Originally posted by Darkmage
take my advice.... before you rush into a fan project plan carefully or better yet don't start a new project, join an existing one such as vegastrike which has proven over time that YES development MAY be slow... but it does get done... existing projects can and will be much better than any mod one person can come up with.
I don't mean to be rude, but you just don't know what you're talking about here. If you strip Standoff of two or three nebula graphics which I didn't do and HCl's patches which I didn't code, you have a mod that "one person came up with" which has actually made a lot more progress than most projects which were already "existing" projects way before I started. I put the word existing in quotes since some of them even make me wonder, I mean, all we've seen so far are a few people full of bullshit and propaganda, but without anything real to show. These people might as well not have announced any "projects" and avoided making fools of themselves, not to mention ruining the credibility real projects with real chances of completion get from the community.
Bottom line is: if you want to make a mod, get working. When you get to the part you don't know how to edit, get someone reliable to help you. But whatever you do, don't drop your idea in favor of someone else's, cause other peoples mods are ultimately something you don't want to be part of. I wasted about a year helping on someone else's WC project and the only good that did me was delaying the creation of Standoff
This other mod didn't get finished, and after so many people getting involved, if it ever got finished it would suck anyway.
Personally, I think that with Cam's talent, if he found a reliable programmer, he could pull off a Privateer conversion for Freelancer without a hitch, specially considering how few ships the original Privateer had... so you'd get a lot of free time to work on the planets and characters while someone else balanced the game stats and made any required changes to the engine's inner workings. However, I think Frosty's right... At least to me, Freelancer feels basically like Privateer, except on training wheels... so any Privateer TC would end up being a dumbed-down 3D version of the original.
--Eder