Modding, Mission Design, and Coding > FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP)

FSO to Unity / UE4?

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ScottFreeCapital:
Hey all,

I'm a developer during my normal job and over the weekend I got curious enough about FSO to checkout the code from SVN (or for those not familiar with code: I just downloaded the code to see it). Honestly, there are a million questions that I was not able to immediately answer from looking at it, and some of it was vaguely explained just because I know the game. I was most curious about the AI so I took a look and found it's over 15.5 thousand lines long.  :lol:

To the point: have we given any serious consideration to converting the C++ of the FS engine into a form that functions well within Unity or Unreal Engine 4? Unity, in particular, I've been working with for over 2 months with a side project and I've grown to love it, primarily because of the way everything works with components. Granted, you would have a lot of significant challenges, you'd immediately lose FRED2, and C++ does not necessarily just "translate" to C# right away.

But there are a number of huge gains too. Since I'm more familiar with Unity, I'll speak to those advantages:

* Unity, especially with its newest version 5, is available totally free to non-commercial pursuits
* Unity has a constantly evolving graphics capability and extreme extensibility (with custom shaders and such) at no cost of time or money, it just comes with upgraded versions
* Unity can do pretty much anything. I'm designing an RTS (real time strategy) game with it and if the code is efficient enough it can handle a pretty heavy workload (it can at least calculate physics on thousands of primitives simultaneously and not lose much frames per second on most modern systems). It does FPS genre games particularly well, and easily, which means the option of having genre-mixing in FS related projects
* It has a powerful new UI system - if anyone wanted, they could fairly easily redesign HUDs or make custom cockpit views with a low learning curve using the engine's editor
* Testing is super quick and easy - it can all happen in Unity's editor. Code compiles between every save and all metadata is maintained by Unity's software.
* This community has a giant library of existing assets (models, sprites, textures, and so on) to choose from and those can all be pretty easily imported into Unity. Blender/3dsmax/Maya, and other tools and their native formats all work well when importing into Unity.
* Super powerful cross platform support - you could potentially design stuff related to FreeSpace for iPad/other tablets, consoles, and so on. I realize this may not be appealing to a lot of PC gamers out there but it's certainly one option.
* The FS engine is old, really old, and as awesome as this community has been - FSO will continue to show its age over time despite the best efforts of good people who haven't been kept on a salary. At least, that's what I see as a likely scenario. Again, Unity is well maintained and is a widely adopted platform which will continue to evolve without any effort, etc. etc...
Having said that, there are a number of disadvantages I could acknowledge right away:

* Converting thousands and thousands of lines of C++ code into C# is no easy or straightforward task, and Unity/UE4 work totally different than the FSO engine
* C++ is probably more efficient at the end of the day, but losing a little bit of CPU related efficiency might be a worthy trade off when considering the larger benefits
* I realize this might be a hugely overambitious project - considering the number of mods that have died along with how long it takes to implement even "simple" looking features in FSO, there might just be too much work to really get this done
* FSO is already super mod friendly, and always has been. Switching to Unity or UE4 would immediately toss that out the window, requiring an entirely custom mod support solution to be built
* FS2's veteran modders and FSO participants would probably have a learning curve for Unity or UE4, and that's a lot of time within itself.
There are probably other things I'm not thinking of as well but considering that Unity/UE4 are totally free and they're both very powerful - I don't think there has ever been a better time to consider such an idea.

The E:
Hi. Yes, I have considered this idea. It's technically possible, but infeasible on the time and money budget that a small hobby project like ours has.

Thing is, FSO is really good at what it does. It has a comprehensive toolset for content creators, it is easy to work with (most of the time, anyway), and there's tons and tons of institutional knowledge of and about it. Switching engines entirely would invalidate all of it, and I wouldn't blame anyone for jumping ship if we did such a thing. Unless, of course, we would produce something that follows the spirit of FSO and can work as a drop-in replacement executable the same way FSO executables do now, but the amount of work required to produce something that can seamlessly and losslessly convert between FSO and Unity/UE is prohbitive.

ScottFreeCapital:

--- Quote from: The E on April 13, 2015, 08:42:00 am ---It's technically possible, but infeasible on the time and money budget that a small hobby project like ours has.

--- End quote ---

 :doubt: Oh.

So, what you're telling me is - if I want it to happen I'll have to start on it myself and probably end up making a brand new game in the process. And perhaps spend years on such a project. I might be cool to do that. Maybe.

The E:
Unfortunately, yes.

Cyborg17:
Fred 2 is a major asset.  It really can't be overstated what a loss that would be to the modding community.  Many Freders can script game events more efficiently than, I've heard, developers with many modern games.

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