Tech considerations
I want to get my hands dirty with engine tech again. It's been a long time since I ported Engoo to Linux and the next project at Vera Visions will provide just the outlet to do so. First of all, after The Wastes we want to do a smaller game. We are not planning on making something incredibly huge with 40 weapons again. We are a small team and want to get things done within a year. That's the theory anyway.
The question is, which style are we going to target? We could go stylized. Have a global 8-bit palette and do something simple but cool looking on there. That would probably be done on a modified Q2 engine. We could also play with real-time lights and do something more modern on D3... but I am not that confident about it. First of all the Maya integration is totally not our current workflow. We use an old version of 3D Studio. I'm sure someone has created workarounds for that though. With D3 I am not sure what I'd be doing besides writing the game-logic, getting rid of bone-networking and making sure I don't break anything I don't fully understand yet. Quake II would allow me to get my hands dirty inside the renderer...
I wouldn't chose Q3 simply because The Wastes is already so close to it tech-wise. The team (and I) wants to work with something else. We want to develop more of our own tools to broaden our horizon so to say. I personally am fully betting on a custom Q2 tech-tree. I'd extend the sprites spec probably and add masked textures and a better software renderer for the heck of it. It would probably be 16-bit to have smoother gradients in the lightmap.
We'll probably switch to Radiant now, too. This is inevitable. We backed J.A.C.K. but the lack of updates and lack of plugin/sdk sources makes it a tough project to defend right now.
Aside from all this stuff on my mind, I'm busy packing my stuff for Canada. It'll be a great time visiting. It'll be a long visit, but it'll be an important one! After all, I want to celebrate The Wastes going Gold around the holiday season.
- Marco