Allegiance 2

[Viscur]

QUOTE (jbansk @ Feb 8 2013, 08:58 AM) If you want your idea to have any chance of success....


DON'T ASK THIS COMMUNITY HOW TO DO IT!!...


Look at what they did to Allegiance 1.

Yea, just look at what they did to alleg 1. Keeping it alive for 5x longer than anyone ever expected, who wants those guys.

[jbansk]

QUOTE (Viscur @ Feb 8 2013, 04:47 PM) Yea, just look at what they did to alleg 1. Keeping it alive for 5x longer than anyone ever expected, who wants those guys.

You call this alive? Are you kidding? This isn't even a shadow of the dead game it was 3 years ago.

[Orion]

QUOTE (NightRychune @ Feb 4 2013, 05:59 PM) 1. esports don't work with teams of 15-20 people that need to be present to play a game

esports also need to be watchable

2. allegiance is not really watchable unless you intimately know the game, and even then it's not that interesting to watch

For point 1, you're absolute correct, but only as offline tournaments go.. something like it could still be big for streaming and online tournaments

For point 2, I suspect this is only a limitation of the current game and its lack of good observer tools.

It would be awesome to get a new game based on Allegiance.. obviously this isn't the first time this idea has been raised. I want to believe this can happen, but I don't think anybody with the capability wants to invest the time and energy to actually build it.

As for the naysayers here... what's the point of even opening your mouth if you're just going to say something like "Do you even play this game anymore?" how is that even relevant? It certainly isn't love for the *community* that keeps people coming back here.

What we should do

One or two people with the technical know-how need to build an extremely limited PoC (proof of concept) to convince the community it can be done. I'm not sure what the scope of such a PoC would be, but I imagine something like a demo .exe that you can simply run and control a ship in space, maybe even fight "pigs"?.. this includes a lot of the basic fundamentals of any game; a (3rd party, most likely) game engine with graphics, physics, sound, input (but neglecting networking), and a basic game.

If someone can build that, they can potentially attract talent and funds. And that is something that can be done, and without the support of the greater community (which you won't get now, if it even matters)

I do find it interesting that most of the naysayers here are people who (I gauge) are non-programmers, and most people who think an undertaking like this is possible/feasible are developers/technical..

[cashto]

QUOTE As for the naysayers here... what's the point of even opening your mouth if you're just going to say something like "Do you even play this game anymore?" how is that even relevant? It certainly isn't love for the *community* that keeps people coming back here.[/quote]

Well, I managed to guilt P1 into playing again, didn't I? Y'all can thank me later ...

QUOTE One or two people with the technical know-how need to build an extremely limited PoC (proof of concept) to convince the community it can be done. I'm not sure what the scope of such a PoC would be, but I imagine something like a demo .exe that you can simply run and control a ship in space, maybe even fight "pigs"?.. this includes a lot of the basic fundamentals of any game; a (3rd party, most likely) game engine with graphics, physics, sound, input (but neglecting networking), and a basic game.[/quote]

Pigs is actually on the trac list for Allegiance, though the milestone is far out. IMO it's one of the most important additions one could make to the game, if someone were so inclined.

It would be cool to set up a server which allowed AI players, come up with an SDK and let the creativity of the community get to work. Ultimately the thing I was daydreaming about yesterday is that, if we got AI to a certain point, we could set up a new game type, player vs. NPC team. It would start off fairly "sandboxy" (kill enemy ships, get money, buy tech) ... though as the team sized increased, enemies get progressively stronger / smarter. As the game moves into the middle game, it takes progressively more sophisticated and coordinated team attacks to make progress. The game is perhaps "winnable" ... but not with tech alone; the real endgame is having enough players on, and to be able to sustain a certain level over, say, the course of a few days ...

All of this could be done on the existing Alleg core, I think. Not to say that such a game type with make "Classic" Alleg obsolete ... but it definitely can be an alternative, and could draw in more players, especially for those times when there isn't a game going on.

QUOTE I do find it interesting that most of the naysayers here are people who (I gauge) are non-programmers, and most people who think an undertaking like this is possible/feasible are developers/technical..[/quote]

I'm a developer ... and I think rewriting Allegiance would be an epic waste of time. Joel is full of @#(! on a lot of things, but he's right in positing that a ground-up rewrite of a mature system is one of the classic blunders.

