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[rubbish]

Well I notice there is a 250hispana presence here already, how many more are lurking?  

Currently ww2ol is undergoing some major overhauls yet the most depressingly out of date part of the game is the one that the developers cannot even come close to fixing.  

The terrain engine was written in the late 1990s, has a terrain resolution of 900m, all objects (except for speedtrees) must be placed by hand, the same five textures repeated over and over again, the list goes on.

Some of us in the ww2ol community are hoping this engine might be the 'one'  - the devs have made a few specifications for any engine they would use in future, either in house (hahaha) or third party, namely:

Same or better viewdistance (currently 8km)

no problems for outerra here.

Procedural generation of towns, cities and transport routes

I understand roads can be generated, any word on towns?

Ability to have 'hooks' (their terminology) in the landscape that will interface with their databases (for the capturing of facilities for example)

This last one has been the deal-breaker in all the 3rd party candidates they have looked at so far.  Is it something that might be coded in relatively easily or added via a plugin at a later stage?

[cameni]

Procedural generation of towns, cities and transport routes

I understand roads can be generated, any word on towns?

There are plans for a city blocks generator in the future, to help with the cities and towns.

Ability to have 'hooks' (their terminology) in the landscape that will interface with their databases (for the capturing of facilities for example)

This last one has been the deal-breaker in all the 3rd party candidates they have looked at so far.  Is it something that might be coded in relatively easily or added via a plugin at a later stage?

I'm not sure what this means, or how it's supposed to work.
Is it a kind of marker that fires event when .. something? Or a query that will give the nearby markers?

Too bad the battlegroundseurope forums are blocked for guests (why?), can't see closer what you guys need and I certainly do not have the time to play the game

[Abc94]

The forums are not blocked for me.  :/

[cameni]

I meant the more interesting part of the forums where they are talking about the engine, that is accessible only to people with Playnet accounts.

[rubbish]

You'll have to forgive me, as the most complex things I program are control systems for home cinemas

The way I understand it, physical objects (i.e. capture points and spawnpoints) in the world need to be linked to databases as their ownership affects a number of different things - Ownership of a town for example, would affect not just which side could spawn there, but would also affect reasearch and development speed, resupply of units to linked towns and movements of military units (i.e. spawnlists) through and around them.

The game is a persistent, (on a per-campaign basis, a campaign might last only days or sometimes months) and is a single zone - no shards or anything like that.

I'll buy you a month subscription if you feel like poking around the forums  

[cameni]

I understand that it is needed for the game mechanism, I just don't understand why it would be a job for the graphics engine. You said it was a deal-breaker for all the engines so far, but I'd think this can be implemented pretty independently from the graphics engine. Although a help from the spatial index already implemented within it would come handy here.

Cid250 suggested to buy me the subscription as well You guys must love the game.
But if the guys developing/managing it would want to talk about it I'm sure they will find a solution
Otherwise it would be useless, not to say that it would be a long path anyway. I was just intrigued that so many views are coming from there but is blocked for us mortals, what secret stuff are you cooking there

[rubbish]

It's to protect the outside world.  There are a lot of freaks there

The reason people love the game is that when its good it is genuinely the best gaming experience there is.  Often it isn't, but like anyone with a serious hard drug habit we live for those occasional moments of nirvana  

I'll try to persuade a coder or two to post here.

We don't need you to build outerra for ww2ol, just to build it so we could use it.

[ahwulf]

I already talked with Brano some over email.

The current codebase is an amalgam of different (and occasionally hostile) coder's ideas from 11 years ago, projected forward by a short staff over 31 versions of changes. Integrating any external engine into this morass is likely to be impossible. If we could start over outterra's features are perfect. The forums being user only were to avoid a storm of spam posts that almost killed the forums entirely.

The user base of this game are small but incredibly (almost insanely) loyal. It's the only game I've played over the last 8 years, even though I work on it (part time mostly). People pay for multiple accounts and even donate money.

There is a plan to upgrade the terrain portion of the game but its only with careful surgery (and some miracles) that the core of the game would still work afterwards. 1.31's work (which was fairly minor in comparison) took forever to complete. I actually saw Outterra after working on the plan and recognized a lot of good ideas :-)

WWIIOL covers a huge terrain area of Europe with some 600 meaningful towns and a single game world played 24x7. A campaign generally takes from a week or two to 6 months (capture 90% of the towns or so to win) with almost 200 different weapon systems. There is a version now running in China with has about 5x the number of players we have on at a time. Almost nothing is scripted, the players pretty much dictate what happens (there are even High Command Staffs of players than make strategic decisions). Very little AI (just MG and AT guns to protect towns that are empty). Really decent flight and ground physics along with a ballistic model for ammo (not hit points). I think its the fact that everything is people makes it so unpredictable and thus fun. Battles can go from all quiet to complete all out war in just a few minutes; some battles can last real world days with no let up leaving you completely worn out. Nothing else like it.

