IronDuke's I-War2 Remake/I-War3

Iron Duke

KUDOS to the work you are putting into making this come to life. Before I get to the good bit however a word of warning.


Atari tend to guard their IP's aggressively. I know you intend to create a script to check for I-War 2 ownership which is a good thing, because you can argue that in order to play this it will actually encourage newcomers to actually go out and purchase the original game on Steam or GOG. I have the GOG version. But please be careful you aren't hit with a cease and desist order from Atari.

I have seen Plasma Pong and Typhoon 2001, both games I enjoyed and both were available free, both shut down by the Atari Lawyers and would hate this to happen to you after you have dedicated months or years of your time to make this happen.

Now a couple of questions.

1. Do you intend for this game to initially follow the original story from Independence War 2 and then continue or do you intend for this to be a continuation of Independence War 2.

2. Will there be support for multiple controllers. I am Currently playing the game with a CH Fighter Stick, Pro Throttle and Thrustmaster TFRP Rudder Pedals set as individual controllers. I have created a control configuration file specifically for this game, as I noted that the originals Flux engine didn't seem to support more than 5 axis per controller. (If 'I'm wrong please tell me.).

Again I wish you all the best.

Developers, If it ain't broke is soon will be.

Howdy!
Thanks for the encouragement and the warning. As for that script, I'm planning on expanding it in a specific way. I'm going to create a little mod when the remake is complete that will be an activator for the remake. Basically, no playing the remake unless you play the first mission with the activator mod running. Then the installation of the remake will be activated. Also, every time you start the remake, it'll do a check for a valid EoC installation. Pain in the butt? Yep. As for Atari, I really doubt they'll pay any attention. This community is a teensy little cult. For us to become a problem, we'd have to have literally a few thousand downloads of the remake, and that's probably not happening. Even giving a cease and desist costs them money, and we very likely will never be worth the effort. But thanks for letting me know. If they ever do contact me, I'll tread on feet of glass.

1. I'm going to completely recreate the story from the vanilla EoC, with all the missions that they cut out, and quite a few of my own. But all the originals will be there. And the story will continue on at the spot where it stops in the vanilla game, after you destroy the accelerator. I'll invent much more plot, explaining the arrival of the aliens, and tying up every loose end in the I-War universe.
2. Absolutely. Yay Unity engine. Besides, I'd die if I couldn't plug in whatever over-the-top controllers start coming out soon.

--IronDuke

Edit: While thinking about the Atari situation, it's entirely possible that my optimism is born of my foolish, headstrong youthfulness. :lol: Being only 18, I have not had much experience with things. We'll see if I'm wrong.

I have just created the project folder for the game. The first thing I do will be to convert the heavy corvette model from .pso to .lwo, open it in Blender, and save it as a .blend. Unity can then read it right off the bat with no conversion of any kind required. It won't have textures though. I will then apply my flight model to it, and give the thrusters the right values to produce exactly the same performance characteristics as in the original game. Application of the flight model may take a few days.

Edit: Turns out setting up the smoothing angles on the ship model is harder than I thought. The problem with low poly models is that the angle between polys of what should be a curved surface may be large than the angle between polys of what should be a corner, so I have to manually mark a lot of edges as "sharp." The auto-smooth ain't gonna cut it.
I have to admire the ingenuity of the modellers of the game; the ship is only 787 tris for 414 verts. For it to look as good as it does shows their skill. And the more I look at the model, the more I can't help but think that they knew nearly every technique in the book for making the desired shape with almost no geometry.

--IronDuke

Here is my first completed skybox. However, the skybox's corners seem quite obvious. Any suggestions?

I have a question, yes. How do I open it?

--IronDuke

Unzip the zip file. Inside is a .mat file. Import the file into your asset folder. Go to window-->lighting page to assign it as your skybox. Here are the original six images.