Official SWGB 2 Game Engine thread.

[Uber Sith]

I find that the C&C Generals Engine would suit it perfectly

 

If youve seen the effects for Batle For middle Eart, there high detailed cannon fodder scenes would be perfect for somthing like the clone wars.

 

So i suggest a modified Generals Engine:

[Arthur2]

yep! C&C Generals Engine is da bomb!

I suggest that you guys make the ideas simpler...I mean..C&C Generals is VERY SIMPLE comparing to SWGB

 

we want a fun game, not a complicated game

[Admiral Vostok]

Well I just had a look at The Battle for Middle Earth, and Ritz Cracker you are right. If EA can do everything they say they are going to do to the Generals Engine to make The Battle for Middle Earth, it will be by far the best engine out there, and with a few more tweaks it could be perfect for a Star Wars RTS.

 

They plan to make it so that there are "cannon fodder" units, that will just fight without you directing them exactly, so you can concentrate on controlling your heroes or other important units. You can also control the cannon fodder, but it helps to facilitate huge battles with individual heroes like the ones in Lord of the Rings. This would be perfect for Star Wars, with the cannon fodder being the Troopers and your important heroes, jedi and mechs being more the more powerful units.

 

Let me just say I have very high hopes for this game, and if it turns into what they are hoping it to be, I'd say to go with this instead of any engine LucasArts could knock together. It will be a tried and tested one, and LucasArts will probably like that rather than having another potential Force Commander on their hands.

[lukeiamyourdad]

I'm quite skeptical about this game. I've tried the War of the Ring Demo and it felt like a total WC3 rip-off.

 

But we're talking about Battle for Middle-Earth here so...

 

I'm not so sure about using the C&C: Generals SAGE engine(if that's the right name). In C&C:Generals, like all C&C games, the troopers are ridiculously ugly. I mean seriously with details at max they still look bad. They would have to change that since the New SW RTS will probably look more like C&C: Generals then Battle for Middle-Earth.(Although the troopers in Battle for Middle-Earth look great when you zoom on them).

 

They would have to modify it to make it more complicated a bit, 'cause in C&C: Generals, like pretty much all C&C games, it's simply one ressource, make a few guys then bash through which gets boring after awhile...

[Admiral Vostok]

I agree the Generals engine as it stands now would not be good for Star Wars. It's far too simplistic, and the game boils down to whoever can get their superweapons first. This is not how a Star Wars game should be. But after they modify it for The Battle for Middle Earth it will be awesome. Not only are the unit graphics brought up to the standard of the terrain, but they plan to make it easy to control whole epic armies and induicidual characters at the same time. Perfect for Star Wars.

 

As for War of the Ring, I downloaded the demo, and let me tell you it sucks. If the didn't use the WarCraft 3 engine, they sure went to every possible effort to make it identical to WarCraft 3, only with less civs. I would also like to add that I predicted this game would suck Please do not confuse it in any way with the brilliant piece of work that will be The Battle for Middle Earth.

[CorranSec]

Well, this Battle for Middle Earth sounds like a good game. But exactly what kind of scale are we talking about? Does this mean that we'll need to be using heroes? Is the 'cannon fodder' idea really very Star Wars? And what about air units?

[lukeiamyourdad]

It should be a huge scale since EA said the game would represent the epic battles of LotR.

 

Huge scale can be good for a Star Wars game.

 

As for heroes, this will be a bit weird for the New SW RTS, although doable. We also don't want uber heroes like the ones in LotR(even the Jedi ones).

 

Cannon Fodder: This will work for the Trade Fed, Confed, Republic, Empire and Gungans. The remaining civs shouldn't have this kind of thing.

 

Air Units: I don't think they should do it totally like C&C generals. They should just create something new for this.

[Admiral Vostok]

The game appears to be about the same scale as SWGB1. However, they want to make it feasible to control entire platoons of troops with the same ease as individual heroes. I'm not sure how they will do this, but I think it will be the best way to work with Jedi and other special sorts of units, as well as the main characters of a campaign.

 

The cannon fodder idea really represents the fact that heaps of Troopers are there to hold up the opposite army's heaps of troopers while your important units like Jedi, Mechs and Aircraft do their bit. Looking at every major battle in Star Wars, I think this works well. At Hoth, the Rebels had a lot of cannon fodder troops that got munched by the special units (AT-ATs), then the Empire deployed their own cannon fodder (Snowtroopers) to mop up. At Endor, the cannon fodder was Ewoks, because the Strike Team were more of a specialised type of troop. Naboo had heaps of obvious cannon fodder, and so did Geonosis. So I think it works for everyone.

