Even tho i made this awful decision of opening my old server again (players are a headache to deal with) - i have tried to avoid any real development - it eats too much time.
Besides messing around with a few models and replacing some bad ones/adjusting angles i had before the 3dsmax plugin era and adjusting some ingame balance - nothing major.
I'm not a 3d artist so i didn't spend much time with that part - existing "free" stuff mostly wont work for rf or is designed for rendering artwork - and i don't have the patience and time to learn and start making my own complex models.
Besides that there isn't much to do with RF. Models/maps are one thing but new functionality/mechanics are too deep in debugging and even then they are half assed features that barely work.
And rF lacks a lot - maps and models are one thing but after initial "wow" wears off, people get bored again and only look at stats/fastest farm spots.
Also proper lack of support for decent shaders. Everything is just basic baked textures - and no support for even simple normal maps.
From what I noticed existing "free" stuff is honestly horrible for RF, at most you might get some weapons that kinda sorta fit without looking too bad and with some effort a mob. At one point i checked out other game art like Dekaron and other older games for stuff. Even then you still get poor results because of different rendering settings and what texture size the files are. Trying to port non-custom made armor into RF just isn't practical unless your okay with joints being off, armor parts digging into other parts, not looking good with mis-matched pieces and a chance texture quality being worse than original game. That's under the assumption the person doing it understands animation enough to give the pieces proper values so they don't deform weird while walking/ doing any other animation.
Imo better of having other game armor as Reference Art, not actually used.
Designed for rendering artwork I can honestly at least work with, that's one of the things I ended up doing, just was really interesting seeing how optimized I could make it while still looking good. Result was okay would really change some stuff if I were to do it again though. Like planes aligned vertically was a poor choice, solid objects would of been much better but planes aligned horizontally did work nice. Plus If I had the time changing glows to a different effect would of made it better.
Custom Maps without radar working would at least liven it for awhile, as new players would have to explore it. Most "new" features/ mechanics are not really new just a new flavor of the old thing, getting chocolate instead of vanilla... For anything major would need to pay to have it special done then I'm guessing everybody else using the same protect could use it too for a cost.
For good shaders and stuff could really look into features/changes to the bin instead of that program you used for anti-aliasing, in theory you could have client side rendering system completely redone without needing to change other stuff. Its not very practical but I see no reason why it wouldn't be possible if time was not a factor.
