An ambitious project

Vendayan · January 13, 2015, 04:07:48 AM

Over the past few months, I've been putting roughly 15 hours a week into a pet project of mine. Inspired mostly by my admiration for NWN, EfU and the EfU community, I've been attempting to make a similar game of my own. I call this my "reboot" project.

While I don't hope to make any sort of a NWN clone, I am looking to capture the essence of what has made NWN and EfU so successful for over a decade. Compared to many modern engines which have more recently been used by Bioware and others such as Bethesda, the Aurora engine that powers NWN is showing a lot of age. To spite this however, EfU and other communities have managed to push the limits of NWN to create many extremely memorable settings and stories. My ambitious intent is to create a new engine which will greatly expand these limits and allow for an entirely new level of immersion.

((Let me add that while I would love to be able to see EfU in some way ported to this project, this is obviously a personal project. I'm not planning to present this off as being the "future" of EfU. Nor do I expect it to become some sort of official EfU sponsored endeavour. Let any suggestions to the contrary be officially disclaimed.))

I'm not naive enough to suggest that this will be easy.

It could be argued that making a new engine is the harder route given the number of other engines which already exist. Unfortunately, none of them are very friendly at all towards a customizable 20-60 player persistent world. For all I've seen, the Aurora engine was the last of it's kind to properly support that niche.

Won't lie. The project will involve months, if not years of programming before it's polished. This isn't just the development of a shiny new rendering engine. First, I need to finish the toolset I've been working on. It may seem to be a less exciting or counter-intuitive place to start, but without a toolset, I can't build content to test the other pieces against. Once I've built the first "working" version of a campaign file, I can start building the server side to make it live and the client side to present it for a Player/DM's interaction. The initial phase actually has me creating many prototypes of these campaign files manually as I adjust the file format until the toolset is ready to take over.

To spite this, the programming has not been my biggest concern. I'm a hardened veteran of countless bloody campaigns in that field. I've programmed for industrial PLCs, both Windows and Unix based web servers, desktop applications, iPhone apps, Android apps, Data Warehouses, etc. I can do these things using more programming languages than I have fingers and toes to count. While I don't mean to belittle the vast amount of programming tasks that this project requires, I can say confidently that not many individual tasks worry me.

Several other types of tasks do intimidate the !@#$ out of me however.

Primarily, there is the sheer magnitude of creative work that is required for such project. I am not an artist, yet I see an enormous amount of artwork ahead in the form of textures, animated and static 3D models, sound effects and tracks of music/ambience, etc. Not only do I need a ton of this content to test with, but I doubt my project would catch on if every potential host needed to start by creating every art asset from scratch before they could build a world out of them.

There is also the matter of design. Not only are there many things I haven't had time to plan, but I can't trust anything I design alone to be popular. In fact, a lot of pieces I even avoid entirely where all my ideas taste like trash. I'd love to try to open a forum (in the abstract sense) which would allow people to discuss ideas. However, I'm worried that it would become a chore of herding cats. The goal would be to develop a semi-firm documented design based on a few strong and popular opinions.

As a side note. Twice now I've wasted days by poorly recording my design. I will carefully plan a feature, only to change or simplify it while coding once I see a technical design flaw. Later I'll look at the code and think "Think is not what I remember planning!". So I'll start it over until I hit the same flaw again. That lesson I keep failing to learn is, "Don't place a minefield without making a map."

I'm not overly possessive of the project, but I am driven to see this niche genre of gaming restored to modern glory. I initially referred to the project as "mine", but as I more honestly see it, I'm currently the only one that "it has". If anyone would be interested in stepping up to this with me, I'd welcome and appreciate it.

manyscruples · January 13, 2015, 04:18:07 AM

You're doing gods work, sir. I wish you the best of luck. Hopefully you find some others who can help you with this. Perhaps you should consider some sort of crowd funding angle.

Hound · January 13, 2015, 06:34:35 AM

I'd donate to a kickstarter for this.

