Anonymous wrote:Excuse me while I claw out my eyeballs after seeing that post.
HalfLife "Deathmatch Classic" is an abomination.
Source is closed source (meaning we can't improve the engine), and would be requiring every player of Transfusion to purchase HalfLife2 or another Source based game off of Steam (as there is no retail release of HalfLife2 anymore), this would defeat the whole point of using the Quake engine for Transfusion (that of it being a free standalone game using an easily modifiable engine, not a mod for a commercial game), and subject countless thousands to the horror that is Steam. Steam would be alright if it didn't waste cpu time, waste bandwidth, and waste everyones' time.
Additionally Source's lighting model is far less advanced than the Doom3-like lighting supported in DarkPlaces engine (which Transfusion is already using).
It would also be a waste of time to port from one engine to another, this involves rewriting all of the game code, and the project is currently lacking an experienced game code programmer so this new code would be slow in coming.
1] I wouldn't call DMC an "abomination", but I would agree it doesn't match the original.
2] Why would you need to "improve" the source engine? I'm honestly asking. I know it isn't perfect, but its still good tech...
3] Yet source's lighting is still superior to that of Blood... you know, the whole point of this project.
4] Waste of time? As opposed to the time you've spent so well wishing another coder will come to a dying project full of stubborn and (arguably) lazy developers?
5] Welcome to 2006. Steam is not that bad, and nearly every gamer has an excellent machine capable of running any source engine game above 70fps. Steam runs thousands upon thousands of users, and valve happily announces new mods.
How many new players does transfusion have?
Do you even have a stable master server anymore?
Face it. It's time for you guys to get realistic here.
Ask yourself the hard question; DO YOU WANT TRANSFUSION DONE OR NOT?
It's time to stop the frustrated idealism, laziness, and wishful thinking.
At the rate you are going, transfusion will be done in 2015.
If you REALLY wanted this project badly enough you would throw some more elbow grease into the gears and try something new. Obviously, judging by the results currently manifested, what the transfusion team is doing is simply not leading to a finished mod.
If you REALLY wanted it done, you would do
WHATEVER IT TAKES TO FINISH.
In the amount of time that has passed since the last transfusion patch you could have finished blood completely twice over with the source engine.
Stubborn developers without a game coder do not finish games. Period.
This project has been going on since before 2002. Make any excuse you want, you've had ample opportunity (and certainly ample time) to finish, but instead you have chosen an engine with near-zero support and even MORE difficulty in terms of development.
With HL2, even if you started from scratch you could get a basic DM mod done over the summer, with a team of 6-10, working 2 hours a day.
This is a modest estimate.
Tried diving into the source sdk? It's actually very impressive, especially from a coding standpoint.
You have two choices here:
1] MAKE AN HONEST DECISION about how badly you want this project done, and then go for it.
2] Go back to sulking in the darkness, wishing for a coder to fall from the sky and work on a dated engine, and accept reassurance and validation for your poor choices from the fanboys on this forum. Really. Go convince yourself that you "did all you could.", then construct an eloquent argument whining about your justifications for lack of progress.
Rationalize, or finish.
Choose.