...But in all honestly, hell, if you can program, trust me, the SFC4 project needs you.
Truly! If nothing else maybe you could give them a hint at how to make the OP/SFC3-like modifications they need to make to the EAW code. Sigh, I wish just one of you had saved the OP code.
I'm not even sure if we preserved a branch of OP. Well I'm sure we would have archived it to disc at some point but Clapton only knows where that might be. As a company, our process was a little flaky sometimes. Like, for the first few weeks of its life OP existed only on my computer. Madness.
I do remember that there were some fairly fundamental changes between OP and 3. In some cases, systems were burned pretty much down to the ground in order to support the new design. Honestly I wouldn't worry too much about how we did a given thing. Without the code to refer to you'll get a bigger payoff by solving those riddles your own way.
In fact... oh boy, here we go. Ok. Even with SFC3's modability factor there were still certain things we wanted to achieve but couldn't for lack of time. We never reached total end-user mod capability. Most notably (from memory) was the weapon code... which by extension blames the overall architecture of the engine. Generally speaking we never achieved a true separation of engine and game which is why there are severe limitations in modding it. Now I think Marc did a terrific job with the refit system (Marc was one of the good guys who really cared) but even so, there's so much more you could do.
We talked about pushing certain things out into one or more "game-specific" dlls but we never got around to it. The theory was that only the generic interface & internals would live in the .exe, while all game-specific implementations would get pushed out into a .dll. Well, I'm not sure any of those discussions actually made it that far but that
would have been the theory if they had.
What are you guys doing with the renderer? It's not even DirectX 9 is it? From EAW? I think hardware acceleration was even optional back then. Unfortunately I remember AFN about how the renderer works in that game. When I went to Shiny I had to purge the SFC engine from my brain to fit Shiny's in there. Taldren... render... absolute blank. Whatever, it's ancient and it's likely the whole thing has to go if you really want to make use of DX9/10.
I'm pretty sure the network code was a big pile of suck, too. That caused so many problems dude, it's not even funny. We so badly wanted to up the player limit per game. I mean come on, six people per game in the 21st f*****g century? Really? Six? I call shinanegins (is there a right way to spell that?). The network code should be cast into the hellfire from whence it came.
Oh no wait, I'm sorry. It's not the network that came from yonder hellfire. It was that mu********ing UI... that blood-sucking, soul-stealing thing called QUIL, and all its minion code that came with it. Wow, I had totally blocked it out. My advice? Dispose of it. As UI theories go, QUIL is right up there with the flat earth people. I mean, anything that begins by hacking some commercial app's file format probably isn't going to end well, you know?
Have you guys considered leveraging existing technology with free licenses that would be 100% compatible with your project? Like, using Ogre as the renderer or something. Ogre is seriously f*cking over-engineered if you ask me (and I realize you didn't) but, I can almost see in my head right now how you could adapt it to SFC fairly easily. And poof, you have a cross-platform renderer.
Man, maybe it's because I just burned a doob but suddenly the idea of turning out an SFC with modern visuals just gave me geekwood.
Damn you guys for making me think about this stuff!
Topic: SFC 4 Project (Read 137621 times)