SatelliteMind · January 13, 2015, 09:09:54 AM

http://shardsonline.com/ Might want to check this out dude, this is the most promising thing to a spiritual sucessor to NWN in awhile. Pledges are back up so you can get into the prealpha admin program if you want to donate $200 myself I decided to pledge a lot lower but I am happy. This Q&A from the lead dev pretty much answers most of the questions your wondering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLithI0Xr0A Their youtube channel has already a couple videos up demonstrating their modding capabilities but if they pull this off this will have NwN capabilities and more. There is already a handful of NwN players there some of them are already making plans to port their respective worlds over to Shards and discussing writing a D20 ruleset. Hope to see you over there

Deadlykate · January 13, 2015, 09:25:37 AM

I have a friend that attempted to do this.

Winter Engine: https://github.com/zunath/WinterEngine/wiki/Project-Overview

Basically what he was trying to do, I think he gave up cause he didn't get enough support. I am sure he would be willing to give any advice out or what he found out attempting to this, he got decently far into it.

Vendayan · January 13, 2015, 09:35:01 PM

DK. I'll look at the source perhaps. Would your friend possibly be interested in picking it back up?

Deadlykate · January 13, 2015, 09:37:15 PM

Possible, I will ask him if I can catch him.

Gloinar · January 13, 2015, 10:02:21 PM

Lol Satellite are you a representative of Shards or something thats all I see you post about.

zunath · January 13, 2015, 10:21:31 PM

Hey man, Kate linked you to my project on Github. That was what I affectionately refer to as "Version 1" :) I've got a private repository posted on Bitbucket. If you want to be added just let me know what your username is and I'll add you. Feel free to reach out to me on Skype - should be able to find me by searching for Zunath.

zunath · January 13, 2015, 10:38:42 PM

Just to give you an idea, here are some screenshots of my work so far: http://i.imgur.com/e6bBNSg.png
http://i.imgur.com/znoDztZ.png
http://i.imgur.com/ESEurM5.png
http://i.imgur.com/v3VedQM.png

Most of my code handles back-end stuff like data access, UDP networking architecture, Lua scripting, etc. I use a framework called FlatRedBall which is a layer on top of XNA. In theory, it could be swapped out for Monogame at some point but I haven't had a need for that yet.

SatelliteMind · January 13, 2015, 10:43:22 PM

Quote from: Gloinar;422264Lol Satellite are you a representative of Shards or something thats all I see you post about.

Nah man just trying to save the dude some time. Impressive screenshots though!

Vendayan · January 14, 2015, 11:48:34 PM

VP has also, for the 12th time suggested that I use Unity for the client. This would be a possibility as well.

SatelliteMind · January 15, 2015, 03:31:08 AM

Unity is highly powerful and flexible from everything I have been hearing you can even download it for free. But in this case given that there is already a game in development which will enable you to do pretty much everything you wanted in NwN and more might be worth the wait. Or kick in $200 to get into the pre modding program. BUT if you want to make your own game I suggest taking a look at this https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/7101 Looks very much like NwN 2

Vendayan · January 16, 2015, 04:09:53 PM

I haven't written it off, but I'm admittedly hesitant to abandon my plans for a completed project. The fact is that no matter how great a client is, what makes NWN and communities like EfU great has nothing to do it's the client. Amazon could make a kindle that could narrate a novel with up to 100 different celebrity voices for supported stories. If those stories were limited to 1000 word vocabularies and only common proper names, would you buy it?

I'm far more concerned with the DM client/toolset honestly. The fact that we still play with a game that nearly an antique is proof of this. I want to give the authors and illustrators the sharpest pen possible. Solutions for clients with the fidelity to present their work are easy to find. I just need one that I can modify to fit what I build behind the scenes.

SatelliteMind · January 16, 2015, 10:22:52 PM

Shards will have a DM client which will let you do pretty much everything you wanted in NwN so I am not sure if you want to build a whole new game when another is going to be featuring that capability. What may be a better thing to do is to see how Shards turns out and if it doesn't have what you need see if there is a way you can modify it to have what you do want and if not than say screw it and do your own project. Its due in 2016 so its not that long of a wait.