Transfusion Forums

I'd like to propose a re-purposing of Transfusion.

Initially Transfusion started as an effort to ensure that some form of Blood could run on modern and future computers. With the coming of DOSBox, the initial purpose of Transfusion has become moot and I would argue, no longer necessary.

This brings up the question: "What's the point?"

The Transfusion team and community have always wanted to see Blood brought into the modern era of computer gaming technologies. An ambitious goal that has never truly been realized. However if we acknowledge that replicating Blood as it was presented on the Build engine, is no longer necessary, we can skip directly to this secondary goal of providing high-rez materials to the Blood community.

I would encourage a discourse of proposed actions. I have some of my own ideas that I will field later in the thread. Please be courteous towards proposed ideas. If you disagree with proposal in this thread, please limit your response to "I disagree with [statement X]"

Edit: Apparently the polling option is BROKEN! Please respond with either

Yea: Transfusion should move on.
Nay: Finish replicating Blood.

I will lock this thread after 30 days.

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Hopefully this might help clarify the proposal.

A re-purposing would mean a shift from "Replicate Blood" as our primary goal, to a goal of supporting community efforts in story telling.

In truth, the main goal of the Transfusion trunk would still be to replicate Blood. But in so far as the community expectations go it's my opinion that we should be honest and just say: “Not in the foreseeable future. But enough about us, how can we help you?”

Basically we would be saying:
This is pretty much all we are going to actively do with Transfusion. If you have an idea for a story, feel free to use Transfusion to make it happen. In the likely event that you need something from Blood or Blood II added to the Transfusion trunk, or if you feel something could have been done better, we can help make it possible for you, as well as maybe help out with other parts of your mod (depending on the individual developer's preference). Subsequently, the replicated Blood components would then be added to future releases of the trunk, probably along side the story branch it supports.

If we eventually reach the elusive goal of “Replicate Blood” along the way, all the better. But why limit ourselves?

Nay: Finish replicating Blood.

It's the only project with the granted rights to do so respectfully, and it still could be pulled off in a modern fashion (code/interface-wise mainly). Besides, it's near impossible to record multiplayer demos in Blood and yes that has something to do with the nay.

Nay: Finish replicating Blood.

I like the Transfusion project as it is, a stand-alone multi-platform 3D Blood game. I see very little reason to change goals now, especially considering, as leileilol so kindly pointed out, this is the only project legally aloud to recreate Blood. The train that reaches the station the fastest is the one that stays on track.

Additional: What is exactly meant by "providing high-rez materials to the Blood community" anyway? Could you please elaborate Dusty?

Tchernobog, it goes back to the design decision if our materials should be "true to Blood" replications, or if artistic leniency should be applied allowing the focus to be directed to new materials.

Dusty:

I'd like to propose a re-purposing of Transfusion.

Initially Transfusion started as an effort to ensure that some form of Blood could run on modern and future computers. With the coming of DOSBox, the initial purpose of Transfusion has become moot and I would argue, no longer necessary.

This brings up the question: "What's the point?"

The Transfusion team and community have always wanted to see Blood brought into the modern era of computer gaming technologies. An ambitious goal that has never truly been realized. However if we acknowledge that replicating Blood as it was presented on the Build engine, is no longer necessary, we can skip directly to this secondary goal of providing high-rez materials to the Blood community.

I would encourage a discourse of proposed actions. I have some of my own ideas that I will field later in the thread. Please be courteous towards proposed ideas. If you disagree with proposal in this thread, please limit your response to "I disagree with [statement X]"

Edit: Apparently the polling option is BROKEN! Please respond with either

Yea: Transfusion should move on.
Nay: Finish replicating Blood.

I will lock this thread after 30 days.

I'm not sure what Yea means exactly, it's pretty open ended. I for one would hate to see Blood abandoned to some DosPox ghetto. At the same time, I don't think a true 3d replication of Blood is even possible, at least not with the current technology. So with all those caveats in place I vote an extremely cautious, an extremely begrudged yea.

I was planning on contacting you Dusty as soon as my economic situation would allow (hint, hint). Unfortunately your post here has forced me to act earlier than intended. Stay tuned to your pms for the next week or so.

Undecided

What an excellent question Chris!

For a long time this question was in the back of my mind but now that this crossroads is finally here and we really have to think about it, I can honestly say that I cant come up with a good idea of where to go from here ATM.

