Engine

[mvbarracuda]

Fair enough Didn't want to come across as harsh or bitter.

Concerning the whole engine discussion: I think it will mainly depend on the question if inxile wants to actually use a real 3d engine or an isometric 2d one. Right now the most people in the game industry will tell you that isometric 2d isn't really state of the art anymore by any means. They would rather propose to use a real 3d engine and lock the camera in an isometric POV.

This said: I personally prefer the looks of the old school isometric 2d RPGs over their modern 3d counterparts. E.g. I'll take Arcanum, Fallout or PS:T any day over Fallout: New Vegas, Skyrim or Mass Effect from a visual and artistic POV. It's hard to explain but somehow these old school RPGs had a certain kind of visual magic associated with them that you can't properly reproduce with a 3d engine. At least no developer has managed to do so for me (yet). If you get the analogy: Monkey Island is (to me) only Monkey Island if it's done in the old school 2d way. Adventures are another genre where I prefer the old games (Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, ToonStruck (if anyone remembers this one)) over modern 3d adventure games from an artistic POV.

[geezer]

Unless Wastelend is going to be open source doesn't the LGPL prevent them from using FIFE?

[DerRidda]

The GPL family of licenses never has at any point in time prohibited you from going commercial, in fact the GPL was designed with commercial usage in mind. You just can't stop anyone from redistributing the code for free. But for games that's a non-issue because all the important stuff, the art assets and the like is not covered by the GPL at all and you can easily tie a license to those that prohibits redistribution.
If anything games are the easiest thing to handle commercially with an open source license because of that fact.

[mvbarracuda]

Just the engine code is licensed under LGPL. So this does NOT touch the data files, e.g. graphics, sounds, videos, etc. So these data files would be released under a different license than the engine code in case inxile goes down the open source engine road. I personally think it's highly unlikely that inxile will chose an open source engine for their game though. Never say never though

LGPL also permits you to link against closed source libraries. You just have to open source the changes you've made to the core engine.

[dmazz]

Silent Storm engine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Storm_engine
Advanced physics model, nearly all structures are destructible, and ragdoll physics is employed for bodies, Three-dimensional mapping allows for obstruction calculations and cover effects from any direction. Bullets ricochet, and their stopping power depends on the strength of the weapon. Modeled are materials' effectiveness at stopping ordinance and visibility based on lighting conditions.

The engine has been used in a variety of games, so it's well documented. Silent Storm, Silent Storm: Sentinels, Night Watch, Hammer & Sickle and Day Watch. And a modified version of this engine was used for Heroes of Might and Magic V. The 3D graphics of which don't look half bad and whose pc requirements are modest 1.5 ghz 512mb ram. And it's old, the publisher who owns the engine went bankrupt in Jan 2011 and was bought out, so it should come dirt cheap. This engine should take care of the nuts and bolts of implementing combat as the silent storm turn based combat system is probably the best system out there, better than JA2 system imo. All that's left is to put in a nice text dialogue system and that's it. Hoping for a Fallout Tactics like combat system though.

Also why limit the game with linux/macosx compatibility?. Linux has 1.11% market share, Macosx 7.31%. Money talks and I'll bet the majority of donators have windows as their primary os. I'd also bet the majority of both Linux and Macosx users have access to windows. Macosx with bootcamp and emulation programs, Linux users as a secondary os.

Also the owners of the silent storm engine, JoWood, bought The Adventure Company in 2006, who have worked with a variety of developers. Recently both have been bought out by Nordic games in 2011, a new company which seems to have few games under it's belt, all basic but moving up as it publishes Alan Wake. So I think the developers of this game will get a very receptive welcome from them.

I will also add that the company who owns the engine has probably seen alot of people leave. That gives the developers the opportunity to hire someone who's already worked with the silent storm engine, and more so on a WWII themed turn based strategy game, not too dissimilar to post apocalyptic as a setting. No better engine support than if it's a guy who built/worked with it for years.

[SXX]

LGPL also permits you to link against closed source libraries. You just have to open source the changes you've made to the core engine.

Are you sure about that?

I know LGPL allow me to dynamical linking some open source stuff in my commercial proprietary project, but I don't think any middleware like scaleform or speedtree allow link them with GPL licensed code.
What more important nobody will allow to distribute these libraries with some source code.

So using of open source engine mean inXile dont allowed to use some proprietary components like closed source API from nvidia/ATI for textures compression for example.
But they still can public not all code of game, but part which they own under public domain or BSD-like license.

