New Horizons for Mount Blade?

[Keith]

As some of you will be aware, I'm a big fan of porting NH over to another engine to keep it alive. Keeping in mind Pieters issues about the required programming and scripting It dawned on me that Mount and Blade might be the perfect system for us as 80% of what we currently use is already included.

Current scripting already in game and other bonuses.

1. Overview map for traveling large distances at a time. (we just need to make the islands and change our horse icon to a ship icon.
2. Random encounters with both national armies aswell as special spawns (call them pirates)
3. Quest system and inventory system for trading
4. Ability to capture lord (pirates) and then ransom them off. This can also be pirate hunting quests and such..
5. Excellent sword fighting system.
6. Large mod community to help with scripting ideas...
7. New release to update graphics and physics soon. (Warband)
8. Ship system almost implemented (ie. horses act like ships)
9. The ability to have a all hands on deck fight!
10. Nation system implemented (so you can be France, England... and so on under 1 banner)
11. Almost all of the engine is not hard coded.
12. Will always be easily accessible for people to buy (and it's cheap $30 now but I bought mine for 15 i think)
13. Fort sieges!


Problems.......
No ocean system, this is the only drawback i can see at the moment. I don't know if it CAN be done or not I'd have to find out about it on their forum, I do know that there is one mod in production (only 1 person working on it) that revolves around pirates

lol, it's actually a seadogs mod for M&B - HERE

 

[carmenara]

I enjoy the introductions to new games I've never tried but...

Truth be told we have massive issues maintaining NH through the down periods (like now) as it is. Finding a team to do our work in foreign lands would be... like trying to tackle a 3 hour main quest with 2 magazines of ammo in Fallout 3. It just doesn't work.

 

[Keith]

I think not having the people only exacerbates the problem we're going to have in the future. There is probably a window of opportunity at this time to be able to go in the direction of choosing as opposed to being told which direction to go. Pieter's right in that choosing a new engine like UDK or Cryengine is just too big a challenge with the resources we have available to us but ....possibly......the new M&B will solve 80% of the scripting and programming problems that takes up most of the time. Getting people to do the quest writing won't be too hard it's really just the modeling, texturing and a small amount of script work (ship dynamics, cannon trajectory, etc..).

Of course, if we were to switch to a new ...something... that would bring people in also, might even bring a few back now that they know there would be a long term future for the mod.

It does not have to be done overnight, and considering the Warband is not due until March a fair amount can be dedicated just to planning.

And M&B is fun to play

 

[carmenara]

I'm a bit skeptical on what is "won't be too hard" at this point, because we don't have enough community input to even get a simple game manual out. Suffice to say, the combined interest necessary for progress with limited manpower is not there.

Whatever course of action decided on, gaining popularity on this site, moddb, and the sailing franchise in general is going to be the sure-fire recipe of success. In this case, CoAS is the logical choice for the next Build project, and it has already left the ground.

 

[Captain Maggee]

Im with what Pieter has been saying for ages...

I dont think we should port over to anything until we have a very stable platform

 

[zorglub]

Sorry mates, I've been editing this post over and over. Haven't been writting anything for month, I've lost the habit...


I've only recently discovered Mound & Blade, a friend of my showed me that game last summer after watching the last things I was trying to mod in PotC.

I wouldn't try modding M&B in stead of PotC, starting from scratch. The "Sea Dogs mod" may become a good future basis, we shall see. I recall someone else had posted a link to this thread some months ago.


1: the "worldmap" could be usefull for exploring islands. For sailing, I prefer our current Directsail system, or a chart like in Seadogs - the best being a mix of the two. No satelite view, no google map, no GPS.

5: That's a major argument indeed. I would add that with the horses, we could make some Conquistador Quests. For what I have been experimenting with the PotC fighting system, it is possible to improve it - but that would require creating new animations in the first place, and a lot of them. If we move to Mount & Blade, it would sure save us lots of trouble.

11 & 12 are very valid points as well.

