I Live...AGAIN wrote:As a former member of Transfusion, please view my following comments as only my humble opinion as I have no say in the future direction of TF. That is up to the current team.
No offense to anyone, but given the lack of development this project suffers since many months, if not years, I'm not sure we can still talk about a current team roster. Definitely not about an
active team roster anyway.
I Live...AGAIN wrote:IMHO, with the emergence of DosBox and the improvements it has made. This I'm afraid has made Transfusion redundant. This project was originally started long ago when Dosbox did not exist when there was a real fear that Blood would no longer be able to function on future hardware. This is no longer the case.
Indeed. That's actually one of the very few statements regarding TFn development on which there seems to be a general consensus.
I Live...AGAIN wrote:What I am thinking is maybe the project needs to change it's focus in order to invigorate itself and continue. This could be done in 2 ways IMO. Creating an entirely new singleplayer campaign to expand upon the original Blood game. Or, continue on with what Transfusion already is which is a good Multiplayer version of Blood (something Dosbox is still lacking). This could be done by offering several innovative multiplayer modes of play including co-op using the Blood universe and characters. Or other modes of teamplay games and of course deathmatch. There are several new multiplay options that did not exist when Blood was released that could be done with a "Blood" feel, keeping in the spirit of the game.
I kind of view the attempt to develop a single player component for TFn as The Big Mistake we made. It required way too much work for the small team we were, not to mention the fact that several members (myself included) started to lose interest after a couple of years of work on this.
I think the mother of all problems with TFn now is the lack of momentum: the project doesn't move anymore. So team members are not motivated to work on it, nor are external people motived to join the project. It's partly due to unrealistic short-term goals (add SP support) I think, and also the game code written in the antic QuakeC language doesn't help recruting new developers, for sure. I like the DarkPlaces engine, but the fact its game code has to be QuakeC disqualifies it as a viable solution IMO.
Slink wrote:I Live...AGAIN wrote:To go the direction of multiplayer, I'm afraid the old debate of engine switching would have to come up again. Unless Darkplaces netcode is up to speed. Mathieu would be the best to answer this question I think.
I recall there being issues with our game net code rather than DP's engine net code, in comparison to other DP games like Nexuiz. Am I mistaken?
I heard this argument before. It may be true, but I honestly don't know.