Project Reality Forums

Best thing about BF2 is not the 64 player limit but the squad- and commander-system. Is there any other game that have something similar? ArmA doesn't have i IIRC. PR wouldn't be what it is without these feautures.

A DEV has spoken, amen

My personal wish, keep PR in BF engine in the future, i hope FB engine will be at least as modable as BF2's engine, and maybe we will get a 64+ player capabillity but if not than it means EA pays people to not work as they should

I have read somewhere among all the reviews of BF Lite that the player limit is set at 24 cause of the console market. Those machines have problem with all the extra objects needed to be tracked, etc. But if they could be upgraded or optimized in some way I'd guess a increased limit wouldänt be far away.

Or NOT!

IF PR switches to another engine I think it needs 2 minimum requirements

VOIP: the ability for players to have 3-4 different channels if you will
-Squad chat(your squad only)
-Inter squad chat (select a specific squad to talk to)
-Proximity chat( any one can here you within 10-15m)
- Team chat
64+ players:
- Needs to support a minimum of 64 players
-128 players (64 v 64 would be perfect for more realistic matches)

Yup, Eggman's both satisfied and piqued our curiosity at the same time. I hope to be there one day saying "I was there when pr was just a mod, and now look at it now, more members than WoW"

Seriously, that would totally make my life

PR has the potential to go beyond just a little indie game - it has quite a bit of market appeal, and there are some incredibly talented people who work on it.

Sleeper hit?

The cost of developing PR to it's full potential would be far too high for a typical studio to take on. The goal of developing the best platoon level combined arms simulation (while still keeping it playable) is something that would have only niche appeal (at least relative to the costs involved in developing it).

So I can only see it being economically viable if the devs involved regard it as a passion / hobby that might actually pay some money one day. It might be achieveable. We'd need a lot of support form a gaming community and some C++ programmers who are fanatical tactical gamers and want to donate their time to make it happen (in addition to the already abundant talent in the PR team).

I've been working on some stuff around the fringes of a PR2 project. I went through a 35 page design document I created *7 years ago*. Nobody has done the stuff that in 2002 I figured would be common place by now. And it's not because the ideas are shite or anything... the basic elements of my 9 year old design (I spent 2 years thinking about it before I documented it) are stuff that still to this day represent what a lot of tactical gamers refer to as "the ultimate goal". But nobody is doing it! PC gaming is getting neutered by piracy and consoles and studios are far too concerned with mainstream market appeal and sales figures to create "the ultimate first person war game".

Most of you will be too young to remember Falcon - circa 1987. At one point Falcon and M1 Tank Platoon were games I played endlessly, usually with "null modem" connections to a mate's Atari 1040ST - effectively a hacked 2 person network. In 1989 Spectrum Holobyte, the makers of Falcon, acquired Microprose, the makers of M1 Tank Platoon - an outstanding tank sim in it's day. They started to advertise an A-10 simulator as part of their "electronic battlefield series". I just assumed that Falcon, M1 Tank Platoon and the advertised A-10 simulator were going to be released with some sort of Infantry simulator and the virtual battlefield would be a reality. It never happend and by 1999 Spectrum Holobyte had dissappeared.

Nearly 20 years since I first recall pumping an Aim 9 into one of my best friend's blocky polygon F16 the closest thing to a virtual battlefield has been the horribly crippled World War II Online (which I was a closed alpha and beta tester for nealy a year and subsequently played for another year after it's release).

If we can manage to pull off a PR2 indie game... I think we have a lot of the things in place that could make some long standing tactical gaming "nirvana" a reality.

egg

Loved the nostalgic touch of your words eggman, even though im really too young to have played the games you mentioned but i felt i was right there!

Well I clearly know nothing about developing games and I know little about the relationship you have with EA and the politics of it all, but what's stopping you from cracking into the engine? Surely BF2 doesn't sell any more copies, I'm pretty sure they've stopped making copies of the game now, and I can't see them bringing out another expansion pack. It's not as if cracking into the engine to change a few hardcoded things is all that bad is it? Of course it would be different if you were selling PR, but you're not. Do you really think EA would take legal action over a pretty much dead game (vBF2)?

