimal amount of models, and I don't know if they original ones would work. I guess it depends on what type of file can be extracted from the game. If we would want to start there we could, and then move on to original content later.Exactly. I think we can extract DirectX (.x) files from the models.bin file. I'll check out how we can edit those later (Change 'm into AutoCAD's .dxf? Or Blender's .obj? What works best?)
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I guess .fbx. It seems that's what people are using with Unreal.
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Aye aye capt'n. I'll be home in two hours and I'll get to it right away.
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I may or may not have 700 .obj files right now.
I may need to register the software though (3D Object Converter) because now every 5th triangle/poly is removed :/ (And a license is 50$. Ouch.)
Onlu .obj files btw. I couldn't find .fbx :s (Mind you, every 5th triangle is removed, hence the crappy look)
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@Judas
I think obj should work anyway. Is it importing the .x into blender that removed every 5th triangle, but the exporter works fine?EDIT: By exporter I meant the program that pulls the model out of machines.
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The Exporter/Converter is the part that removes the 5th triangle. Blender is working as it should (free and perfectly smooth)
(Blender doesn't allow importing .x files tho)
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@Judas
Ah, hm. That's weird. I'm going to see if there are any other converters and probably test this one as well. -
I've asked the guys that created the converter if we could get a free key (even if it's only for a single use), this being the product of love, sweat and tears. :) (But looking at others is wise, as I don't know if they'll respond positively if at all)