I'd add two other good points :
- M&B have some kind of terrain generator system, which could come handy when exploring islands.
- M&B have got some smart system to save space, on models for example - characters being separated in several pieces, etc (meanwhile, our build mod is reaching 7go)

What I dislike, is that PotC was in C, and M&B is not. We cannot imagine porting the Build mod to M&B, and I don't like the idea of loosing our work. If use M&B, we basicly have to change everything. M&B looks less easy to edit, (or at least - less user-friendly). I personaly enjoy how easy it is to write something for PotC, to add code/mathematical operations in the console, etc... We haven't done all that we could do with this engine, that's my opinion. Of course, not having the source code is a strong limitation. It is best seen with the ugly random sailors that walk aboard your ship when you're playing the ship in stead of the character. All that part is hard coded. It looks like in the "Sea Dogs M&B mod" this will look way better. I haven't read the whole thread, but I wonder how they'll make their ship maneuvrable? This will be interesting.

 

[Keith]

SWS, I see that as part of the issue we don't have the people anymore as POTC 1. cannot be bought online & 2. is getting long in the tooth.

With M&B not being much of a game in itself, that's correct, I think even the developers accept what their are doing is a sandbox game for others to build on.

With the mods, the one I play most now and have been really impressed with the empire buildig depth is Prophesy of Pendor HERE it adds castle structures, more advanced lord system, better factions, etc... There are a number of other mods available that expand on both the RPG elements as well as functions.

Apparently there is also word that the developers are entertaining the idea of naval combat now (would be in longboats most likely, but IF that were the case that would be great.

The other downside is I don't think even if they do naval combat you will get the rolling seas type ship to ship fighting......and to be honest that 1/2 the fun in POTC.

 

[computica]

Sorry but I think the POTC mod is fine where it's at...

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I'm quite willing to believe pretty good piratey games could be made on other game engines,
but it won't be the PotC Build Mod. Maybe some of the Build Mod content could be used for them,
but for actually porting, the only platform we've got is CoAS. That'd be the easiest and most realistic to do.
At this point in time, we cannot even do that due to lack of manpower and required knowledge.
Would I like to be able to develop a proper pirate game fully from scratch so we can do everything the way we want to?
HELL YES! Do I think we can do it? Especially in our spare time? Personally, I just can't believe it.

 

[Officerpuppy]

I haven't played M&B in months. I bought way back when it was only $8 or $10.

 

[mcd-2003]

On this fourm we all including myself spend so much time saying what we would like to do and what we wish we could do. If we just hang around talking about it then sure its not going to work. If we give it a go though then there is at least a chance

If NW is to have a future we need a new engine and I dont belive porting to a currently existing engine is a possibility and we still wont have the flexability we want.

We have so much talent here. Differnet people from all over the world, Young and old. Working together on what could be our game. Long may it continue.

I would advise that we continue with POTC for now and get build 14 finished. While some people start looking into how to create a new engine. Im happy to be part of this new team.

Nothing gets done when we sit on our butts discussing it. We have been doing that for 18 months. Lets get up and do it!!!

Anything is possible!!!

thanks

Captain Matt

 

[Keith]

Well if worse comes to worse, I'll do a donation drive to purchase the Storm engine license

 

[Thagarr]

Well if worse comes to worse, I'll do a donation drive to purchase the Storm engine license

Now there's an idea, Akella and Seward were both moving on from the Storm Engine. It is the engine that we are most familiar with, even if we don't currently have the ability to hard code anything. Obviously though, we would be limited a bit by sticking with that engine, and as was pointed out above, our mods now are approaching the max capacity of a dual layer DVD.

I'm not really familair with Mount and Blade enough to comment, but the lack of oceans would be a big drawback. The two open source engines that we were looking at a while back, the Irrlicht Engine and Ogre3D, both look quite capable for what we need, but also look to have quite a steep learning curve as both require C/C++. There are other open source engines out there, but most lack what we need to get the job done, or are like the two above and have a steep learning curve that requires us to be programmers.

This may have been mentioned a while back, but I don't recall, another option would be to use Panda3D, this is also an open source engine, but it uses Python as a scripting language. The learning curve for Python is not nearly as steep as it is for C/C++. This is the engine that Disney is using for POTC online, and for ToonTown. It has a very active forum and seems to be updated pretty regularly. It is also capable of interacting with C/C++ libraries and code, but those features aren't as well documented as the support for Python.

