Many people have been wondering what has happened to IW, as there has been little news of late.

First let me assure everyone that it has not been abandoned.

Things simply slowed down for the last year largely because of RL issues; I went on exchange for 6 months, and then had my thesis due at the end of 2010. Similarly my time currently is also limited by RL roles, but not enough to prevent me working on IW. But let me get to the point.

Currently, IW has not been updated for a while and Spring has moved ahead in a number of ways. In its current state, IW is not playable, and the team as it stands lacks the knowledge to update it. Gnomre has indicated he lacks the time and motivation to continue in his prior lead-coding/management role, and my involvement has always been as artist and designer (ie: my technical knowledge extends primarily to fiddling with text values), so we lack the ability to make the necessary changes at the moment.

Therefore, this is an earnest request for help from the Spring community to help us modernise IW for Spring. ForbodingAngel and Googlefrog have already been assisting me a little, but it is a complex job for them alone to shoulder given they have their own projects as well.

Primarily the work needed requires an updating of the lua rules, fixing some gadgets, conversion of some cob scripts to lua, mending the GUI and hunting some nasty bugs that are lurking.

Many people have been concerned in the past by IW's closed development model. The reasoning for this has always been that we wanted to avoid releasing a game that would always appeal to those who are interested in Star Wars, but are not used to the 'rough-around-the-edges' nature of a typical open-source development. We wanted to have a polished product before chasing those curious people off.

However, given the already very lengthy time of development, and the need for some new blood on the IW development team in order to finish the final 15-20% or so of work that is left before it can be considered 'complete', if the community can help us get IW into a playable state, we would be happy to release IW in its current, unfinished state, as a playable open-beta. Although perhaps 'demo' would be a better term, as we would not be releasing so much for balancing feedback as much as to encourage people to join us to assist with the final development push.

If you're interested in helping out, please send me a PM noting your experience and how you can help (I've been out of the loop for a while so I don't really remember who has made what and I haven't been keeping track of all the talented new guys that are around) and we'll get you access to the SVN.

I can't exactly pinpoint all that is wrong with IW currently because it is outside of my knowledge to really know what's going on. Forboding and Frog will hopefully chime in with what they've seen that needs to be fixed.

To clarify, I am making two requests:
1) To any Spring mod or engine developer who can help us modernise and fix IW so that it is as playable in Spring as we had it several months ago in order for us to release a public demo
2) To anyone who would like to join the development team to help finish the final 15-20% of work.

In terms of what needs to be done for the final completion list (not for modernisation of IW), here's a quick summary:
- Many advanced units need to be animated, some such as the Imperial heavy walkers, need quite complex/sexy walk animations
- All advanced units need to be implemented, some needing some custom lua for their behaviour
- General mod management, implementing new units, creating buildpics, organisation etc
- The GUI needs to be fully implemented (I'll happily post images of the designed GUI but in another thread)
- Ideally the sound set needs to be made IP free (an on-going project, currently some of the soundset is 'borrowed' from old SW games)
- Creating a custom installer and bootscreen

I could probably update it in a day or so if google or forb fails to warlord.

I'm up for helping out lua wise. (Gadgets not gui)

like what?

guess its like spells/abilities.

I presume some units might have jumpjets so that could be taken from CA.

yes, i figured. but what spells/abilities?
landspeeders flying around ATAT and tripping them over with wires?

air transports with soldiers shooting out of them and than jumping out when the transport lands.

@warlord, pfft, gimmie svn access, I'll have you fixed up (updated) in notime.

they have no svn.

Guess again. Gnome set one up a few weeks back.

Also

oh, that is great! finally a properly organized project!

Thanks all for the responses, they are very much appreciated. SVN details have so far been sent to the following people: FLOZi, Forboding Angel (I posted the details on the private IW forum which you have access too ), smoth, knorke, TheFatController, Googlefrog. Please fire things up and see what you can work out...

We can use this thread here to coordinate what needs to be done.

knorke: The list of units left to be implemented can be found here. (missing is the ATAT which needs a bunch custom scripting to work properly).
The art has been completed for pretty much everything there, but most things need to be animated, scripted, need custom weapons, etc. Only one or two units need quite complex lua, but a number of the older units need scripting revisions, particularly the commando's sap-charge, as well as units that need to stop to fire (e-web, droideka, imperial artillery).
Similarly, we designed a bunch of landing shuttles that are used for the imperials building animations (units and structures), which need to be coded, along with the rest of the building animation (basically a hologram that fills in nanolathe style, followed by a shuttle which lands, and the building appears under a puff of dirt).
Really we need the units animated, that is one of the most important things that needs to be done for the final release.

gota: we disabled units firing out of airtransports because it made them too overpowered.

I have attached an image of our GUI (photoshop file available), which we had partially working in previous versions. Googlefrog informs me that GUI has moved on and needs to use a new system?

In case the right people don't see this:

You need to set up a different user for every person accessing svn. What's the point of version control if you have no idea who did what?

Edit, you don't need a new gui, but google frog is telling you to use chilli, which would be a good idea, however it would need extensive work to function the same as your current gui.

Thanks, I'll get on it as soon as I have some free time (next day or so).

Allowing you to revert changes and have backups of older versions, plus hopefully commit comments that can be used to write a changelog.

I just committed fixes for the start-up lua errors and start units not spawning.

There seems to be some problem with starting resources, nothing will build.

Also the buildrange on at least the rebel commander seems to be too short.


Also someone needs to resave all the sounds,

Those should also be fixed, I was making a series of commits (own users and a changelog page would be awesome tho.)

The UI looks cool but it seems very bloaty ?

Sorry, weÔÇÖve just set up the SVN - IÔÇÖm very new to it all, IÔÇÖve forwarded this to Gnomre to sort out as I've got no idea.

I believe the problem with resources is to do with storage rules being changed - I don't think the Imperial Commander had default storage, but had storage determined by starting rules.

Flozi: What is the deal with resaving all of the sounds? Is there a program I can grab to do it in bulk?
We haven't had problems with the buildrange in the past, has anything changed to have affected this?

Otherside: The plan with the UI is to only display elements as they are needed, that just shows the maximum possible elements that would be displayed to show how they all fit together. For example, most build trees only fill one of the columns, so there would be no need to display the other two. That's also designed for a smallish screen res.

That was my fault, I added the unit spawner I modified for BA without adding the corresponding 'unitdefs_post.lua' file.

The issue was that the engine removed start resources and a gadget was provided but this didn't recreate the old engine behaviour and gave the resources to the Team instead of the Commander.

It should now be fixed exactly as it used to be for now.



I was in the middle of doing this when the post was made, Audacity/Goldwave have batch file processing and it should be fixed now but there's still a few missing sounds (check infolog.txt)



There was an engine minimum of 128 here, a lot of IW units had 50-60. I set them to 128 for now to allow them to build which recreates the old engine behaviour.


I'm done committing for the moment so if you wanna update from SVN a load of my fixes are now in :)