Kickstarter

[deathwinged]

Pharaxes, while building one from scratch would be exponentially more difficult, moving to Unity would not be nearly as hard for an experienced team. Unity is very powerful and simple to use, for one example, and even a tiny, inexperienced team can manage to make an immersive, open-world shooter style MMO (e.g. Firefall). A free to pay model, similarly, is not 'pay or barely play', but a 'pitch in a bit here and there/make your own way' system. I should note that the free to play model here doesn't exactly work perfectly, either- as far as I can tell, it retroactively removes characters that your subscription doesn't support. A well-structured free to play model stands to bring in even more development money for Virtrium, as paying 'premium rent' on your lair AS NEEDED, or unlocking more character customization options (e.g. races, perhaps?) by-character, as opposed to consistently paying for certain features you may not use. Right now, the engine doesn't support anything like a premium currency or character-customization locking. I'd really like to see the devs make an effort at this sometime!

[AmonGwareth]

Even using Unity 3D unless you had a sizable team you'd probably end up spending at least a year, if not longer, getting the core systems implemented. Maybe longer. And there would be a lot of time you'd have to spend fixing bugs, improving performance, optimizing, and every other little thing that was forgotten along the way (tutorial system, flexible UI, particle effects, and more).

Big hurdles would have to be overcome first before you could even consider using Unity, such as the communication layer, handling things like Istaria's definition files for character animations and sounds, particle effects (doubt Unity would import them) or even the terrain (since it is sent by the server, not pre-built like most Unity projects).

One other thing, I know from personal experience that Unity does not load all of Istaria's raw models (I have tried) which would be something else that would have to be worked on.

Right now, the engine doesn't support anything like a premium currency or character-customization locking. I'd really like to see the devs make an effort at this sometime!

These features are actually not something Unity could help with as they would require both server and database work to develop.

This is not to say that working on that type of project wouldn't be a good idea or certainly worthwhile... Just clarifying that it would not be easy and would not be done quickly. It would be a lot of work and would take a significant amount of time.

[deathwinged]

Wow! For starters, thanks for taking the time to reply to this freshly necro'd post Amon, and I realize that those are very big issues- further I want to clarify that I don't mean to solely promote Unity as a path, but my reference game (Firefall) is based off of it. Further, a newer engine would allow the implementation of a modding community, as it would conceivably use more recent and easily producible file types! I have a firm understanding of how difficult it is just to modify existing games, and a healthy respect for game development- as something I very likely couldn't do well.

However! Again, a newer engine would allow for far better mod support, and if the dev team were to use more widely available programs, it's almost certain that the skilled members of the Istarian community and other interested individuals would be happy to assist in some of the work- modeling dragon pieces, weapons, helping with debugging, and small but significant tasks of that nature after the core 'upgrade' emerged.

So far I've been speaking from a purely theoretical perspective- but I am now starting a survey that can be found here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/14pR...EfD-Y/viewform

If you're a player reading this thread, please feel free to drop a response there and share with friends! The idea is an interest check and test to ascertain the reach of Istaria's social network, and any results will be shared on this thread after a suitable amount of time has passed- or if there seems to be an unexpectedly massive interest.

[Pharaxes]

a newer engine would allow the implementation of a modding community

never noticed the Forum: Player Customizations? ;D

modeling dragon pieces, weapons

you can do so already. Not without reason there are mods like high res texture model or things like throath patch or white claw- and wingtips. Even the sound environment can be changed (like with Firebrands sound emote pack). And of course the map pack as well, altering the whole ingame map.
When you have the right tools (and many people seem to do so) you can already edit textures and alike.

[deathwinged]

Those are minor smoothing tweaks and texture modifications. I'm referring to significant expansions- different body shapes, perhaps the ability to include clientside scripts to selectively render them. Which is -not- something the current, limited moddability of the game supports. The mods you refer to primarily affect the flat maps that wrap around the textures- ask Racktor on the forum here; I've questioned her about it. That's why the forum you mention does -not- have a 'modeling' section. It's impossible, as far as I know. (Though I recall that a program (Granny? Maya? Not sure.. ) was mentioned, but it bears a nice price tag.)

[deathwinged]

And a bump for a somewhat busy forum? Would definitely like more replies on the survey.