Here's one of the threads, this one with my ideas. The forum it's in has a few more, though.
http://nwcitadel.for...read.php?t=1869
Now, as far as the actual engine: Unity3D is reasonably easy to start with, but there's a few things we have to worry about here.
The first one is the Vault. How many gigs, if not terabytes, of custom content are in the Vault? How many days, or even months, of modules? Why alienate all those resources?
Having support to load NWN1 and even NWN2 custom content not only opens up a whole lot of stuff to be played, it also means we don't have to make things just to test with. It also means we don't have to write a toolset before writing an engine, using the NWN toolset is possible.
To get all that in, we need to start at a lower level than things like Torque or Unity allow. Those are both high-level, simplistic engines. Honestly, both are crippled. They're good for part-time game makers starting out with Baby's First Shooter. There have been a few cases of really good games coming out, but those are bigger teams with a lot of time and work.
We already have libraries (code modules) to load NWN2 resources and interact with the Aurora protocol (for interop with old servers). Tying that into a prebuilt engine is, again, hard to do.
So basically, while using Unity is a good idea in general, if we want any kind of backward compatibility, it makes it harder. Good suggestion, just not sure if it'd work here.
'> There's a lot of stuff we already have, and to avoid remaking things that just don't need remade, starting at a lower level may actually save time (yeah, I know, it sounds totally backwards).
And for anyone worried about copyright, well: it only knows how to load resources. Nothing is actually included, you still have to have the resources already. We can even check to make sure you have the engine for the game who's resources you want to use. No piracy worries, no sharing of original files, it's all good copyright-wise.
Modifié par pkpeachykeen, 17 juillet 2010 - 02:31 .