[SXX]

Also why limit the game with linux/macosx compatibility?. Linux has 1.11% market share, Macosx 7.31%. Money talks and I'll bet the majority of donators have windows as their primary os.

http://support.humblebundle.com/custome ... statistics
Linux and Mac users usually pay more than 25% in humble bundle and I backed alot to see Wasteland 2 on my loved platforms.

If publishers wont to support platform that I use its mean they wont get my money.

[DerRidda]

Also why limit the game with linux/macosx compatibility?. Linux has 1.11% market share, Macosx 7.31%. Money talks and I'll bet the majority of donators have windows as their primary os. I'd also bet the majority of both Linux and Macosx users have access to windows. Macosx with bootcamp and emulation programs, Linux users as a secondary os.

So you LIMIT a game by making it available for MORE platforms? Check your logic processing unit, it's clearly faulty.
The facts are these versions WILL happen at the 1.5 million Dollars milestone which is highly likely to be crossed, so it's not up for debate, don't waste your time.

You know that this "Money talks" attitude is exactly the reason why Wasteland 2 didn't happen with traditional publishing models? Or you might have gotten it as a console focused first person shooter playing a red-booted grunt shooting up stuff to dubstep music.
I've heard there is this immensely popular book out there some people have chosen to live by, I don't buy into that stuff but the part about how you should treat people the same way you want to be treated still makes sense to me and applies here quite well.

[dmazz]

I was referring to a comment here saying the engine needed to be portable to macosx and linux. I don't know which or how an engine is considered linux and osx portable, but if we consider that engine choice as very important, then that disqualifies alot of candidates. I'm not against a macosx and linux port. Just worried a great engine is missing out due to ease of linux and macosx port concerns.

linux and macosx users might have made a disproportionate amount of the donators and supporters to get this project off the ground. But windows users and donors still dominate. Wasn't trying to be uncharitable, just reasonable. I assume everyone wants the best engine possible for this game.

[SXX]

linux and macosx users might have made a disproportionate amount of the donators and supporters to get this project off the ground. But windows users and donors still dominate. Wasn't trying to be uncharitable, just reasonable. I assume everyone wants the best engine possible for this game.

Linux and mac users have same problems like old-school RPG lovers.
We want to pay money but nobody want to give us normal product, so we all try to support developers who make games for us.
And RPG gamers want to pay, but industry doesn't give us a quality product.
I don't think wasteland get more than 100,000 backers, so even 5000 linux backers make sense.
We all need work together to get what we want, because even together we are minority in all players mass.

Its reason why cross-platform support is more important than Uber engine which unimportant for RPG.

[yezu]

Also why limit the game with linux/macosx compatibility?. Linux has 1.11% market share, Macosx 7.31%. Money talks and I'll bet the majority of donators have windows as their primary os. I'd also bet the majority of both Linux and Macosx users have access to windows. Macosx with bootcamp and emulation programs, Linux users as a secondary os.

1. People from inXile promised Linux and Mac OS X versions. How it would make them look if the broke this promise?
2. You'd be surprised how many people use Linux and Mac OS X exclusively.
3. How do you measure market share? I have sources giving values ranging from 0.8% to 12.0% for desktop Linux That is from 8 to 150 million users. Do you think that this demographic is really worth ignoring? Multiply that times 2 for Mac

Also I'm sure that any of you hoping for a 2d game will be disappointed. Developing high quality 2d games right now is VERY expensive, and for a RPG, which needs A LOT of content, it's pretty much suicide. I know that a lot of you are suggesting FIFE and similar engines but sorry guys this is not FreedroidRPG or even Eschalon and it's not the early 90's any more.

[Bryce777]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyzJ4NhV ... 3Wi3zHCy0=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReVinXNu ... XXC2O6nZY=

If we're going to talk about engines then C4 is a great choice. It has inbuilt physics engine and I can personally attest it's easy to make a top-down game with it and that it's extremely stable. It's also pretty cheap and comes with lifetime updates. The engine looks good in the demos even though they are mostly "programmer art" but it really shines when you take the effort to put in good art assets!

A true 2D engine is going to make things hard to mod.

Probably they have an engine anyways but just in case.

