New engine please

For developmental things relating to the graphics of the game.
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Z-Man
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Re: New engine please

Post by Z-Man »

Unity does not just have a free personal edition now, all the features formerly only available in the pro version are available for free (as long as you don't make more than X$ per year with X being suitably large that I forgot what it was, something around 150000).
They also just recently released a version with a proper networking subsystem.

What kind of kills Unreal are the high system requirements for development. My PC I built late last year barely makes the minimum requirements. I should check one day how much that really matters.

Neither Unreal nor Unity are readily GPL compatible, as far as I can tell from the basic fact that redistribution of works produced with them is tied to conditions. To actually reuse our GPL code, we'd either have to re-licence all of it (by talking to all past contributors) or invoke some iffy construct; distribute a basic 'game' with an interface to plugins under a licence that is compatible with the engine and the plugin interface being licensed under the LGPL, and the old GPL code then is one of those plugins (only being a derived work of the LGPL interface and thus fine, legally). I don't know how difficult this would be to pull off technically in Unreal at all. In Unity, native DLLs are supported, but I think only plain C interfaces, so that would be a bit YUCK.
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Re: New engine please

Post by Word »

It seems like Z-Man posted here but I can't see the post. Anyway, I'd be glad if that would come to fruition, with the devs' approval (btw, could we please get a status update? where is everyone?).
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Lucifer
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Re: New engine please

Post by Lucifer »

Panda 3d. We'd write the new Armagetron in python!

I just ran one of the instructables they have available and it's a 150 line flight simulator. Sure, the physics isn't there, but it can link to ODE (we wouldn't need that, we have our own physics model we'd use, and we could probably factor it out into a plugin or something). Also, the terrain is just a terrain map, but come on, flying a plane in 150 lines is really really awesome.

I'm looking at it because we're still talking about doing a family game, we're now debating one of three games (all networked, and the first two are clones because the best available versions do not support multiplayer):

* Star Trek: Conquest. The wii game, made into a networked multiplayer game.
* Elite: Obviously, we want to be able to fight each other or be on the same team.
* Stargate: SG-1. If we do this, we'll make it flexible enough to support Atlantis, but really, having this as an action-packed RPG would be awesome, and my family's big enough to field an SG team.

We haven't decided which we'll do, but if we do either of the last two, we'll use Panda 3d and python. ;)

(Panda also comes with networking)
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Re: New engine please

Post by Word »

I take it "we" is the company you're working for (not referring to the Arma crew, except in the first line)?
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Lucifer
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Re: New engine please

Post by Lucifer »

No, last time I checked, the company I worked for fixed cars, not built computer games. ;)
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Re: New engine please

Post by ConVicT »

Lucifer wrote:No, last time I checked, the company I worked for fixed cars, not built computer games. ;)
They both use engines.
Get to it!
Apply your mechanics to light cycles!
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Ratchet
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Re: New engine please

Post by Ratchet »

Jip wrote:Unity also has now a personal free edition.
Since my daily job is programming c# in Unity projects, I would definitely help porting arma.
But I don't know anything about GPL licensing and Unity...
Tron in C#/Unity would be EPIC.

Also, regarding Visual Studio Express (@Z-Man):

Behold, Community version!
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Re: New engine please

Post by kyle »

If tron needs to be rewritten, we should probably make it so that it can run on mobile devices.
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Re: New engine please

Post by Z-Man »

And now Unity has an experimental build of the editor for Linux:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity- ... es.350256/
For me, that's the last practical barrier and I'll start seriously experimenting with it. Sometime later. The caveat is that they explicitly say that future support may be dropped any time.
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Re: New engine please

Post by Word »

Woohoo. Armagetron's future is (almost) saved. :)
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Re: New engine please

Post by aP|Nelg »

@Z-Man, Lucifer: Could you have 0.5 be the version of armagetronad with this experiment?
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Re: New engine please

Post by sinewav »

aP|Nelg wrote:@Z-Man, Lucifer: Could you have 0.5 be the version of armagetronad with this experiment?
Given that odd numbers are reserved for experimental releases, probably. But then again, considering the amount of rewriting involved it might be more appropriate to rename to Armagetron 3D and reset the version numbers!
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Re: New engine please

Post by aP|Nelg »

sinewav wrote:
aP|Nelg wrote:@Z-Man, Lucifer: Could you have 0.5 be the version of armagetronad with this experiment?
Given that odd numbers are reserved for experimental releases, probably. But then again, considering the amount of rewriting involved it might be more appropriate to rename to Armagetron 3D and reset the version numbers!
Why don't we keep Armagetron Advanced and keep the version numbers though? is that not possible?
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Re: New engine please

Post by sinewav »

aP|Nelg wrote:is that not possible?
The devs can do whatever they want. The can rewrite the code and make Armagetron .5 a spreadsheet program, but that also wouldn't make sense. But the names and numbers are not important. What is important is development, so let's not worry about the superfluous.
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Re: New engine please

Post by [Anonymous] »

sinewav wrote:
aP|Nelg wrote:is that not possible?
The devs can do whatever they want. The can rewrite the code and make Armagetron .5 a spreadsheet program, but that also wouldn't make sense. But the names and numbers are not important. What is important is development, so let's not worry about the superfluous.
Well Said.
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