RtCW (Multiplayer) Remake on D3/UDK...Thoughts?

(eiM) #21

I can just say that making a proper anticheat is probably as big of a job as the whole project you arleady plan. There are alternatives out there like TZAC for ET or different free open source anti cheats that are even used in leagues (dont remember names atm). You really should not let that topic stop you. There will be cheaters, but if commercial titles cant stop them how should you :wink:

(DerSaidin) #22

Hello,

Since making a few ET maps, I’ve been working on Weaver for… (/me looks at date on that post) over three years. Longer than the date on the post because I was planning and testing things well before posting that. I have nearly done it, we are so close to a beta release (note: I’ve been saying that for years - this time for sure ;D).

I thought I’d briefly share some of my first hand experiences for you.

  • As eiM said, one of the hardest parts is finding the right people. There are a lot of different skills you need (3d, textures, graphics, sounds, animations, code, etc.). You need a variety of people, and each needs to be adequately skilled, and needs to - somehow - be motivated enough for long enough to get work done.
  • You need a core team who is as dedicated and committed as you, which covers the most important skills (code, 3d, textures). You need this to be able to progress continually, and to ensure the core of the game has a reasonably consistent style.
  • You will be frustrated seeing skilled artists working on random stuff (i.e. speed modeling contests - in your eyes a pointless waste of time) that you will not be able to interest in your project. This is why it is so hard to find people - the vast majority don’t care about your project.
  • Unless you know them before hand (in which case they may fall into your core team), you need to show work completed to entice anyone to join your effort. Until then its just a worthless forum post - they won’t care about your project.
  • Some skills like animations, you’ll need less of and you can bring in people temporarily
  • Some skills like 3d modeling or texturing, you’ll be using the entire time to produce a map of visual quality to match the modern engine.
  • Working on a team can boost your morale/productivity if you see each other producing work and feel compelled to produce yourself. The opposite is also true.
  • If you find someone who is both skilled and willing to join, they still might not actually produce anything much for you.
  • You will get heaps of noobs offering to help, you ask them to do something simple, i.e. model a chair and they’ll disappear without doing anything. As a rule of thumb, if they haven’t done anything before they will be useless - but do give them the chance to prove otherwise.
  • This will take you years, you will spend much of your free time (or get nowhere). Your enthusiasm will fluctuate.
  • There are sites like opengameart.org which can be good, but they will only have a few things you want, and your art will start to look very mismatched. These sites are probably more useful for finding people you can lure to work directly on your project (put their work on opengameart.org as well as using it in your project - give back).
  • As the leader of the project, you need to drive it by doing more work than everyone else. Showing them progress and inspire them to produce. You can’t lead a project like this by providing “ideas and management” you need to produce more tangible artifacts such as operational code or artwork ingame.

I have got this far from building a good core team with the important skills: myself (map design, code), Trak (3d, textures, mapper) and Jani (2d gfx). Trak joined before that date of the post in the first link, Jani only about a year ago. Jani and, particularly, Trak have given the project life ( <3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3 ). If you don’t find skilled people who are dedicated long term you are screwed.
Lots of other people, including eiM, have made much smaller contributions, but you need the core team.

I have spent over $1K contracting artists (cheapest people I could find) to produce bits of art I couldn’t find skilled volunteers to do. The vast majority of this went to the player model - I decided given the time I had invested I was willing to pay for a nice playermodel which is kind of the centerpiece of the artwork.

I haven’t got up to preventing cheating yet. Ultimately hackers own their PC. It is theirs to control, if they really want to, they can hack your game client and fool any detection system. The way to combat them is give players a token (e.g. CD keys) so you can ban them, and make it difficult to get a new one. Competition will require players to register their token so if that token is banned you’ll know. As eiM said organized competitions can deal with it, just worry about making your game awesome for them to want to play it.

I don’t know you I recognize the name though, perhaps I could interest you in Weaver instead? :wink: or if you’ve worked on any smaller projects like a map or small mod before. If I may make some guesses about you, my apologies… Judging from your enthusiasm for RTCW and ETQW, if you had made a map or mod before it would be for one of these. If you had you probably would have posted about it on these forums, yet I see a small post count which makes me think you haven’t… Is leading a full scale game project like this a good place to start?

So no doubt what I’ve just posted is pretty disheartening. Thats because its honest.
To have any chance of success, after reading this post you had better still look determined - like this x1000. If you do you might have a chance. Because the main thing you need is determination to drive you for years to come - be prepared to do the whole project yourself, spend your money on it, whatever it takes.

TL;DR: You will fail. If you are determined to start in-spite of this you might succeed, if you also happen to find the right people to help (needle in haystack).

(Dashiva) #23

Wow, thanks for the reply. You probably know me from #etpro on Freenode.

Yes, I know I’m crazy. I’m also pretty motivated about this. It seriously bugs me that the ball has been dropped on RtCW like 5 times in the last 10 years (starting with ET even). Add that to wanting to really make something of my own and it was like the perfect storm. I’ve made a couple of competition mods for certain maps in the past, and had a pretty good working map back in 2005 or so that I never released, so I’m familiar with Radiant (unfortunately, I still still think that the description of ‘drinking water through a fork’ applies to it especially in light of the ease of use of newer dev tools for other game engines). After about a month of research I pretty much know what is going to be involved in this, and I agree that It’s a huge job for one person. However, I’ll be able to work a lot off of other people’s work (thankfully) and save months of time.

