April Fool's joke aside, this seems like a discussion worth having...
Pardon my bluntness, but all WC graphics engines suck big time visually, compared to modern engines, and the tools to work with them and script things suck even more.
The FSO engine was the graphically best and most accessible space game engine at that time, so it was used. There is a good reason nobody outside the WC community uses any WC engine. You have to be a WC-religious zealot to use them. And it is the same zealots that say a game cannot be WC-ish if it doesn't use a WC engine. I don't mind if someone thinks like that, but they have to accept that most people don't think like that, and still can be WC fans and enjoy the game.
Well, I'm more than happy to agree that any WC engine is outdated - as is to be expected after a decade and a half. And I'm also more than happy to agree that the FS2 engine is minimally less outdated, and has become even less outdated through the source code project. The only caveat that I would point out is that if the age of the engine was the only consideration, then both of these would have been left by the wayside a decade ago: immediately after the release of StarLancer, to be precise, long before the FS2 source code was even released.
The catch, however, is that even with the source code available for FS2 and a full
decade of development, nobody has produced anything truly Wing Commander-like on the FS2 engine. That's always been one of the big criticisms of Saga, right? Ultimately, its combat just doesn't feel like Wing Commander - and not for the lack of trying on their part. I mean, they really turned the game inside out in many ways, but still failed. Now, in theory, there's nothing stopping someone from taking the FS2 engine and reproducing the exact gameplay of any particular WC game, whether it be WC3, WCP, or even Privateer. But Saga's example demonstrates that it really is a very, very tough thing to do. Wing Commander games have always had a specific feel to them, and by the time WCP came along, this feel was the outcome of eight years of steady refinements on a particular concept. This was similarly the case for the Star Wars games - again, by the time Alliance came along, you had years of building on top of a specific "anti-Wing Commander" concept. And it was equally the case for the Freespace series, which, being the youngest of the three, was designed specifically to be different to both of the others - with great success, I might add. Play any of the final games of these series for three minutes - Secret Ops, FS2, Alliance - and you'll have no trouble recognising which one it is you're playing, not based on the graphics you see, but on the feel of the gameplay.
So, when Saga set out to turn Freespace 2 into Wing Commander - and remember, their initial effort was more like a total conversion, with no significant engine alternations initially - they had their work cut out for them. In many ways, it's impressive they got it as close to WC as they did, even if I don't feel it was very close at all.
The point I'm getting at is that even if the engine to Wing Commander Prophecy was also available in source code form, and people were enhancing the daylight out of it, whether somebody would choose to use the engine or not would (or should) still depend on the experience they're trying to produce. I'm not at all surprised that people aren't using the WC engine for anything, because I don't see anyone out there really trying to do Wing Commander. You can be certain that if I were making any old space sim right now, I certainly would not choose the WC engine either. But, at the same time, if I were to produce another WC mod - well, here we are, sixteen years since Secret Ops, the engine has aged like crazy, and you know what? It's still my first choice. Not because I'm familiar with it (using an engine is just like riding a bicycle... that is to say, no matter what people tell you, you actually do forget
), but because it's still got that Wing Commander feel that nothing else out there has. Why would I want to waste my time turning FS2 into WC, when Saga has shown us all how challenging that really is?