Call for volunteers: merging Allegiance into FS2

KGJV · Post by **KGJV** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 11:08 am

I'm starting to see some usual Alleg whining, negative attitudes and out-of-topic posts here so I'd like to clarify some points:

1st this is a personal initiative from Matt after he saw one of my post in the FS SCP forums. He contacted me directly and asked if me or other Allegiance players/coders would be interested to help him. That is why I publicly posted here to see who would be interested. I'm greatly interested for sure and so we're inquiring who is too. Nothing more for now.

This is not a FAO official project. We don't know the position of FAO on this nor their plan for the futur of Allegiance in general actually. As of today their plan is : do nothing. So be reassured, we don't want to replace Allegiance.exe with some FS2 code or whatnot. It's not even our call actually since the lobby, servers, asgs, and these forums are all privately owned systems and I'm not part of FAO anymore.

If you would prefer that the Allegiance code change or evolve or be rewritten from scratch or have FAO handling the management and changes or whatever different approach from this one then plz open your own topic.

I'd really like for everyone to keep a POSITIVE attitude here so things can move forward and not backward. Try also to see the bigger picture and leave your "Allegiance confort zone".

This project is 2 days old only, so don't jump the gun by raising very specific red flags. Also don't forget that the purpose like Matt explained is to "port the Allegiance gameplay into the FreeSpace Open engine". The gameplay not the game.

the main topic is still a call for volunteers and so far the people who clearly stated they want to participate are:

FS community: Matt
Allegiance community: Clay, SP4WN, Sambasti and KGJV.

so 5 persons so far.

HSharp · Post by **HSharp** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 11:23 am

I apologise if my post sounded negative, I am simply unaware of the limitations of FRED and the FS2 engine, the only mods/missions I have ever seen for FS2 have just been singleplayer missions/capmaigns or dogfighting on a set map, I don't mean to poke holes, just to see what can and can't be done.

I am by no means saying don't make the attempt in the first place because almost anyway you look at it it's going to be a plus to do this project, the extremes being it becomes a great port and then Allegiance can look better and have a bigger playerbase and we all play on FS2 Alleg or it becomes a horrible port but it's still advertising Allegiance to the FS2 community.

w0dk4 · Post by **w0dk4** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 12:14 pm

Not sure if you'll like my opinion, but here goes anyways:

As you said, FS2 is primarily single player with limited multiplayer support, not even speaking of multiplayer logic. Allegiance is almost pure MP. Yes, the games complement each other, but if you think about it, this is the worst-case scenario to port Allegiance gameplay over to FS2. For this to be a positive argument, you'd need to combine the source code of both games rather than re-writing one game to resemble the other. And I think we all know that's just not possible.

I think the main point is that with the effort needed to make FS2 behave like Allegiance, you could get done a massive amount of work on Allegiance's code base, like:
- upgrading the graphics with shader support (normal mapping, post process shader, etc..)
- basic scripting support (do we really need a sophisticated solution?)

These two things are really the only thing FS2 would offer, and they are not that hard to introduce to the Alleg codebase, whereas it'd be a massive undertaking to overhaul the network code and multiplayer logic of FS2.

KGJV · Post by **KGJV** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 2:00 pm

I hear you w0dk4 but like a lot of people here, you reason 'in theory' and 'absolute'.

You forget the most important thing: the human factor.

Of course that upgrading alleg gfx and adding scripting are probably 'not that hard to introduce' but WHO gonna do this.

All devs have left and we never had a lot of devs anyway. Plus we have the whole FAO organisational issue. We have NO human resource in the code department.

In theory I could also stop my work, find/borrow some cash to found a game studio and rebuild Alleg from scratch. That's theory.

Alleg forums is full of posts and people with theories , plans and ideas.
99% of these are vaporware and only a few people actually DID something. the ratio between theory and reality is very bad for the Allegiance community, very very bad.

Now I don't know if this project will go anywhere but on paper it has way more chances than anything else so far. why ? because the FS community has active moders and coders and that's the most important factor.

Clay_Pigeon · Post by **Clay_Pigeon** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 4:36 pm

MatthTheGeek wrote:QUOTE (MatthTheGeek @ Jul 31 2011, 04:46 AM) The Aleph system is one of the easiest thing to emulate, and one of the first thing I thought about when thinking about FREDing an Allegiance-like. In FS, a game is restricted to a single map. However, you can easily via the mission editor teleport anything that come close to a certain point to somewhere else, and vice versa. We just need 'sectors' to be areas far enough from each other, let's say 500km, and we're done.

There's also the issue of keeping the mini-map up to date, which is probably the single most important tool for keeping abreast of what's happening across the map during a game.

But, maybe that's not so bad. I confess that I don't know a ton about what FS is capable of. At any rate, I'm happy to help!

-T

MatthTheGeek · Post by **MatthTheGeek** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 6:48 pm

Clay_Pigeon wrote:QUOTE (Clay_Pigeon @ Jul 31 2011, 06:36 PM) There's also the issue of keeping the mini-map up to date, which is probably the single most important tool for keeping abreast of what's happening across the map during a game.

But, maybe that's not so bad. I confess that I don't know a ton about what FS is capable of. At any rate, I'm happy to help!

-T

The HUD code has been recently fully revamped. You don't have a minimap in FS, only a radar, but this probably won't be hard to implement with the new HUD code. I never worked with it myself, but I saw what it's capable of and I'm pretty sure it's something it's capable of.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 8:06 pm

I'm not against this project in principle; I think this could be a cool idea in it's own right, but I think (if you're aiming this *at* the Allegiance community) unless it's a definitive "Allegiance 2" you're going to fracture the allegiance community.

So while I think it's cool you want to make a mod for FS2 that's similar to Allegiance, I don't think it's necessarily cool that you want to move Allegiance's community to mod.. I realize you didn't ask for my opinion, but there it is.

So by all means, go ahead and make this mod, It'd be an interesting project to follow.. but I don't support trying to migrate the community to this project. And I apologize if that was not your intention.

Spunkmeyer · Post by **Spunkmeyer** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 9:27 pm

Orion wrote:QUOTE (Orion @ Jul 31 2011, 03:06 PM) So by all means, go ahead and make this mod, It'd be an interesting project to follow.. but I don't support trying to migrate the community to this project. And I apologize if that was not your intention.

He's thinking about working within the FS2 community instead, and whoever's gonna help is gonna help. It's not like anybody is doing any work here so you don't need to worry about anyone "switching over". As far as players are concerned, there can't be a community migration till the port is done anyway. And at that point it'll be a better option anyway, unless a miracle happens around here.

Makida · Post by **Makida** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 10:57 pm

KGJV wrote:QUOTE (KGJV @ Jul 31 2011, 07:08 AM) This project is 2 days old only, so don't jump the gun by raising very specific red flags. Also don't forget that the purpose like Matt explained is to "port the Allegiance gameplay into the FreeSpace Open engine". The gameplay not the game.

Do you mean porting just the space combat sim aspect of Allegiance, then, or only certain aspects of Allegiance gameplay?

Anywho, I'd say the core thing for Allegiance as a whole would be teams led by commanders. That was, IIRC, the heart of the game from the original concept. So there would have to be a strong RTS aspect to the game, with a single player per team in charge of that aspect... Can that be ported/coded into the FS2 version?

Assuming, again, that you guys aren't just focusing on the space combat aspect alone.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Mon Aug 01, 2011 1:45 am

Spunkmeyer wrote:QUOTE (Spunkmeyer @ Jul 31 2011, 04:27 PM) And at that point it'll be a better option anyway, unless a miracle happens around here.

That's contingent on how much like allegiance this mod ends up being..