[Post your screenshots here]

Not my best but I lost most of my best long ago when our original forums died.

[New Members Introduce Yourselves Here]

 

Hey and welcome! What is ECW may I ask?

Expansive Civilian Warfare, a W3D game based on Renegade. Here's there site and Moddb page:

http://expansivecivilianwarfare.com/

http://www.moddb.com/games/expansive-civilian-warfare

 

And the under its old name: http://www.moddb.com/games/rp2 (slightly more content).

[W3D vs UDK]

Oh no UDK has good physics, Unreal3 was fine, my point is that RenX still managed to fuck it up.

[C&C Renegade: Bear Island]

MA Bear Island is a map made by Blazea58 and myself. The main plot of the map is about hunting animals for money, however there is a twist about ten minutes in when a tiberium meteorite hits and turns the map into a defense map. Here is a bit of gameplay action:

Jump to 4:30 on this one to jump right into the action:

[Blog 21- Moving on up]

The fracturing was unpredictable, but understandable. Especially after my talk with OWA. Of course, it incredibly confused me at first, since I noticed a lot of missing threads on my part and the loss of my testing access, until I noticed this happened.

 

So exactly what is going on with Tiberian Technologies? What is their stance on this?

I haven't noticed any disruption from inside of the TT team, at least not on the bug reporting sites that we talk on and stuff. I will admit I knew about this a couple months before it happened, I assume some of them knew it was coming too.

[Coding]

In order from favorite to least:

C++
C

Java

JavaScript

PHP

SQL

MaxScript

HTML/XHTML/XML/CSS

Cobol

[New Members Introduce Yourselves Here]

Hi guys, I'm Jerad, I am project lead for ECW and make a few maps/mods with the same team for Renegade.

[Useful browser addons]

Please keep in mind that some sites survive off Ad revenue (sometimes it has to be clicked other times its just number of users displayed to) I'm a member of a few sites that were once free, but have had to start charging for memberships due to the growing user base and decrease in ad revenue. Just have to say that because I feel its a double edged sword.

[90 Field of View]

Please keep in mind that after Renegade moved to 4.x its FOV became dependent on your resolution 1920x1080 has a wider horizontal fov than 1024x768, but 1024x768 has a larger vertical fov than 1920x1080. So if you really want a wider field of view, just string up a bunch of monitors and slider that slider to max, just keep in mind your sacrificing vertical fov.

[High poly/Low poly]

lol, "polygons don't matter" - that's amusing

 

There's literally no point to having a very detailed tank above ~5,000 polygons in this engine. It doesn't have the capabilities of showing that detail properly. There's no support for normal maps, spec maps, etc. The simpler you can get it, the better it will generally be. 5k is perfect for almost every tank you could want to make.

I have to ask what you mean by "doesn't have the capabilities of showing detail properly" and then go off to list normal mapping, the point of a normal map is to make an object look like it has detail that its mesh doesn't actually have.

[W3D vs UDK]

 

 

Why not move to UDK? W3D is dead

Welcome, are you staying around long? (honestly asking btw)

 

Depends on how much stuff there is to leak. ;D

 

W3D doesn't interest me anymore... you should contact the RenX team and see if you can get your hands on their code. This place seriously needs some UDK love. Otherwise it'll be dead on arrival.

 

Port stuff to UDK, publish some fancy ads, attract new folks and so on

 

People need to stop assuming that moving to a new engine fixes jack. Maybe no one noticed, but RenX belly flopped so hard after the first few weeks of its release. If a game is good people will play it despite the graphics, original counter strike, mine craft, etc stand testament to that. The issue most W3D games have is we have shitty advertising so no one hears about them.

 

There is also a down side to having a large community off the bat:

If your game releases with a major bug, now everyone plays your game for the first time and is imminently exposed to that, which potentially turns massive numbers of people off to ever trying it again.

 

All engines have pros and cons, some cons you don't see until you start developing on them. If these teams were slapping out a new game every year it'd make sense to switch engines, but when it takes years to complete a game there will always be something better to move to before you complete, its just better to complete one thing at a time or else you get nothing done.

 

 

 

It's free through some nebulous idea that EA somehow endorses having one of their engines distributed without written consent

 

Cons:

Just about everything. It's old, dated, lag-ridden, there's no source code, no method of modifying the engine besides hex editing and scripts, and as Windows continues to progress to new versions there's no guarantee that Renegade will continue to work anymore

 

 

ECW actually got written consent from EA, I assume Reborn and AR did as well.

 

And your cons about no source code is pretty much completely off, we have about 60% of the engine source in TT 4.2, and hook the rest, if we need more we simply reverse engineer it. Saberhawk is currently working the engine up to dx11 in TT 5.0.

 

A pro to W3D is that its scripting language is in C++ which in comparison to Unity (which uses javascript and C#) is vastly faster.

 

 

You can take advantage of a superior engine to great effect, more so than you would be able to achieve using W3D. Imagine reborn with better physics and mechanics you could gain from utilising UDK.

It's also visually more appealing. I prefer gameplay over graphics, but if you can have great game play with awesome graphics, why not?

I will admit, I was rather surprised that RenX managed to actually make vehicle handling worse than stock renegade, if that's what you mean by "with better physics."

 

 

When deciding what engine I'd be most likely to choose it came down to a choice between Unity, CryEngine, and UE4 and I ultimately decided on the latter because of the likelyhood that it will be extremely mutable in what it's able to accomplish (Blueprint system in particular looks excellent for projects like these with shared traits and mostly aesthetic variation). If you're going to make the switch then there's no point in not going with something that will define the next generation, not be made obsolete by it.

 

You should cross unity off if you want Multiplayer and players able to exit and enter vehicles, because Unity does some odd shit with how player control of network objects works. If you're the creator of the object your computer is what does the updates. This works fine if its just you playing, but if someone else gets in a vehicle your computer created, every key press they make has to go to your computer, where it controls the vehicle, and then sends the update back, which makes for painful amounts of lag. Although it is possible that they have fixed it, I haven't touched unity in 3 years now, but I rather doubt they did. I feel if ECW were to move off W3D I'd go for cry engine, as it'd likely support large open environments better than what UE3 did.

[Command and Conquer Renegade II]

Good luck with your mod, the start is always the hardest part, make sure the project lead is dedicated or it'll fall apart like so many other mods.