Epic?

[RMSe17]

Whatever happened to Epic mod? Is it still in development? Or abandoned?

[GrandpaTrout]

Right now Epic is on summer break! Summer is too short to spend weekends indoors coding. But development will crank up again soon. Sailing season just ended (yesterday) and camping gear was returned to storage last weekend.

There are still many pieces to finish.

[RMSe17]

Great! I am eagerly waiting for it :):) :D

[hoom]

Ooo what do you sail?

[GrandpaTrout]

It is a Capri25. Part of a ~30 boat one design fleet on one of the largest city lakes. (I am 2000 miles inland). The boat has a deep keel and about 1000lbs of weight that keeps them upright most of the time. And it can carry quite a bit of sail. Normal crew of 4 but with room for 6 on a windy day. One of the best features is the attached BBQ grill (required for rules compliance). Very handy for windless days of swimming and beer drinking. One windless day we lashed all the boats together into a huge circle - our own water world.

Our boat is mostly crewed by tech geeks. And basically none of us knew how to sail 4 years ago. We actually just took first place in a race during nationals. It was our first first. There was much rejoycing. A long way from our typical last place that first year.

I normally crew fordeck. Lots of sail changing, looking for wind and other boats, and tactics.

It would be great to do some ocean sailing. I expect NZ is a great place to sail. Is it tons of islands everywhere, like around Greece? Or is that just further north in Indonesia?

[RMSe17]

just stopping by to see if Epic is any closer to being played :)

(and dreaming of a space sim that would be a mix of IW2:EOC and X2, taking the strengths of both)

[GrandpaTrout]

I am dreaming of the same thing. I cannot quite get there from the EoC direction. EoC is missing the database for tracking the hundreds of ships. POG is an excellent language, but it was never designed to replace C++.

I will release the parts of Epic that are playable at the end of April. I might take a look at modding X after that. I have kind of avoided looking at other engines to avoid distraction. I don't really know if the X combat system can be salvaged.

[RMSe17]

;)

[GrandpaTrout]

Epic transformed into a trading and pirating mod called "The Middle States". Several really great team members jumped in to help. As much as volunteer efforts can be predicted, it will be done in June. Beta should start soon.

The mod will feature a whole new cluster with totally redone graphics, planets, stations, factions, and politics.

There is a dynamic econ simulation (coded in a scripting language, I must have been insane...) based on the stations in the cluster. Change the stations, change the economy. The trade system is pod based. And every station type has different goods for sale/purchase. Yes, when you dock at a station, things happen.

The player can hire wingmen to help with the fighting and hauling of cargo pods. All player ships require fuel and upkeep to stay operating. No more free ride. Totally redone wingman command system.

The player reputation really works now. If you attack a faction, they go hostile. If you attack innocent civilians, the government goes hostile. Pirates are going to have a hard life. You can increase your reputation by purchasing up, which also gives you better trade goods.

It is a pretty fun mod. Graphics are done. Still a little coding to do, but not much. And a bunch of balancing work, documentation, text cleanup, and testing, testing, testing.

[RMSe17]

that sounds awesome!!

man, in my experience it's rare that something this big gets finished. So many times I have seen people start on these grand projects taht would transform a good game into something amazing, and then ... not quite sure what happens, probably different stuff in every situation, maybe they bite off more than what they can chew, maybe they lose excitement and interest in all the code grinding, with more games out there to play and enjoy...

so I am really excited that this project has not gone that way :) :up: :D

[GrandpaTrout]

Epic nearly died. Taking on too much and going in to many different directions. (I had no resistance to feature creep and was the worst offender in that reguard). Work stalled. The team disbanded. After a year away from the project I went back to see what could be salvaged. It became clear that with a little more effort a very playable game could be recovered.

So dust off your EoC disks and reinstall. You are going to need your graphics card issues sorted out before the end of June. And we will have need of Beta testers who are willing to bash new features and decipher my cryptic manuals (until the real ones arrive).

[Indie]

Well, I have never even uninstalled it (except when I broke it due to excessive modding). Of course, with these HD prices who needs to uninstall? :) Looking forward to seeing what you have. It would be a shame to lose all that work. :up:

Early this year I started my legacy pack for I-War original and Defiance and actually managed to put most of the fan missions ever made into the game and lauchable from the I-War interface. What is taking longer is finding out what I should put into an install package to make it work. Mainly because its booo-ring. ;)

Oh, and then there is Buda5 which is on an extended (summer/winter) break... :)

[GrandpaTrout]

It looks like Logic is working on a great Nexus mod screen shots (http://www.b5-conflicts.com/screenshots.html)

Buda5 is on break, but do you have any future plans? I ask because the Epic team is going to tackle replacing the traffic scripts next. The goal is to make the new scripts INI file controlled. The star system building tools already exist. And with the traffic scripts spawning the correct ships - well, it would make a nice B5 mod.

[Indie]

Well, never say never I guess, but I think its unlikely that I would do anything major with Buda5 in the near future. This is mainly because I currently spend most of my days coding Java and after that I really don't feel the urge to go scripting. :bulb: :p

I'm hoping I'll be able to get back to my own pet projects again in the future though. :)