As Graf pretty much said, I think the main thing it needs is a coordinator, which is basically someone with a lot of free time to do the "admin stuff", but who also understands how to assemble everything. There's quite a bit of "code" stuff that needs doing, but it's mostly a matter of collecting all the stuff and putting it in the right place (there are different versions of files in different formats and levels of completeness all over the place).
There's also quite a bit of missing knowledge in places, for example :
- Getting normal maps working.
- How the gory death animations would work with armour (I believe we may have to make a "broken up" version of every armour item, that separates in the same way as the "death body").
- Bit of confusion about the models not quite working in newer revisions of the SDK.
- Stuff to do with linking all the models up to actual in-game objects.
- The problem with the "action" occurring at the start of the animation, so the enemy is shot before the gun is fully raised to fire.
In a sense, those are all things that we either need someone to look at, or a lot of people to help with. At the moment, they're beyond my abilities and beyond my available free time. It's not as much fun as designing and making models, but it's needed to make it all work.
As well as those, there's a lot of background work to be done on fitting everything together - for example, I did a little research and testing on the options in the character selection screen, and trying to understand the game-object>model-object connection, and associated floor and inventory objects, but it's still a mess of text files and bits that don't work. There's a load of other stuff I've not even looked at yet.
Personally, I've not had time to do anything on this for the last month, which is unfortunately how my free time goes. I've certainly not abandoned it, but it's going to be several weeks before I have the chance to sit down and work through some of this stuff. There's still a lot of things I need to learn myself before I can explain to anyone else how they work.
The other issue is one of general morale, or "bottlenecks" in the production - if someone makes a major step forward with one of these areas, suddenly a load of other stuff can get done, and people will find the enthusiasm to do it. When nothing happens for a while, everything slows down and stops (for example, Horatio and others make a load of new models, none are implemented yet, Horatio stops working on models - when someone comes and does all of these, it would probably start again).
p.s. love the "one does not simply" picture