However, having an open discussion about this topic is a great idea and long overdue.

I'm afraid you won't get anywhere with this pool. Even if 90% of the people on this forum want to continue that way, if the only 3 or 4 guys that are actually committed to do some work for this project right now want to change direction, go for it.

I think my opinion on this subject is already well known, since, unfortunately, we already discussed this before, over and over again

Yea: Transfusion should move on.

leileilol wrote:It's the only project with the granted rights to do so respectfully

This is true, and I’m not proposing that we fully abandon the goal of reproducing Blood, but I don’t think that it should be the primary focus of Transfusion any longer.

A “for instance” if I may. Say someone gets an itch to make a mod for Blood, but they don’t want to be limited to the Blood engine. What options do they have? Transfusion? Well, that seems dead, next? A newer Build engine, Quake, Doom, other Lithtech, Unreal… As you’ve pointed out, because we’ve done a lot of the work of moving the materials across to Quake friendly formats, it’s fairly easy for them to just apply that same principal to any of the engines listed above. And thus we have, c2g, winBlood, Hypertention, B2R, zBlood, etc. I don’t want to discredit the hard work the teams listed above should be credited with, because there is certainly a lot more to it than just porting materials.

The door has always been open for other projects to use Transfusion as their core, but in the 7 years after releasing 1.01, there hasn’t been a single Transfusion mod even attempted, despite the secondary goals of making it easier for teams to do so. I would argue that because our goal has been to finish replicating Blood, we have actually deterred other projects form even considering the Transfusion as an option; tipping the scale towards using other engines. As a *mostly* Open Source project, Transfusion should be an open house. And yet, we’ve got things clamped down to the point where people really can’t do much with it.

This is the scenario I would envision:
BlooditeX gets the idea to do a mod about Caleb crushing a potential Cabal uprising after some relevant tome was uncovered in an archeological dig in South America. Well, because Blood really doesn’t have any tropical type scenery, they might be tempted to just use the Crysis engine, and port the Bloody bits over. But what if, because we decide to take an open and actively supportive stance on mods, that they also have the option of using Transfusion. BlooditeX comes to the forums, recruits other Bloodites with knowledge about how to get things on DarkPlaces to help out.

They work on it a bit, and decide that they can use some aspects from what’s been done in Blood, or Blood II. Because of the license we have to use the Blood materials, they can freely do this even if it hasn’t been included in the current Transfusion distribution. So in the process of making their game they also end up replicating that aspect from Blood, which can then be sent upstream to be included in future releases of Transfusion. In this way they will also help the current, primary goal of replicating Blood.

I know the above sounds like a pipe dream. But with the current level of development, Transfusion may well just close up shop and let it hang.

Addendum
Elric: Thanks for bringing up the old posts. It looks like I'm troding over old ground with this one, sorry, ILA. But in the past it looks like we've always just said "the code is open... now go away." rather than openly embracing new content. It is this aspect that I think needs to change.

DustyStyx wrote:Addendum
Elric: Thanks for bringing up the old posts. It looks like I'm troding over old ground with this one, sorry, ILA. But in the past it looks like we've always just said "the code is open... now go away." rather than openly embracing new content. It is this aspect that I think needs to change.

I never said that having (yet) another discussion about this is a bad thing. It's certainly better than letting things rot, I agree.

The best thing about threads like this are when old friends come back!

HI Mathieu!!

I Live...AGAIN wrote:The best thing about threads like this are when old friends come back!

HI Mathieu!!

Hi Joe. Good to see you too!

I haven't been contributing to this site (or the project) much, but I've still been coming back every now and then cause, to me, this has always been the main site for Blood-fanatics and blood-related activities.

I don't really care what you decide as long as the people who're still passionate about Blood stick around.

Well said Wrim.

Also, you still have the best profile gif on the planet.

I Live...AGAIN wrote:Well said Wrim.

Also, you still have the best profile gif on the planet.

Agreed, on both counts.

Nay: Finish replicating Blood.

I think it could use a more up to date game engine though. From what I have read, id Tech 4's source code will be released by sometime this year and I'm sure that would be a great game engine to recreate Blood on with it's atmospheric graphics properties especially the lighting and shadows. I'm not sure how easy it would be to make a total conversion on the game engine, but I'm just making a suggestion.