Any Lurkers interested in a "conventional" Libre Game ?

[Pxtl]

Honestly, if I wanted to make CA into a libre mod, but keep the incredibly rich diversity of having so many factories with so many units, I'd do something really controversial: axe one of the factions. Some 90% of the units for Arm and Core (or whatever they're called in CA) are simply mirror-images of their opposition. I don't think it would be any great tragedy to have _one_ faction with a few special units.

Alternately, take the "Dune 2" approach, where units that are too similar to their counterpart use the same model, and have the factions be identical except for their special units - so the Stumpy and the Raider are the same damned tank, but the Arm has the Sharpshooter where Core has the Dominator. Of course, this would mean picking a single artistic direction for both factions.

I just get sad when CA developers talk about cutting units to make the game easier to complete, when half the units they have to make are (gameplay-wise) redundant.

[Hoi]

Personally I decline sakoths offer, I don't want to make comprimises on artwork, ca can use everything once released though, also, sean and swift might have a diffrent opinion about this.

[smoth]

stop being full of yourself and take the content. Or don't and have fun spending years doing redundant work. All the while ca and all the other projects will pass you up because they have years of work. To be fair I don't think you will outdo mr.d or cremuss

[Hoi]

stop being full of yourself and take the content.

I never said it's a bad thing to do that, just that it should be replaced eventually.

Or don't and have fun spending years doing redundant work.

I want to learn this stuff anyway, and IMO you learn by doing.

All the while ca and all the other projects will pass you up because they have years of work.

Good for them, it's about the end result, also, we are just starting, do you really think we can catch up with ca? Didn't think so, stuff takes time.

To be fair I don't think you will outdo mr.d or cremuss

Did I said that I can?

[Argh]

Quit yellin' at each other. If Hoi wants to make stuff that's PD... well, that's his business.

Cremuss's stuff was released GPL, Mr. D has never even really stated his license, so it's fair to say that it's just (C), and probably not really legal to put into a GPL work anyhow, not that anybody cares.

[smoth]

lol, this lot treats copywrited shit as pd. I am trying to say that if they want to get it done in any reasonable time frame they are going to have to consider using the available resources. It is just stupid to try and take all that on when other people have done it for you.

[Hoi]

Hmm sorry for any misunderstanding I made, I was confused a bit, what I meant is that I'm not going to work for ca, I have no problem with using other stuff for this, I'm not the only one to decide though.

[Saktoth]

Some things

CA actually has very few directly equivalent cross-faction units. Almost all units have had heavy changes introduced. As a general rule core 'equivs' cost 33% more, are comensurately heavier, and have half the RoF, but sometimes previously equiv units have totally different roles now (Hammer/Thud).

But i agree absolutely, i think its better to have a single faction with a fuckton of tech branches than two factions. It saves on dev and art but its good for gameplay too. The only difference between a tech branch and a faction is that one unfolds ingame and the other is picked prior to the game. Being able to chose from any tech branch allows you to mix together a much larger range of options for more diverse and interesting mixes, and on the design sides allows you to not worry so much about equivs and make each tech branch geniunely unique.

So id suggest at least starting with just the one faction first, which AFAIK is what Libre is doing.

[Pxtl]

Dammit, I need to try the Arm units in CA more. I had no idea Arm was getting cheaper and lighter units. I thought I was just doing more with less.

[SeanHeron]

Hello all,

Well, it's taken a bit (but that's group decision making for you), but we've decided we'd like to pick up on Saktoth's suggestion, and even expand it a bit!

As we've tried to point out a number of times, we're going to be using available Artwork/units to start with (which we have a lot of you to thank for!). But for a number of reasons, we see ourselves creating new Artwork sooner or later. And we would like to propose a shared Sci-Fi Artwork project! First though, we should note a number of difficulties we see with this:

-Visual clues (different gameplay demands different clues to players regarding the units uses)
-difference of quality expectations (between projects)
-Related with that (quality expectations), how to coordinate the ongoing work -> ie, do we have an approval process for models or not?
-finding agreement on style

So we reckon that even if we set out with some of you, and try to get a cooperation going, we might not actually come to any agreement, as we might realise that such a close cooperation would be frought with too many difficulties to be worth it (such an outcome would not be a "failure" in our view).

Nevertheless, we're would be happy to further discuss the proposal with others (obviously with Saktoth/CA, but we were thinking perhaps Forboding Angel could be interested as well, and maybe there are others I don't know of/forgot).

--Sean Heron, on behalf of the Libre team