They could. And the fact that it is illegal makes it no option.

The best thing for me would be if the 64p could be increased to 128. I'm used to the Battlefield physics.

Have the devs ever considered trying to buy a license to the BF2 engine? If you could get enough donations it might be achievable, and then you could work with the same engine without the hardcode limitation, if DICE is willing to license their engine.

munky91 wrote:Have the devs ever considered trying to buy a license to the BF2 engine? If you could get enough donations it might be achievable, and then you could work with the same engine without the hardcode limitation, if DICE is willing to license their engine.

shure they have but if I remember the license was like $5000+ so it probably not going to happen

Let's just wait, things can get upside down when moddb vote results are released..

No engine in the BF franchise history has never been made available for license. If it was my guess is the cost would be on the order of $250,000 + royalties. And I am pretty sure they would not make it available to a mod team, you'd need to be a studio with a pedigree of releases and marketing funds (because making a game is one thing, supporting the engine to licensees is another thing with unique costs associated directly to it). And the engine market for AAA engines is VERY competitive. Unreal pretty much owns it and even engines like Crytek are struggling to find people willing to pay the fees.

PR as indie game would be on engines with costs in the order of about $300 to $1000 per programmer (which would mean about $1000 to $5000).

The challenge is that people expect that games look like the Operation Flashpoint 2 trailers or the COD4/5 graphics. Aside from compromises made around large numbers of players, a PR indie game would obviously suffer from the fact that the base engines we can afford simply don't have the kind of development efforts invested to make them look like that. I'd hate for PR to end up like WWIIOL where... somewhere in there... there's a decent game, but it looks like a 1988 era Wolf 3D game.

egg

PR mod is the best of BF2 ones. It is possible EA pays attention to PR DEV team and even if PR2 will became a commercial project like AF and SF that doesn't matter to me.

Personally I feel its totally unrealistic for PR to become an indie game, for many reasons - heres a few of them:

It is also going to be much harder to mod in the future because of the new capabilities and increased expectations, so to try and adapt a new engine to the MOD as well as upgrade all the other stuff, would be too much to expect - I dont think that the TGEA engine, would be capable of matching the frostbite engine, even if thousands of hours are spent on it - I feel that trying to do that would be the death of PR, as a new mod crew will simply create a new realism mod for the frostbite engine, and do it with a lot less work. It looks to me like the TGEA engine would be capable of achieving maybe BF2 looks if youre lucky and it would probably take 2 years - whats the point? So you can code fast ropes?

Basically DICE are making BF3 now (Id bet my house on it) I suspect that theyll release the FrostED at some point in the next 18 months.
I cant see BF3 having less capabilities than BF2, so there will be a very similar game, except with a next gen engine, and improved capabilities. Im sure that within a matter of weeks of modders getting their hands on the FrostED, new tools will be created by the MOD scene to export stuff over to the new engine - Theres also a much bigger community of BF modders, and that makes it easy for noob modders to find tuts etc - if you think where most of the R-DEVS learnt their skills then this is a very important point.

Theres many other reasons, and I dont mean to sound negative - Im just trying to be realistic.

Basically DICE are making BF3 now (Id bet my house on it)

Interesting wager... I think you might go homeless

[R-DEV]fuzzhead wrote:Interesting wager... I think you might go homeless

A few months ago - DICE:

At GDC Paris today, Ben Cousins, executive producer at EA's DICE studio, has confirmed that the team is currently working on no less than five titles in its Battlefield franchise.

DICE confirms five Battlefield titles in development // News

They've announced 4 so far....any guesses what the other one might be?

Do you seriously think that a games company (and an EA games company at that) will not release a sequel to one of the most successful games ever?

EDIT - though I admit it will be interesting to see where BFBC2 for PC fits into that - maybe 2 year development for BF3?