What is the status of this. Curious people in eve want to know; Mocton said something might be happening here. Maybe something is.
Always nice to hear about something 6-8 months after it's announced, but meh.
I'll explain why unless you want to be doing what it sounds like you're trying to do (which is take the old game, rip out the stuff that is totally outdated, replace the stuff that never worked to start with, and fix the huge number of bugs I recall this line of games has - plus add more functionality) until 2014 using a SFB based ruleset is a good idea. It's not so much that SFB is full of awesome (which IMO it is) but that it's an already functioning, existing, mostly BALANCED game system. If you choose to create something totally new, you're going to have to figure out how to create all these game systems from scratch, balance them all against each other, etc. This will take time, probably a lot of it. SFB has the benefit of having already for the most part done these things, so the only concern is the adaptation to the game that is being created. Since you're using a already established frame that previously did a lot of this work, the only things that you'd need to work seriously on would be adding whatever additional options to it that you chose to include. Which brings me to the next thing to consider.
People think that SFC 1/2/OP is a computerized SFB. It's not really. It's a conversion of SOME of SFB. Many, many things are missing, and this causes problems. I especially recall that romulans in SFC are mostly crap because without plasma bolts (or sabot) they have a very hard time fighting equally against opponents, since their tactics are nearly universally limited to a very small bag of tricks. Similarly, fighter regen and other such things annoyed me greatly, as well as the fact that the actual fighters themselves were overpowered and underpowered at the same time. The alterations caused problems that could be mitigated by smart players - but why should they have to do this in the first place? My advice, is due to these reasons, is to take the SFB frame that you're starting with, actually FINISH adding the missing features in it (and/or make the ones that are implemented in a questionable manner, such as fighters, work correctly) and move from there. Once you have a basic working framework, you can add as much stuff as you like/is practicable on it with no problems.
The other thing that I'd say is that SFC has really only been a player vs AI game, or a game with some limited multiplayer support in it (Mplague, etc). Dynaverse...well I played it for years, and it's limitations caused me to add grey hairs to my head I think. Most of the play in what is supposed to be a multiplayer arena is against the AI, which is not exactly what comes to mind when you say multiplayer. Even then, 6 total people...not much mutliplayer in that. I suppose I've been spoiled somewhat by eve, where the max player count in a fight that I've been in was over 1200. Not that you'll likely get close to that I'd assume in anything not hosted on a dedicated server (with programming to back it up) but somewhere in the 20-30 range would be nice (and if done right would seem doable). In short, not only the multiplayer code should be scrapped, but the way mutiplayer is used in campaigns should be totally rethought. If the idea is that you're playing against other people, shouldn't you actually, you know, play most of your game time against other people?
I suppose I'll need to keep tabs on this now to see if something interesting develops. Is there a place where progress is being tracked, or is this a dead horse?
