The Fan project post

Pedro

Pedro

Admiral
ignoring the irony of 3prt2 is it just me or was 3prt3 aimed specifically at me
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I think the topic brings up a good point though, long long ago when UE started there were very few fan projects, I actually started it when a Quake TC (no I'm not a FPS fan, it was the borg mod) I was watching fell through and had got the idea of fan projects on the brain
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Unfortunatley now there are huge numbers of them, all struggling for personnell, some lasting no longer than a week, UE itself collapsed for a time, I think the fan community (inc me and everyone else) needs to get sorted out, even the CIC has half completed sections abandoned for months
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Any suggestions? Anyone who thinks we should give up no fan projects and moan about origin and ea?
This should be intresting
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Now, now, the Fleet Commander guy keeps his project in his name... and KrisV still hasn't done any work on his project.

Seriously, it wasn't meant to kill of fan projects, just to poke fun at everything. Fan projects neeed to continue to convince Origin that we're still out here. But they also need to get organized -- I've hung out with Origin people who make fun of us for never finishing anything... (G)
 
Like Origin finished Prophecy without MP, like they finished the Prophecy series, like the finished Strike Commander or Ultima: Ascension? I personally wouldn't think Origin would have that much place to talk about finishing things they start.
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There is no God but myself. No destiny but what I deem for me. I walk my path and no others, for I am free.

http://www.ntr.net/~vondoom
 
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Well that was exactly my point LOAF, we need to get organized and get the exsisting projects working, especially the promising ones such as fleet action and dare I say UE.
Problem is there have been more projects than staff and thats something which needs to be sorted out.
Personally I believe once we have tools such as wingED everyone should be able to do something but in the meantime we should be getting them organized, a proper game conversion or add-on is a massive undertaking and for all the attempts we haven't got much to show for it except some nice new ships and some UNDER DEVELOPMENT headings.
Hey and LOAF don't you think Origin should remember Privateer 3 and Privateer Online?

Oh my did I really post all those smilies
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Pedro: I don't know much about programming or what is required to get fan projects running but what if you and the other project people just merged your projects into 1. Perhaps that didn't come out right. What I mean is what if you could all concentrate your efforts on 1 project instead of many? That could at least solve staffing problems.
My 2 cents worth.

Vondoom: "Like the finished Strike Commander." I've played Strike Commander and it's add on Tactical Operations. It certainly seemed finished to me.
 
Well, that's probably the best solution. You could have two, three teams of fans merge, and work on their projects. You could make a poll, and ask wich mod, add-on, or whatever fans would want to see the most, and you'd work on that. Once that's finished you would start working on other projects that were put on hold.

[This message has been edited by Earthworm (edited October 14, 2000).]
 
I think that's always been a problem with fan projects. I get the impression HCl is the only person who's a good enough programmer, and he chose fame and fortune by trading Wing Commander for Starlancer. Well, that's what he thought he'd get anyway.
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Earthworm said:
Well, that's probably the best solution. You could have two, three teams of fans merge, and work on their projects.
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There's another problem though... people getting bored and giving up long before the project is complete.
 
KrisV said:
I get the impression HCl is the only person who's a good enough programmer, and he chose fame and fortune by trading Wing Commander for Starlancer.
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Did HCl get a job at DA?

If I could ask a few questions of people working on fan projects (maybe this could be a decent poll topic sometime):

What kind of experience do you guys have going in?

Did you start by programming small games to gain experience, or did you jump right to the big show?

How would you recommend getting started?

Are any of you trying to build a portfolio to get a foot in the door of the industry?

I'm quite interested. Right now I'm a second year CS major, and I would love to work in the industry. I plan to start doing small game projects next year following a progression I read over at Programmers Vault (http://www.chesworth.com/pv/games/how_do_i_make_games.htm) that I thought was quite well thought out. Is that the way to go?
 
No, he's now doing mods and editors for the Starlancer community instead of the WC community. Probably a sudden loss of interest in WC after EA canned it.
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Penguin: The original release of Strike Commander was plauged with problems and bugs. It barely ran on a top of the line system (when it was released) and crashed freqently. Origin quickly fixed these bugs since the game was a testbed of the WC3 engine and CR wanted everything perfect.

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There is no God but myself. No destiny but what I deem for me. I walk my path and no others, for I am free.

http://www.ntr.net/~vondoom
 
Strike Commander's engine was later used for WC3's planetary missions. Armada delivered the space flight engine.
 
Strike Commander and Armada are the same engine. The planetside missions were nothing but WC with ground. There was no gravity or anything. Strike Commander was the original build so Origin could create a 3D engine for WC, Armada was another early testbed with further refinements and WC3 was the third iteration of said product. WC4 was the final build of the 3D engine.

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There is no God but myself. No destiny but what I deem for me. I walk my path and no others, for I am free.

http://www.ntr.net/~vondoom
 
Although Roberts intended this to be the case -- and often spoke that SC would be the 'preview' for WC3 during its development--- it was not to be. Armada was a new engine. The team who designed the SC engine went on to work on Origin's line of aircraft sims. SC's ground mapping *was* carried over into WC3, for the terrain missions.
 
What kind of experience do you guys have going in?

When I started I had nothing but too much enthusiasm, however now I am nearing the end of my A-level course in C programming.


Did you start by programming small games to gain experience, or did you jump right to the big show?

I was never going to be programming, not back then (however I now will be). Most of these fan projects are add-ons and therefore are very different to producing games from scratch, even small ones. I had played about a bit with mission creation and stat editing.

How would you recommend getting started?

Well I'm just programming in C, currently working on a piece of accounting software however in my spare time I'll be trying to create a simple game (a recreation of Space Invaders). I'd recommend learning a language (not Basic or Visual Basic ofcourse) and working on it until you feel you are close enough to being able to make a small game learning only a small amount more in the process (eg I needed to learn some C++ stuff for graphics etc)


Are any of you trying to build a portfolio to get a foot in the door of the industry?

It didn't begin this way however if the project is finsihed it will be useful to my career as it shows things like knowlege in the industry and organizational skills (the latter I certainly didn't start off with and still need to work on).


Hey I do like the idea of creating a poll to find the most popular fan add-ons, if no one objects I'm going to see who would be willing to merge with another group(s) and then run a poll (or if possible get the CIC to run) to find out maybe the most popular 4. It honestly wouldn't bother me if UE got outvoted if it helped another project BUT we'd have to make sure that it was only similar projects merging, however I'd need to check with the other members before agreeing to take part in such a poll.
Cpl Hades it was never really a problem of people getting bored, the reason UE originally went down for a time was that HCl left and other members got buried in work, I think we were cut down to 1 experienced programmer.
 
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