But I could imagine a WWIIOL based on Outterra's kind of engine. Just not easily without a lot of extra effort.

[cameni]

Hi ahwulf, I almost forgot I've been talking with someone from WWIIOL already

Yes, seems that such project cannot go forward without a serious investment and a fresh start. But I can imagine it, would be cool.
Rafter wrote about it here as well.

[ahwulf]

Glad Rafter talked about it so I don't have to vague. They actually spent a long time trying to squeeze the existing game into OpenSceneGraph and it failed completely. Today one could assemble the game out of your engine, a physics engine, a flight engine and other available parts to assemble something gameplaywise similar. My project plan was for replacing the terrain with a more flexible higher resolution terrain engine, but still fitting into the odd way the game code functions. Basically pulling out the rug from under the code base but knocking over as little as possible. Then manage the terrain in a server based system from DEM data, shapefiles for roads/rivers/rails and town locations, then generate the town layouts (and maybe even the buildings themselves). My idea of fun :-)

[Cid250]

Brano, you know... i will be pleased to pay a 6 month subscription for you, when you get a bit of free time (may be if you have holidays, i can try to do it for the date that you suggest).

Even if you only can play one month, you can get full access to the internal forums for those 6 months.

Just drop me an e-mail, with the best date to start your subscription, and i will pay it for you

[cameni]

Thanks Cid, but you know it's not a problem of money but rather of time. Though time is money

The core issue is elsewhere.
I've been talking with Ahwulf about it and seems that until there's some space and a push from WWIIOL or from someone else to make a new game based off WWIIOL gameplay, it's just a dreaming of fans about what could be. I'm confident it would be a great game, but it requires a serious investment to make it happen. Much of the ancient code base of WWIIOL would have to be rewritten, and we agreed that it would have to start (almost) from scratch.

[Ghostrider]

Much of the ancient code base of WWIIOL would have to be rewritten, and we agreed that it would have to start (almost) from scratch.

I'd really like to see either CRS (Cornered Rat Software) or another developer pick up their game and this engine and rewrite WWIIOL. Call it WWIIOL2 if you will. CRS has made a lot of improvements over the years and continue to do so but I feel like there is only so far they can go with their current game engine and coding.

With the collective knowledge of CRS's current programmers and knowing exactly what you are trying to achieve before rewriting all the code, knowing exactly how systems are supposed to perform, should save a lot of development time in recreating a new game.

I think one of the biggest things holding WWIIOL back right now is that so many players instantly dismiss it without even trying it because of the graphics. Obviously that will always be a trade-off for games that offer huge seamless worlds and hundreds of players on the same battlefield but trying to squeeze modern day graphics out of coding written in the 90s is like trying to potato through a key hole.

It will probably never happen, at least not any time soon. But one can dream i guess.

[ZeosPantera]

Re-Coding a WW2 sim in Outerra sounds grand, but if you really want to increase your numbers and more importantly your monthly subscriptions you guys are going to have to step up and compete with a modern day equivalent War sim.

By all means have the WW2 part, but going after games like ArmA2 with this engine and the ability to mod it heavily could throw thousands more into your corner. The Current engine Arma uses is too ingrained into their business model to change it to anything like Outerra quickly or at all. So if successful you would really just catch them with their pants down. Currently, the Military sim market is pretty slim, so a refreshing and impressive new one is almost guaranteed to surpass the very buggy, very heavy and very outdated Real Virtuality 3 Engine. The LOD alone makes me gag.

Look at their official forums http://forums.bistudio.com/forumdisplay.php?f=4
It's a discombobulated mess.

[Matt6767]

Re-Coding a WW2 sim in Outerra sounds grand, but if you really want to increase your numbers and more importantly your monthly subscriptions you guys are going to have to step up and compete with a modern day equivalent War sim.

By all means have the WW2 part, but going after games like ArmA2 with this engine and the ability to mod it heavily could throw thousands more into your corner. The Current engine Arma uses is too ingrained into their business model to change it to anything like Outerra quickly or at all. So if successful you would really just catch them with their pants down. Currently, the Military sim market is pretty slim, so a refreshing and impressive new one is almost guaranteed to surpass the very buggy, very heavy and very outdated Real Virtuality 3 Engine. The LOD alone makes me gag.

Look at their official forums http://forums.bistudio.com/forumdisplay.php?f=4
It's a discombobulated mess.

Arma looks nice and all but I believe this thread is discussing about World War II online. Such a perfect engine for any war game.