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ralphtricky -> RE: Patch news (3.5) (3/24/2015 3:16:07 AM)
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ORIGINAL: jakobscalpel
I'm not Ralph and I've never seen the code for this game, but I'm a professional programmer and I've read Ralph's posts carefully, as we all have. I've also donated time to an old text based baseball simulator that has similar "problems" to those Ralph described so I have a bit of background. My opinions below.
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1) Why are we trying to update TOAW 3 at this point? PC's, OS, graphics, monitors, etc. have all progressed in leaps and bounds. It's like trying to retool a 2 barrel carburetor for a 1979 VW. WHY?
When the UI and game engine code bases are not separated completely, sometimes modifying within the confines of the existing game code is easier and faster than re-writing from scratch. Rewriting from scratch is an *incredibly* tempting decision to make when presented with old code but it often is not the correct choice. It is hard to describe how many hours of work usually go into a game like TOAW.
The code was pretty good. There were only a couple of really bad areas caused by it's DOS origins requiring the use of polling in the dialog boxes and a global mouse variable. I remember that I patched one area where the AI behavior was determined by the mouse location! There were only a few areas like the pathfinder which used global variables abusively.
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2) You (Ralph, Erik, et al) probably cannot or will not speak about TOAW 4 (due to NDA's etc) yet it would seem to me that since TOAW 3 was written by someone else (Norm K.) and he's not involved AFAIK, and Ralph is trying to reverse engineer the game's DNA, then wouldn't the time, money and resources be better spent on creating a WHOLE NEW GAME that captures the essence of TOAW 3 but in BRAND NEW game engine, graphics, etc????????
Budgets for any game the size and complexity of TOAW are almost certainly far beyond what Matrix would be willing to pay. This stuff is hard and time consuming!
There are also more games that end up in the graveyard than get completed.
http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2014/01/kickstarter_research_highlights_low_delivery_rates_of_game_projects
TOAW also was NOT the first game, it's based on Norm's earlier works.
If you wanted to recreate it, you'd be a lot better of starting with a smaller game with a single focus, then expanding.
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3) What would it take in terms of money and resources to write a completely NEW game engine that allows easy mods and that has similar features right out of the box??? Not some watered down limited "East Fron" game with 16 future modules, but a WHOLE NEW GAME like TOAW 3 was that allows you to create ANY battle in ANY era????
To question #3, I think that perhaps a kickstarter or similar campaign could raise funds given enough gamer interest.
My complete wild-ass guess? 300k minimum, with dedicated programmers, testers, etc that are willing to work long hours for less than full market value simply because they love the game. Perhaps the TOAW engine is simpler than I suspect and this number is high. But it won't be high by much.
At the Gates is funded with $100K from kickstarter and is currently on Steam pre-sales. Jon Shafer was also the lead designer for Civ 5 for a game with broader appeal, so was able to get funding. I believe that he's still the only developer, hiring artists as needed.
$100-150K is probably more reasonable if you could find a developer/designer willing to work for that. I doubt they'd get that much from kickstarter, though.
If you want to understand the complexity, Quake 3 has nearly 310K lines (including comments and blank lines) TOAW has about 170K.
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