Battlezone 3 - what are we waiting for?

[cheesepuffly]

You mean BZII 1.3TA5?

Everything is still mostly the same.

[bigbadbogie]

Actually, I beleive there are three years until FE. Not certain, though.

FE's campaign begins in late 2009.

The year that Core was nearly destroyed was 2005.

[Nielk1]

Would assuming another 5 years till Hadean incursion if not preemptively attacked be accurate enough to the events not altered by that?

[Russian Roulette]

That means, engine-wise, people should be looking at current games that deliver that same physics rush that BZ1 did that are capable of being expanded to support base building.

Here's your engine!
It's amazing, easily customizable, very powerful, free, and can adapt to any need.
I would even like to add this to the battlezone II engine, if possible... GSH?

Check it out!
OGRE 3D
http://www.ogre3d.org

[Nielk1]

Only if we had noticed GSH had taken up the DX9 challenge before he got anywhere. It was a surprise to us testers to.

[GSH]

Ogre is a neat engine, to be sure, but there's license issues -- it's LGPL source code, which can't be intermingled with closed source-- and I think it would have taken longer to rewrite DX6 code to speak to Ogre. DX6 and DX9 are closer cousins than DX6 and Ogre.

-- GSH

[TheJamsh]

check out the thing Tempest Storm pointed us too... DX9 allows for some NEAT addons.

[bigbadbogie]

Except that is doesn't work.

[Nielk1]

Except that is doesn't work.

Set it to start off toggle on a key.

[bigbadbogie]

How?

[Avatar]

I think I missed that, what's Breed?

Breed was...  well...  here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breed_(video_game)

It went downhill after the demo (I hear) and never took off. 

-Av-

[AHadley]

Shame, sounds like it was quite a good game too. I'll have to look out for it.

[Dx]

Breed could have been great but the publisher wanted into the act and modded the developers work which prevented the updated code from ever being released as CDV didn't want to break their modded mission scripts in order to fix the game bugs.

CDV shipped outdated code then blamed the developer, no one ever got the updated code patch from either one of them. Then i heard the lead programmer used the pay from CDV to buy himself a new car instead of paying the workers.

The game engine was said to be used for football game development after that.

The tank, fighter and dropship was fun in the demo, the mothership was pretty cool. I always wanted to have a BSG type battle in space.

[xSSx Grizzly]

It already has, but I take it you mean BZ3

Yeah 

[RAVEgun]

I haven't really followed all the community additions to the story line/plot. But I sure think it's awesome there's so much creativity and initiative here.

Again I think it would be awesome if we were to create a current gen base on which we can create lots and lots o' Battlzone.

I understand there is some skepticism about creating Battlezone 3, perhaps it's wouldn't be very fruitful to create it with so many great mod already made or in development that could also be considered Battlezone 3.
So I though it might be better to ditch that idea and go for something that might be more interesting for all of us:

The core would mostly consist out of extending the vehicle API to incorporate the unique Battlezone vehicle handling physics. Most popular current platforms already have API's for wheel driven, track driven, and hover vehicles. Modifying it so that the hovering is authentic to that of the Bz tanks would be the core challenge. Second challenge would be to create generic terrain palettes (set of assets such as rocks or terrain features) that would give modders and mappers a powerful way to create very nice, realistic and detailed terrain. Third challenge would then be to program a versatile base building/unit creation API that's easy to modify and extend. However that would be all much further down the development schedule.

This would enable us to create high end content for it. If we develop it so that it's very open, well documented and modifiable, that would give the community much more power and possibilities.

After that I'm sure the community will pretty much take care of the rest Mods, SP, IA maps, we could take it anywhere we'd want. Reworking the old Battlezone and Battlezone 2, could be.

I've done some more research and I'm ready to approach some other developers to join me. Through my experience with mod building learned it's better to get something out quick and release often, to keep the effort and the support for it alive, and make the development a little more transparent/open. For now I'm thinking of just a 'proof of concept'. 1 vehicle, 1 slap of terrain, 1 weapon. That already implies a quite large amount of work. Think it would be best to just try to manage that first, and listen to feedback. If you'd like to join the effort PM me.