Newbie Spellweaver
- Joined
- May 11, 2015
- Messages
- 23
- Reaction score
- 11
Hi Ragezone,
I used to play a lot of Flyff back in the day, and I loved private servers. Some of you probably remember I was the annoying little 13 year old going around the forums as The Hot One.
(TLDR @ the bottom)
After coming back just recently and leveling up a new character to hero on eFlyff I realized how great of a game this is and how much potential it holds, but nobody seems to be doing anything about it, rather just milking the player base by offering a new fashion set or overpowered weapon.
I've poked around on the top lists for private servers, and yeah, some of you guys are adding great content to the game, but when it all comes down to it, Flyff is still a pretty boring game after you max out your characters. I'm not here to rant about the game or the private servers though. I'm here to suggest something probably not new (because I've seen failed emulation projects...) but something quite doable.
I feel that creating/recreating Flyff in a modern day game engine such as Unity3d would spark a huge amount of development within the community, and here's a about 10 of the 100 reasons why I think that:
Beside all of these powerful features offered by the Unity engine, let's take a step back and talk about the amount of freedom creating the game from scratch would offer. Central version control systems can be set up to allow anyone full access to the source and documentation giving them the opportunity to make big changes to the game if they don't like the vanilla emulation. (This could even include different branches, in case someone wants to branch a v6 emulation rather than work on v19)
TLDR;
This is not a "I'm going to start this project! I hope you guys will help me! (In reality I'll just abandon it after 2 days)" kind of thing. This is a "What do you guys think? I want your input." kind of thing. I'm looking for a project to help me learn the complications of game development, and Flyff already has all of the models and textures, it just needs a programmer.
Unity3d is a powerful piece of software, and I feel recreating Flyff in it would really get this community of developers going again, as well as make it easy for new developers interested in our game to get started with coding in C# and Javascript.
I used to play a lot of Flyff back in the day, and I loved private servers. Some of you probably remember I was the annoying little 13 year old going around the forums as The Hot One.
(TLDR @ the bottom)
After coming back just recently and leveling up a new character to hero on eFlyff I realized how great of a game this is and how much potential it holds, but nobody seems to be doing anything about it, rather just milking the player base by offering a new fashion set or overpowered weapon.
I've poked around on the top lists for private servers, and yeah, some of you guys are adding great content to the game, but when it all comes down to it, Flyff is still a pretty boring game after you max out your characters. I'm not here to rant about the game or the private servers though. I'm here to suggest something probably not new (because I've seen failed emulation projects...) but something quite doable.
I feel that creating/recreating Flyff in a modern day game engine such as Unity3d would spark a huge amount of development within the community, and here's a about 10 of the 100 reasons why I think that:
- Unity is free. It even comes with it's own development environment called MonoDevelop. Oh, and if you don't like that, it also supports Visual Studios 2012 (enterprise and pro!) Aren't you all tired of using vs2005?
- Unity is an extremely well documented engine that works both with C# and Javascript, which are two extremely easy languages to learn. This is great for new developers that want to get involved in our community.
- Unity's GUI based editor is extremely simple and intuitive, allowing for new developers in our community to quickly get started with making extensions and custom content. (We should focus on stimulating new developments, because let's face it... there aren't many around here.)
- Unity is constantly in development by the Unity Technologies staff, meaning we would get new great features and bug fixes with every release and update.
- Unity's Asset Store contains thousands of extensions and tools for the editor, including
You must be registered to see links, a server networking middleware that can be used to set up the multiplayer aspect of the emulation.
- Unity supports 20+ platforms. Though it really isn't a big pull for the Flyff community, I have seen some people really wanting to get Flyff working on a Linux machine by removing the references to the Windows-only files.
- Unity's fully customizable import system will allow us to read/import files such as .o3d, .dds and .ani so we can use them in the editor without spending time converting. (We already have the structures for the file types, so this would be an easy step!)
- Unity's "Mechanim" animation system will allow us to merge animations(running while shooting a bow, anyone?), create transitions between them, and easily create brand new ones by changing just a few key frames.
- Using what Unity calls an "Asset Bundle," we can (theoretically... I haven't looked into this yet...) redistribute community releases in the form of mods, which can add custom content like fashion sets and weapons, much like the modding system found in Minecraft.
- Unity's extendable interface will allow us to make tools that can be used right inside of the editor to quickly create vast amount of content. (Example? QuestWriter, per player InventoryEditor, ect..)
- Unity has a very powerful lighting/shading engine, as well as great support for particle effects. This would give us a great amount of new opportunities to make the game look better.
Beside all of these powerful features offered by the Unity engine, let's take a step back and talk about the amount of freedom creating the game from scratch would offer. Central version control systems can be set up to allow anyone full access to the source and documentation giving them the opportunity to make big changes to the game if they don't like the vanilla emulation. (This could even include different branches, in case someone wants to branch a v6 emulation rather than work on v19)
TLDR;
This is not a "I'm going to start this project! I hope you guys will help me! (In reality I'll just abandon it after 2 days)" kind of thing. This is a "What do you guys think? I want your input." kind of thing. I'm looking for a project to help me learn the complications of game development, and Flyff already has all of the models and textures, it just needs a programmer.
Unity3d is a powerful piece of software, and I feel recreating Flyff in it would really get this community of developers going again, as well as make it easy for new developers interested in our game to get started with coding in C# and Javascript.