[Fineus]

Simple one this - if you could base a Freespace FPS on any one game, what would it be?

Red Faction has its Geo-Mod, SOF/SOF2 it's ghoul engine. Unreal Tournament has a fantastic looking engine. Quake3 (or indeed the latest adjustment of it - Jedi Knight 2) has incredible graphics/frame rates.

Personally my money is on Jedi Knight 2, the graphics are already an example of the same style "universe" with corridors and so on. Imagining a Shivan ship is a little harder but it's perfectly possible.

So... what do you all think?

[Zeronet]

Well the actual Freespace FPS project uses the Red Faction engine.

[Redfang]

I guess Quake 3 (Q3 :doh:, RTCW, MOHAA, JKII and more) engine would be good.
 
Maybe Jedi Knight II. At least the demo didn't have very good textures (full detail), but it looks very good otherwise. And the engine shouldn't even be too buggy because it's the Quake 3 engine.
 
Edit: While RF engine might not be very good, that Geo-Mod would be good.
 
Edit2: Not to forget Serious engine. It's very good, too.

[Kellan]

There have been questions asked about that though, because the Red Faction engine is not extensively supported, and because less people probably have it than would have Unreal Tournament 2003 etc.

Sandwich wanted them to use Renegade's engine, which can do indoor and outdoor stuff pretty easily. I'd go for UT 2003, to be honest because it's a massively flexible engine with top public and industry support. Plus, it's suddenly appealing to a massive market when it uses the engine of what is sure to be a best-seller...

[Zeronet]

Renegade isnt that good a game though, graphically too. I guess the JKII engine would one of the best to use, you could give shivans force powers.

[wEvil]

I'd base it on Crystal Space or Ntrap personally - both have the kind of modular extensibilty that will be needed when openGL 2.0 and DirectX 9 hit us.

Oh yea - any of you who are going to buy a graphics card HOLD OFF until christmas.

the Matrox G1000 and 3Dlabs P10 will pretty much make fixed-state graphics cards obsolete overnight in my opinion, so dont get that Geforce4 just yet, mmkay?

[Zeronet]

K. I'll wait until the Geforce5 comes along.

[wEvil]

.....bah.

I could run down all the technical merits and disadvantages of geforce cards but it would bore the hell out of everyone.

Suffice to say - GeForce architecture was, is and will probably remain a cheap and nasty card for the masses.  If compared to a car, it wouldn't be high-end, trust me.  As a high end card you realise it just don't cut it and it sometimes really annoys me that people regard them as high end .  They aren't, repeat, they just aren't that good.

[Ace Pace]

well IMO, FS can't be made into a FPS, what would you do? fight the T-V war? no one maneged to capture anything. boarding ships? thats easy . to make good missions with FPS you need traps and so, when boarding the ship is allready disabled so no traps.

[Redfang]

I'm not going to buy GF4 either, but wait for R300, or NV30. Matrox Parhelia sounds also very nice, and I guess it's coming very soon, because there is a flash animation in Matrox homepage that says: coming May 14, 2002 (direct link).
 

Originally posted by Zeronet
K. I'll wait until the Geforce5 comes along.

 
I guess it will not be Geforce 5. And it (NV30) should be a big improvement over Geforce 4.
 
Also, R300 seems to be very interesting, I guess Parhelia will be very expensive, of course R300 and NV30 can be too, though.

Edit: Ace Pace, I somewhat agree with you.

[Zeronet]

Originally posted by Ace Pace
well IMO, FS can't be made into a FPS, what would you do? fight the T-V war? no one maneged to capture anything. boarding ships? thats easy . to make good missions with FPS you need traps and so, when boarding the ship is allready disabled so no traps.

Im sure the other Ace(he's on the Freespace:FPS team) would agree .

[Kellan]

Traps are crap. Halo was great and had next to no 'traps'. Bah.

[Zeronet]

Halo is the best FPS in existance and i only played it for 4mins on the XBOX at game to come to that concluesion.

[Nico]

Originally posted by Zeronet
Renegade isnt that good a game though, graphically too. I guess the JKII engine would one of the best to use, you could give shivans force powers.

yeah, shivans with force powers
Renegade is my choice. all the tools to do everything are done, you can make vehicles like in RF ( but much more fun to drive), maps can be huge, AI is better than the RF one -dudes will follow you on scales, will jump of roofs if you do so etc- You can simulate various environments. Only thing you can't do: you can't swim (ok, who want to try and swim with 80 Kg of weapons on his back? ). You can do your new characters and levels in Gmax, converter already released blablablablabla.

[Redfang]

Originally posted by Zeronet
Halo is the best FPS in existance and i only played it for 4mins on the XBOX at game to come to that concluesion.

 
Bah... pad...
 
I have also played Halo, but I have no conclusion.

[Kellan]

Originally posted by Zeronet
Halo is the best FPS in existance and i only played it for 4mins on the XBOX at game to come to that concluesion.

Yay! Zeronet and me can finally agree on something!

I bought an XBox so I could play it, though... :devilidea

[Fineus]

Halo does look good - it's be pretty interesting to do a Freespace conversion for!

I think having read things though I'm in two minds now. The Jedi Knight 2 engine would be an excellent base, but then UT2003 does look even more impressive. However with no experience of the game first hand it's hard to say

[CP5670]

I would recommend using the Unreal Warfare engine, which UT2003 and U2 will both use. From what I have seen it looks simply astounding, and if it as powerful and extendable as the original Unreal engine was, it would make an ideal candidate.

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by Kellan
Sandwich wanted them to use Renegade's engine, which can do indoor and outdoor stuff pretty easily.

I did? Heh - my memory is going.

Originally posted by Redfang
Edit2: Not to forget Serious engine. It's very good, too.

The Serious Engine would be best IMHO. Mainly because I know it could support modelling a fully articulate Shivan, bouncing off wals and ceiling. Plus, it looks great, runs great even with many enemies on-screen, and supports huge indoor-outdoor levels. Heck, it even has portals (think man-sized jump nodes. )!

[Ace]

The Red Faction engine can do a damn site more then what Volition did. It's also easier to work with then Quake or any other FPS engine I've seen.

N-Trap is the only engine mentioned here that is "worthy" of FS:FPS other then RF

Also, to AcePace:
What do supar-secret GTI shmucks do?

Don't think new weapons/flying an Apollo, think multi-level zero-G combat in the scaffolding of an Orion class destroyer being built...

Ace grumbles about how all Volition products allow for negative values in the tables, things like reverse geomod, frictionless surfaces, better lighting, etc. etc. which can't be done in other engines without serious coding...