[Spunkmeyer]

QUOTE (cashto @ Feb 8 2013, 06:45 PM) Joel is full of @#(! on a lot of things, but he's right in positing that a ground-up rewrite of a mature system is one of the classic blunders.

He's right in THAT context (although Netscape WAS a dog and Mozilla codebase proved to be far better) but he's talking about lost manpower and business throwing away a living codebase. What we have here is a dead codebase and no business, quite a different situation. In addition, quite a few fundamental aspects of the game can be handled differently (for the better), now that we know what we know.

It's funny how I had this *exact* exchange with Onion several years back and back then I was also claiming a rewrite would be a tremendous waste. But I had not really looked at the source at the time.

[Orion]

Ha.. I think that really applies more in the business world than the game world, cashto.. IMO rewriting is almost always an improvement on what exists, mainly because you know many of the pitfalls you're going to run into ahead of time, so you can architect to avoid them.. it's just a massively expensive undertaking. If you have the resources to invest, it's definitely worthwhile to rewrite ancient systems.

QUOTE (Spunkmeyer @ Feb 8 2013, 08:57 PM) It's funny how I had this *exact* exchange with Onion several years back and back then I was also claiming a rewrite would be a tremendous waste. But I had not really looked at the source at the time.

The codebase is a mess, and not really worth salvaging IMO.. the game itself is what I'd like to see salvaged in some form or other.

[cashto]

QUOTE (Orion @ Feb 8 2013, 08:09 PM) Ha.. I think that really applies more in the business world than the game world, cashto..

I don't see what makes games special in this regards. That is to say -- "the old code is a mess, but we know what the problems are, so our second system will be better architected" -- is exactly the sort of hubris Joel describes in that article. The truth is, in any mature system, a rewrite is essentially throwing away years hard-earned knowledge, years of bugs that had to be dug up and fixed. When you see messy code, when you see complexity, you can't just assume it's accidental, unnecessary, avoidable complexity. The code just might be complex because the problem domain is more complex than you thought.

And in the specific case of Allegiance, I guarantee you none of us are privy to the thousand little lessons the original developers had to learn in the process of building the system.

I'm curious what specific improvements either one of you would make to the architecture of Allegiance, the "fundamental aspects" that you would improve if you had the time and motivation to do so.

[MrChaos]

QUOTE (cashto @ Feb 9 2013, 02:21 AM) I don't see what makes games special in this regards. That is to say -- "the old code is a mess, but we know what the problems are, so our second system will be better architected" -- is exactly the sort of hubris Joel describes in that article. The truth is, in any mature system, a rewrite is essentially throwing away years hard-earned knowledge, years of bugs that had to be dug up and fixed. When you see messy code, when you see complexity, you can't just assume it's accidental, unnecessary, avoidable complexity. The code just might be complex because the problem domain is more complex than you thought.

And in the specific case of Allegiance, I guarantee you none of us are privy to the thousand little lessons the original developers had to learn in the process of building the system.

I'm curious what specific improvements either one of you would make to the architecture of Allegiance, the "fundamental aspects" that you would improve if you had the time and motivation to do so.

*ding*

it is a very ill wind that blows the existing code in the bin for a total rewrite. At least that was the lesson I walked away from in RL.

Helped put together a GUI front end to make the mainframe era back end more usable. Math still was math, the app designed some of the most succesful stuff in its field just the interface was clunky and required being an expert in that app. After spending a nice amount of time modernizing the interface what we ended up with basically the same thing but now it was graphic based vs text based. While it was a bit faster and more intuitive you still had to understand the underlying assumptions and theories to really use it properly. Hope that made sense

edit: @#(! forgot this bit in the origional post. It also required us to spend a decent amount of time to understand why the OG coders did the things they did... some was specific to the language used but many times it was specific to making the app give better results.

[Adept]

I'll just throw this out there. Only mega studios like Valve create new game engines these days. Nearly everybody else buys one off the shelf and maybe adapts it a little to their needs. The Alleg devs couldn't do that in the late nineties, but for a remake of Allegiance that would be the sane way to go.

[FazzBumm]

A tip from the Business side:

You are talking about something that is called "Business Reengineering". building an organisation, a structure or whatever that actually runs, up again from scratch. If you ask a good business consulter if you should do so, he will ask you two important questions:

1. Is your planned result at a minimum of 50% better than the old status was ?
2. Do you really have the discipline to sweat it out? Because it will take double as long and will be double as expensive than ur worst case calculation.

If you can answer both questions with a clear "Yes !" then it could be worth doing so.