Just Finished the Game

Particle Systems no longer exists any more. The developers who made the I-War series get no money from any sales of the game any more. No royalties, nothing. So buying the games off ebay doesn't hurt me or the rest of the guys who worked on the game personally. So don't feel bad about it!

-- Steve
Stephen Robertson
I-War series co-designer.

But EPIC is THE expansion pack for I-War2... but made by VERY LOYAL I-War series Loyalists...

HEY!! why dont Ericman and Shane and other modders form a new COMPANY... hehehe

by the way is EPIC finished yet, after epic is finished what next??

There's only One oF us GetTing out HeRe aNd it w0nt be mE

Dang, sorry you guys lost out like that. You've made one of the best game environments I've ever played in.

What happened / will happen to the source code? Is it even possible to make a sequel if you and the other designers even wanted to?

Who's idea was it to create a coordinate space of such cosmic magnitude, and how did you guys pull it off? Did you write your own math routines specially for extremely large integers, or did you use floating point? If it's FP how did you maintain adequate precision at larger magnitudes? Everything seems to stay put, right down to the centimeter, no matter how far away it is ... or is that just an illusion?

We still have the source code, but I doubt we'd ever get permission to release it. It's a very complicated rights issue.

The original I-War had a large coordinate space, so I imagine it was Michael Powell and Glyn Williams idea in the first place.

From what I understand I-War 2 uses some sort of dynamic precision. It's very precise in the area around the player, and the precision drops off the further away from the player you get, which is why you can have these huge distances in the game.

Most of the ships / items in the game are placed when the player gets near their location for that reason - if you place a load of stuff millions of kilometers away very close to eachother then they can collide because the precision isn't good enough.

-- Steve
Stephen Robertson
I-War series co-designer.

We still have the source code, but I doubt we'd ever get permission to release it. It's a very complicated rights issue.

I'm very sorry to hear this Stephen. It would make such a huge difference to the moddability of the game, its longevity in the hands of fans, etc. This is likely a dead issue, I know, but you never know how far motivated fans might go to get what they want. Is there any light you can shed on the 'complicated rights issue'? How hard would it be to unravel? Who might one contact in the organization to discuss the complications of the rights issues? Any further hints you could make available might help.

In my experience all issues, complicated and simple, have workable solutions. Usually the solution is a matter of money, and the level of complication involved just determines how much.

--
Hot4Darmat

Wow, that's pretty sophisticated, but it makes sense; that's how double-precision numbers themselves work: very precise when small, less so when large.

If the coordinate space were "wrapped around the player" so that all distances and coordinates were based in the player's frame of reference then plain old double-precision would work; at coordinate 0, 0, 0, where the player's ship is, precision is maximal, while out in the boondocks at 3 billion by 200 million by 80,000 precision is minimal.

I frankly have absolutely no idea how one might actually go about designing such a system. I guess if I did I'd be writing great games like I-War, eh?

Hats off to you guys. I wish you were still in business.