:: So let's have an opinion poll: if there was a (finished) engine that allowed
: you to import maps/scenarios directly into it, was modern in terms of
: graphical capabilities, more flexible than Marathon (esp. with double
: subtractions) and open source, but above all Marathon-like, would you use
: it in favour of Aleph One?
I'm not a mapmaker, so my comments will be irrelevant if the tools for creating maps for the new engine are not as good as the engine itself. The bottom line is that it makes no difference to me one way or the other what game engine I use as long as it can be made to run on whatever hardware I use and so long as it will work with any existing map, either directly or by flawlessly importing the map. It took a long time for AO to become practical as a replacement game engine for M2/MI, and it did not really flourish until Mac OS X made the original marathon engine a liability. It was only then that the open source community had any real incentives to make AO robust enough for everyday use. Up until that point much time was spent on adding features such as support for 3D objects that tended to distract from the more important task at hand. Therein lies the danger in any open source project - programmers will always work on what they want to rather than what they need to, making the production of a stable game engine the last rather than the first priority.
Me!!, your first post in this forum was just yesterday, and there is no return e-mail address for you, either, so I'm not sure how the rest of us are supposed to take you seriously. For all I know you are a 12 year old kid with a little bit of programming experience and loft expectations that a bunch of real programmers will flock to your great idea and program at your beck and call. If you're actually a genious MIT grad student with tons of programming experience, then please forgive my comments. It's just that, as this forum is littered with the carcasses of would-be mapmakers and their ideas for great scenarios, the world is littered with people with great programming ideas but without the skills or experience to make them a reality. Please, give us a reason to hope. Show us that you have the skills, the experience, the time and the buring desire to make this happen and we'll give your idea some serious thought.