Author The Panda Development Group
Graphics API OpenGL, DirectX Operating Systems Windows, Linux, MacOS, SunOS
Programming Language C/C++, Python Status Productive/Stable
Documentation Yes
Features
General Features Object-Oriented Design, Other:
• Support for ARtoolkit
Scripting
• Python scripting interface
• Programming on the fly using interactive scripting in the Python shell
Built-in Editors
• Direct tools for GUI-based scene editing
• Particle effects API and GUI-based particle panel
• Future plans: An easy to use but powerful and generic scene/level editing tool
Physics Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body, Vehicle Physics:
• Very basic physics engine that may apply forces to classes. The physics engine can handle angular or linear forces, as well as viscosity
• There are two ways to go about collision detection: Bounding volumes & allow collisions against all geometry
• support for ODE physics
Lighting Per-vertex:
• A variety of lights that work by vertex lighting
Texturing Basic:
• Animated textures
• Support for video textures (AVI, MPG, MOV)
Shaders High Level:
• Support Cg
• Built-in shader generator for per-pixel lighting, normal maps, tonemapping
Animation Skeletal Animation:
• Soft skin animation and a sophisticated actor interface for character animation
Meshes Mesh Loading, Skinning:
• Supports 3D Studio Max, Maya, and blender models via plug-ins.
Special Effects Particle System, Fog:
Terrain Rendering:
• Generate terrain meshes from heighfields.
• GeoMipMapping
Networking System Client-Server:
• a networking library and a mmo-grade patching system
Sound & Video 2D Sound, 3D Sound, Streaming Sound:
• Sound using the FMOD library
• Support for OpenAL
Artificial Intelligence Finite State Machines:
• Two different finite state machine systems: FSM & ClassicFSM
Rendering Fixed-function, Stereo Rendering, GUI:

I got this info from DevMaster.net, they have a lot of engines listed that might help us decide which one might be right for us if we do decide to try something. I looked through a few, but stopped looking after I read about Panda3D. I agree though, we should definitely finish NH and get that stable and playable before we start exclusively on a new project.

Here are a couple of examples of Panda3D from Youtube, maybe not the best looking examples, but they give you an idea of some of the possibilities.

You can learn more about Panda3D HERE.

If we do decide to do something from scratch with a different game engine, the project is very likely to take several years to complete, although the simple scripting with Python may help to speed that up a bit. One good example of something along these lines is an open source strategy game that has been in active development for several years called 0 A.D. It's not something we would be able to accomplish in just a few months.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

The question I'd like to have answered is: how do we even get started?
We can come up with ideas aplenty, but without a way of turning the ideas into a reality,
I don't quite see the point of even considering the ideas.

 

[carmenara]

There's a lot of potential left in POTC... you just gotta be creative.

Hint... vehicle handling

 

[Thagarr]

The question I'd like to have answered is: how do we even get started?
We can come up with ideas aplenty, but without a way of turning the ideas into a reality,
I don't quite see the point of even considering the ideas.

I've been putting some thought into this, I definitely don't have all the answers, I barley have any as I have never even attempted anything like this. But just for the sake of argument, here is what I am thinking. If we decide just to switch over to CoAS after we have finished build 14, then it's pretty obvious how we proceed, pretty much like we always have. We simply just move our focus and have discussions with the modders who are currently working on CoAS and see what ideas they already have for future mods and where they need help, I am sure there are several things that are currently in POTC, or are being worked on, that could relatively easily be ported over to CoAS. A lot of the textures and models we have now could be used without much modification.

If we decide to give Mount and Blade a try, those of us that don't currently have it would need to purchase copies and get very familiar with it, read through the MB forums and modding threads to get a handle on what the differences are between modding POTC and MB. As I said earlier, I have never played it, so I really have no idea just what the game is capable of, but the fact that it doesn't currently have an ocean system would really limit what we were able to do. If we could figure out a way to add such a system, we would be spending a lot of time working on that instead of actually working on content. From what Keith has posted above, the rest of the game sounds like it might suit a lot of what we would require it to do. We would basically have to start from scratch with models and textures among other things.

