Just thought I’d bounce this off of some people. I’m pretty much set to attempt a sort of remake of the RtCW multiplayer component on a modern engine. I’ve been playing games like QW and BF3 lately and they get lost in the minutiae of leveling up. When I play Battlefield I feel like I’m playing World of Warcraft rather than a shooter. I really haven’t liked where FPSes in general have gone and really think that RtCW and ET were the golden days. That being said I’d like to take a crack at making my own iteration of the RtCW multiplayer. The goals are:
Class Based
Infantry Only
Arcade Feel (as opposed to the realism most WW2 games tend to focus on)
Smaller Maps (16 Players max)
WW2/Occult Theme (This was really cool in RtCW)
Emphasis on shooting and tactics over experience points and spam (see Quakewars for an example of how not to accomplish this).
I’ve come to the point where I have level design worked out and blocked for three or four levels and am now at the point where I’m ready to put serious time into it. However I think I need to make a choice on which way I am going to go engine/development wise. I’ve been learning UDK mapping for the past couple of weeks, and I’ve used radiant in the past for ET maps. I’ve basically come to a crossroads in regards to a design that I can execute in a reasonable amount of time (3 or 4 hours a night over a few months).
The obvious answer would be to just extend ET/Xreal but I don’t want to do this for a couple of reasons. First: the ET community is at a point where the price of entry is really high. You just can’t go into it as a noob and get any real enjoyment when everyone’s been playing the game for at least 5 years. While I like the gunplay it’s stagnant. I’d like to move away from the id3 engine itself for this reason. Everyone knows the feel of it. Secondly: we all have decent PCs at this point, with UDK, at least, I can code for DX11 and do more modern things in the engine to make it look and feel better.
So here are the pros and cons as I see them:
UDK Pros:
Up to date graphics/physics/code. Good default “feel” to the engine.
Large user base with good forum support and tutorials.
Steam integration.
Well thought out tools.
Works well for terrain/outdoor maps.
Built in Voicecom/matchmaking, etc.
Cons:
Emphasis on static meshes means I need to learn to model proficiently.
Hard to get prefabs for WW2 themed games.
Not open-source, no Linux support, no engine code for low level functions.
Doom3 Pros:
Open source.
Large numbers of prefabs.
Lots of community experience.
Open-source, easier to mod, will bring in the Linux community.
Faster mapping.
Cons:
Engine and netcode feel bad.
Terrible at rendering outdoor environments (though I have heard that the megatexture source is included so this may change)
Outdated (no widescreen, multi-thread).
I’m assuming the basic outdatedness of the d3 engine will be rectified in a few months with something like iodoom3, but that still leaves me with having to use a poorly performing engine for development. However, UDK seems like it will take up a lot of time on the modelling end of things. I’d have to have a larger team and the UDK scene seems like it isn’t really interested in a RtCW type project.
So, there you have it, what would you do if you were in my shoes? I’m assuming I’m going to have to collaborate with a coder and modeler to get this done, but I’d like to build up a few maps before I let this out into the wild.
Thanks.
Would be awesome.
