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FOnline Development => General Discussion => Topic started by: Whungerman on September 02, 2022, 09:45:18 pm

Title: Time for a change.
Post by: Whungerman on September 02, 2022, 09:45:18 pm
N/A
Title: Re: Time for a change.
Post by: Dagnir on February 14, 2023, 12:15:08 am
Look at the number of players on the servers. Around 100 on all of them combined. Most stick to the same server. Do you want to spend years creating something that maybe 20-30 people will enjoy? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Overall, the game was already doomed back in 2009 when we've split into TLA and 2238. For a stupid reason of the primary developers of TLA not speaking good English. Hardcore enthusiasts who can do development in their spare time are hard to find, and by splitting them into two (later - many more) teams we've made the development unsustainable.
Title: Re: Time for a change.
Post by: mickmelon on August 03, 2023, 04:07:10 pm
I appreciate Dagnir's point, but I see it differently. Not everyone's here for the crowd. Some of us enjoy the grind and the brain-bending challenges. That's the thrill of it, right?

Remember, FOnline was born out of a love for Fallout and a desire to keep that world alive in a new form. It's always been a passion project driven by a community of enthusiasts. That spirit is what's kept it going for almost two decades now, despite any splits or disagreements that have occurred along the way.

I think one reason for the dwindling numbers of FOnline is due to the game being so outdated. If this were to be recreated in Godot or a similar engine - and don't get me wrong, this is a mammoth of a task that will undoubtedly take years even if the scope was greatly reduced - then perhaps that's when it will begin to attract new players to the classic games. This goes not only for attracting new players, but also developers, because the SDK is so outdated now with clunky tools and using a shitty scripting language when there are many better languages today for this like C#.

To the OP, I appreciate your vision. You're right - the community's fragmented, the engine's outdated, and FOnline needs a serious revamp. Building something on Godot or a similar engine is a mammoth task, sure. But is it impossible? I don't think so. Whether it's worth it is a different question - and I would say it only seems worth it if you are thinking about the journey rather than the destination, because you may very well never get there in the end. There's also the point that if you're going to put this amount of effort into recreating the game in another engine, then why not start your own IP?

I would suggest an initial goal of getting a working demo in Godot. Port some assets, create a couple of maps, design a single quest, make it single-player. This gives us a tangible target to aim for and breaks down the mammoth task into more manageable stages. Then, we can build from there. It doesn't have to grow into another FOnline, instead it could form as the basis for fan games, not unlike what I believe cvet's goal is with his work on the FOnline engine nowadays.

The question I would have is what are the legal implications of this? You already see in ambitious projects like Skyblivion and Fallout 4: NV, they're having to recreate the assets and voice acting due to copyright reasons. Same goes for Take Two taking down Grand Theft Auto mods that port maps from one game into another.