If we purchased a license for the Storm engine, if Akella would even license it to us in the first place, we would need at least one C/C++ programmer to help implement a lot of what we would want to change in the code. The rest I think would be pretty much like switching over to CoAS, we wouldn't loose most of what we have now, and the textures and models would work with relatively little modification. I am sure many of us would be willing to donate to help purchase a license, any time money gets involved, unforeseen problems can crop up though. Some may even expect a "return" on their investment, and that could lead to one day charging for the game, I'm not sure I really want to deal with the headaches that go along with a commercial enterprise. Just throwing it out there!

If we started from scratch with one of the engines mentioned above, or a different one, it's possible that we could customize it to use a lot of the content we currently have for POTC and CoAS. First we would need to decide on exactly what kind of game we wish to create, and what elements we would like to see in it. Then I think we would need to organize ourselves a lot like a commercial game company would, with a producer, lead designer, lead programmer, lead graphic artist and story writer to name a few. Each lead person would be responsible for making sure each component in there respective departments ties in with what the rest of their team is working on. We could have one main forum for the game and sub forums for each individual team. The producer would of course need to define what each team would be working on and assist all other team leaders or individual team members with problems. The producer and all team leaders would also take on the responsibility of tying all the components together and actually compiling the game code. We would not have to start out with a full blown pirate RPG, we could start with something a bit simpler, like an arcade style target shooting game using elements we would like to see in a full blown game, like flintlock pistols, cannon, crossbows throwing knives and axes. That I think would be a good way for us to both see if we might be able to accomplish something, and also test out the basic design elements, collision and particle physics, basic modeling. If we were successful in producing a "proof of concept" game, everything we had worked on could be incorporated and we then wouldn't be starting completely from scratch, and we would have shown ourselves that we could do it!

Going through and re-reading what I have written above, it does sound a bit daunting taking on the task of writing a complete game from scratch, and part of me agrees with Pieter, that we really just don't have the ability currently to do this. But there is another part of me that says if we try it, we may be surprised by what we can accomplish, we have been told before on more than one occasion that something was impossible, yet we have accomplished it! One thing is for certain, if we do not even try, then it IS impossible.

 

[Keith]

I've been putting some thought into this, I definitely don't have all the answers

Wow Thag, I'd hate to see how long your post would be if you actually DID have the answers!

With the Mount & Blade, you can actually download and play to level 7 now. (Your uber at around lvl30)

http://www.taleworld...b_download.html

I'm actually not a big fan of porting NH over to COAS, reason being is that Playlogic has not done Akella (and by extension Seaward) any favours regarding the promotion & support of COAS, getting a patch for COAS will be like finding chickens teeth. Also, I think we'll end up in the same position as we are now, with an unsupported engine. Mount & Blade may also end that way however in it's defence it's whole purpose in life is to be a modders toolbox for that type of gameplay. It's also the lesser of 2 evils as I thik moving over to a UDK is just too big a step & it would take alot of the modding fun out of it considering the amount of coding required.

 

[Thagarr]

Wow Thag, I'd hate to see how long your post would be if you actually DID have the answers!

So would I! :

Thanks for the link Keith, I'm downloading it now, I'll have a look over the holidays when I get the chance.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I'm actually not a big fan of porting NH over to COAS, reason being is that Playlogic has not done Akella (and by extension Seaward) any favours regarding the promotion & support of COAS, getting a patch for COAS will be like finding chickens teeth. Also, I think we'll end up in the same position as we are now, with an unsupported engine.

Indeed; thanks to Playlogic's inexplicable non-support of this game,
it is hardly better available than PotC, despite being a much newer game.
The only reason now to port over is for the graphics and additional game engine features.
And even then, at this point I'd prefer being able to use the Storm 2.8 engine on PotC
(eg. replacing Engine.exe and adjusting PotC code to not crash), rather than moving the Build Mod to CoAS.
I don't much care about CoAS anyway; the whole style of the game rubs me the wrong way.

 

[Artyom]

I do own mount & blade (Albeit the more recent "With Fire and Sword") and it is a pretty great engine to work on. I have several years experience with coding games and I understand the M&B coding pretty well too, if a project like M&B: New Horizon's would come out I volunteer to do some coding work. One tip is to use "With Fire and Sword" as that is a further build on upon Warband and it features period accurate muskets, pistols & grenades already.