After having checked with Janis for basic possibility, I hereby open the discussion on releasing Scattered Evil on Vavoom instead of Doomsday. I list some of the pros and cons, feel free to add other ones:
Pros
- More possibilities for SE, especially for me as mapper. With Doomsday, building the city was kind of a nightmare, most of my ideas were not realizable. Also, large outdoor maps with endless plains or "rolling country" (small hills all around) should be possible, the very type that makes for great interconnecting maps between hubs. Also, Vavoom skyboxes allow us to landmarks being posted in a certain direction (i.e. you can put a volcano towards the north and a lake towards the east, they won't both be replicated 3-4x all around like in Doomsday).
- Development on Korax Arena can start a lot earlier (indeed instead of indefinite starting date it can be as soon as August or September).
- As KMOD 3.x contains everything ever coded for SE and artwork is fully compatible with both engines, nothing goes to waste despite the engine switch.
- Vavoom is supported in-team (Janis is both Vavoom author and Korax' Heritage programmer), unlike Doomsday for which support was never available (in 2001 and early 2002, I tried to get SkyJake to help us with minor issues and put questions to him but he always brushed me off).
Cons
- This way, SE will be postponed even further (which is IMO not so bad now that KMOD 3.0 with a lot of new RPG features is being developed and released continously). OTOH this can actually have advantages, like some features that wouldn't have been finished on time this way can still make it into the game.
- Everything needs to be ported we have for SE this far (OTOH it's not that much that would be kept in the current form anyway, seeing that much of the gameplay is to be changed).
How do I imagine the engine switch?
- Currently, the art team is working on stuff that's compatible with both engines w/o modifications (I think Vavoom has actually even support for more than 256 colors for a sprite, or am I wrong?). For them, nothing really changes, except that they have now more time to finish stuff.
- The coding team should make the switch later on, once KMOD development is mostly finished (i.e. 3.x is released, patched, tested, and proven). This way, no parallel work is needed to be done, which simplifies matters. My proposition is that the complete code for all damage skins is inserted now into KMOD code, and for the damage skin frames the original frames are duplicated in the wadfile. This way, no matter when moster DS are finished, they only need a wadfile update to work.
- The mapping team should start the work at once already with Vavoom in mind. I realized only lately how much work the maps will need anyway (adding extra exits, changing ACS, in most cases retuning monster/item placement, rebuilding some parts of some maps to make them fit the neighboring ones etc.) that it won't be much more work if a couple of extra niceties (like slopes and 3D floors at places where they enhance gameplay and/or looks) are added. Not to mention those outdoor maps I could never do in Doomsday because of engine limitations.
So what about TSP, you ask? Well TSP concept calls for not much more than a sequel to SE with a different engine, an enhanced highres GUI with mouse interface for inventory and stuff, a different storyline, and a seemlessly connected huge world. The engine can be used already now for SE, and for the rest I anyway had a somewhat different kind of game in mind for a long time now which fits the concept better than an FPS. Indeed, TSP concept is not fit for an FPS with the kind of human resources we have, whereas the idea I have can well be realized with a team like ours (I don't want to overcrowd you with info, so I'll post about that project idea in a separate thread if someone requests it).
This would make public releases look different from current plans: as already decided and announced, KMOD releases will continue for some time yet. Right after the last KMOD release or even parallely to it, the first Korax Arena release could be out, which would help us a lot in keeping interest in our projects alive. This would mean we could take a lot of time to polish SE, which in this way would become in many ways what TSP would have been, but with the SE story (which can be modified a lot still), and with more emphasis on action and less on epic RPG (which could be kept for the project afterwards, which would still be called TSP but would have a different concept).
OK I stop before I get so confusing even I myself won't know what I want to say. <!-- s;) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink" /><!-- s;) -->