Essentially as it stands now I’m going to be building the game as a mod of ETXreal or Openwolf. Basically it will be just a reskin of ET with more modern graphics, so I’ll yank the default models and weapons and replace them and then have new maps. The other option is to piggyback on Sturm’s (amazing) Dark Sense of War, but this would involve having to code essentially all the game code involved in RtCW style gameplay, and I don’t think I’m up to it. Either way there’s some pretty definite ways to get to the end of this. I am also prepared to pay for custom character models, but hopefully I won’t have to do that with the advent of things like makehuman and freely available FPS animations.

Now, about your Weaver project, it’s really strange, I had that exact same idea for a mod a few months ago. However I could never figure out how to get a magic system work well in a FPS setting, I’d be interested to see how you do it. I’d totally be down to help you a bit, just depends on what you need.

(Tankey) #24

Indeed. I prefer games like W:ET. Best shooting game since all those years.

Would be awesome to see a look-a-like game of ET with better graphics.

(Mateos) #25

[QUOTE=Tankey;392222]Indeed. I prefer games like W:ET. Best shooting game since all those years.

Would be awesome to see a look-a-like game of ET with better graphics.[/QUOTE]

Caugh ETXreaL caugh

(Indloon) #26

caugh Tr3b working silently on that caugh

(Mateos) #27

If I reply it will maybe goes too much off-topic isn’t it? (Maybe the next release will have surprises, personally I like surprises :stuck_out_tongue: )

(Dashiva) #28

It’s important to say that I’m not out to recreate ET. It’s going to be a new game based on a new story/design. ETXreal is great, and I hope it keeps people playing ET for another 10 years but quite honestly after 2000 or so hours of it I need to move on.

(Dragonji) #29

Agreed!

*10 characters needed.

(.Chris.) #30

Everyone should in my opinion, nothing is ever going to match ET so why try. People need to try and be more open to new ideas and not just dismiss a new ‘ET style’ game when it offers something that isn’t ET with modern graphics. ET:QW could have been awesome if people got behind it to modify the game like they did with ET fixing bugs and adding new content and such.

(Mateos) #31

If ET is in our hands, it’s because before there has been RtCW. So there could be an good after-ET, nope?

(FFSturm) #32

Ofc

Chris:Everyone should in my opinion, nothing is ever going to match ET so why try

Why match it when you can actually do it better?

With that said, I don’t mean to add Shiny BlueGreen flying Mite-Crabs.(http://www.supercheats.com/guides/files/thumbnails/guid/the-legend-of-zelda-twilight-princess/bug5.jpg
http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111101114911/wolfenstein/images/thumb/6/66/Geist.png/340px-Geist.png)

How? is the question

(Dashiva) #33

Lol what? Is that an in game screen shot or something I missed in W2?

(Dashiva) #34

Ugh, never mind. Apparently I never played W2 single player and missed the fleas.

(Dashiva) #35

Just an update on this. I’m still working on figuring out what the right engine is. It might be Torque3d, to be honest. I’ve tried ET:Xreal and it’s non-functional on ATI hardware.

(eiM) #36

what exactly do you mean with non-function on ATI hardware? I’ve ATI hardware and I developed on Xreal for some time? There ofcourse were some performence issues compared to Nvidia but nothing like “non-functional”.

(Indloon) #37

Cryengine 3 :smiley:

(Dashiva) #38

ET:Xreal is non functional because it takes me 5 minutes to load a map on anything ATI. It takes 5 minutes on my Radeon 6520 on my laptop, and 5 minutes on my Radeon 6770 on my desktop with a Sandy Bridge i5-2400. I don’t have my GTX 460 with me, it probably runs fine on that. It has something to do with how the shaders are cached. ATI has really terrible OpenGL drivers so it’s probably not entirely Xreal’s fault. Also, I’ve been testing Doom3 with things like Sikkmod and it’s non playable without having to install 3rd party utilities because ATI is just horrible at OpenGL.

Also, after playing QW again today I continue to be frustrated with the Idtech 4 play experience. I’m not sure Idtech4 is really good for anything tbh, so that’s out. With ET:Xreal I feel like there are so many little niggling problems I’d have to fix I could have churned out half a dozen maps by the time I fix them. Also, almost all ET formats are deprecated so I’d really have to code a lot of the game all over again anyway. If you’ve tried using MDS/MDX formats you know how hard it is to do modern things for character design. Unless OpenWolf turns out to be tenable It’s either UDK or Torque at this point. Torque has its problems but at least I get source access. Also, the pipeline is a good two or three times faster than Radiant for level creation.

Cryengine is great but there’s no way I’m going to get the 10 people that I’d need to work on a team to get a real game out. Unless there’s some sort of knight in shining armor I’m going to be doing this myself.

(reaply) #39

This sounds good.

I’m sure that the gameplay can be replicated. And levels might be able to be in better detail (not that they aren’t good at all.)

(etwolfmod) #40

Is there going to be a linux release in case you use UDK? Cryengine3, UDK all those freeware tools dont come in non-windows flavors. Does steam integration require steam to play? I’m not playing this if/when Steam is mandatory to install and play. I still use xfire.