[DerRidda]

Seems like C4 also doesn't support Linux. And no, they haven't decided on an engine just yet. I got this in response to a question about the tech on Kickstarter:

Thursday Mar 15, 8:40pm EDT
Thanks for your pledge! We haven't fully settled on our engine yet but are evaluating a few different options. When we do have our engine set in stone, we will certainly announce it to the world on our Wasteland 2 forums. Check them out for updates!

So of course they are doing research of their own but keep the suggestions coming. Just make sure they support all 3 major operating systems and are actually available, I have seen plenty of suggestions for old and probably unsupported engines here, or some that seem to be in house engines for some specific developer.

Good advise is, don't link to screenshots or videos but link to the actual website where one can see the features, get eval. kits and buy a license. The odds are, if you can't find the place to buy that license it's probably not available.

[geezer]

Multiplatform is a moot point now is it not? Unless the donations don't reach 1.5 mil it's going to be in and no doubt only cross-platform engines are going to be considered.

[Bryce777]

C4 supports many platforms, but not some of the critical console platforms like xbox (some support), which is why it's probably been ignored by big companies in spite of making pathetic engines like gamebryo (used by bethesda) look like a tinkertoy.

C4 engine is going to support iOS soon and then it will support linux. It's actually very easy to port to linux, the only issue is it puts a bigger burden on the dev as far as supporting drivers and testing goes. If a company like inxile were to request I'm sure it would become a priority. Sadly the engine has been ignored by mainstream games in spite of the excellent graphics features and overall high quality.

[skuphundaku]

At the moment, for a modern multi-platform 3D engine, I see 3, maybe 4, options:

1) Build it in-house - may take too long to get it right
2) OGRE 3D (http://www.ogre3d.org/) - it's just a rendering engine, not a complete game engine. There are a lot of plugins and tools, including a working scene editor (http://www.ogitor.org/HomePage). Some of the plugins are nothing short of fantastic: http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=49849. However, getting everything into a working development environment and creating all the necessary tools may require quite a lot of work.
3) Unigine (http://unigine.com/products/unigine/) - should work out of the box across Windows/Linux/MacOS
4) Torque 3D (http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d) - as it was already mentioned, Age of Decandence and Dead State are already using it, but, AFAIK, the Linux/MacOS support is still in beta, so this may not be a good multi-platform option.

[Bryce777]

Torque is awful. Ogre may as well make your own since it has no tools, plus it's very hard to debug. Unigine I am not so sure of. There's also Unity but it kind of sucks, especially for GUI, and I don't think you'd have an easy time getting it to make a turn based classic RPG.

Honestly if they have no engine yet I don't see how they can do it so quickly, but maybe with several veteran programmers it can go quickly.

[skuphundaku]

There's also Unity but it kind of sucks, especially for GUI, and I don't think you'd have an easy time getting it to make a turn based classic RPG.

Before we even get to its suitability for RPGs, which may be a problem for all present-day commercial engines, Unity has no Linux support. That takes it out of the picture.

There is also idTech 4, but I haven't looked up any tools for it. The tools may be a problem. On the other hand, it's GPL and it may, very well, be the most advanced of all the available options.

[geezer]

I could actually see them using something like Ogre3D. it would be sort of a hybrid approach. They would have to do more stuff in house than for a complete game engine, but they may actually prefer that level of control. Who knows.

The lack of solid linux support for C4 seems problematic. It's true that OS X does a lot of things the Linux way under the hood, but adding support for it...I don't think that's going to happen and even if it does it will be in alpha or beta form. I think the last thing InXile is going to want is any potential source of more bugs. The engine does look nice though.

I took a look at the wikipedia listing of game engines and there aren't that many possibilities for free or near free engines, partially because of the GPL, although maybe they can find a way to get around the GPL by open sourcing certain parts of the engine. Seems like a stretch to me though. There are a huge number of commercial engines on that page though. Too many for me to look at each one and check platform and isometric view support and try to get some idea of cost. Many commercial engines are notoriously expensive and obviously this project needs something relatively cheap.

Probably 100k at the most and anyone who doesn't care that much about graphics (which includes quite a few backers) might be annoyed at that kind of allocation of resources. I could live with 100k for the engine if necessary because I am a bit of a graphics whore. A sucker for eye candy. For anything more than Age of Decadence graphics I consider it to be in the optional but nice category though. Even from a graphics whore perspective the talent of the art team is really more important than the engine, but I think the unigine would be awfully nice.

[geezer]

Using the Doom 3 engine would be amazing if InXile could somehow get around the GPL.