 

As for Air Units, they've got Giant Eagles and Wraiths on Fell Beasts in BFME, which I'm assuming wouldn't work like air units in Generals, and as such I think Air could be integrated fine.

[lukeiamyourdad]

Cannon Fodder: Although it is true that lots of troopers have been sent to "suicide" I don't think it really fits a civ as the rebellion, in general terms to do such a thing. A more Elite Trooper civ would tend to use them in better tactics then frontal assault which obviously isn't something the Rebels are best at.

 

The same thing applies to the Naboo and Wookiees.

[Admiral Vostok]

Hmm, I see your point. However since we don't actually know how this cannon fodder concept works, we can't say whether or not it suits Star Wars.

 

Another thing that might make the game a bit unsuitable is the possible emphasis it will have on seige, which isn't a huge part of Star Wars warfare. The only thing that comes close was Hoth, and that was hardly like the seiges of Lord of the Rings. Then again I'm sure if it was modified from Generals it can be changed back to being less seige-oriented.

[eizo131]

I haven't read a lot of the posts, but after thinking about it i think that LA should make their own engine and make the units more like they were in the movies.

[urluckyday]

Of course the Age of Mythology engine!

[DarthMuffin]

Haven't read most of the posts, but it seems like most peeps like the Generals engine...

 

Well, I like it too. I thought it would be too small-scale, but if EA decides to do a lotr game based on it, I suppose we can have big armies. Seems good to me.

 

I also think that Tech Levels should be taken out. I also HATE those damn Trooper Recruit --> Trooper ---> Hvy Trooper stuff. All the civs (I already pissed everybody off here with my choices (GE, Rebs, GR, Confeds)) should be completly unique, of course, as in WC3.

 

Of course the best bet would be to create their own engine, but I must say I've lost faith in LA (and no, LA didn't do crap in the making of KotOR).

 

I'm quite hungry for SW stuff right now... especially a RTS... So I guess I would buy anything they throw at me anyways...

 

And for God's sake, AoM and AoK is just the same crap. We want new stuff

[DarthVirus]

Hi DarthMaulUK !

 

Well use 3D engine of Command & Conquer Generals will be good but this C++ engine must be "translate" in assembler before.

 

So like that the game will not suck on "middle" machine like presently with Command & Conquer Generals.

 

Not everybody have Ati Radeon 9800 XT with Pentium EE 3.2 GHz with 1 GB 500 MHz DDR with SCSI 120 GB hard drive !

 

[T10]

I like the idea of using the C&C Generals engine. I love it's 3-D. It's good graphics right to the closed zoom.

 

I'm not really sure about the RoN engine. A CC is replaced with a city. And, I don't really think that the rebels founded too many cities during the GCW.

 

I haven't played AoMm so I don't know what that's like. But, from the screens, I don't like it. It looks flat. But what would I know.

 

I vote for C&C engine.

[lukeiamyourdad]

Well, the AoM infantry units look a lot better then C&C Generals and in general I find AoM's graphics a lot better.

 

However, AoM's engine is not fit for playing a Star wars game while the C&C one, with a bit of tweaking, would be a lot better.

[oback]

ist not good to scale down your game for weaker graphics and less features because people still us pentium 3's. gotta think of the future, and yes you all will hafta upgrade your systems sooner or later so why not just do it and you can play all the games u want. i kno money is an issue but save up, and getting these computers on a payment plan isnt bad either. But i liked the engine they used for swgb, it had good graphics, good gameplay and it ran fine. Wat i would like to see is more population limit, and the ability to run that better. But i would like the game to be the style that the first one was, not anything like midival total war. But using any engine would be fine, just use the one that is gunna be able to run on higher end pc's for the future

[thy god]

i dont give a crap

[fatpat60]

Alright, so I finally decided it was time for me to participate in the SWGB community after about two years I think it has been since its release. Anyway, what should SWGB2 be like you ask? Here's what I've got to say:

1. Graphical improvement required. I want to see the game go full 3-D allowing me to view my glorious army from more than one angle.

2. Drop the age/tech level upgrade along with a bunch of other upgrades. I found it silly that a TIE Fighter upgrades to an Interceptor. I want to see those two fighters fight side by side like in Ep VI. Same goes for the TIE Defenders and every other fighter in the game, Z-95 Headhunters are NOT the same thing as X-Wings!!! Some upgrades have got to go, it would allow for even MORE unit variety.

3. Jedi and Sith need more powers. The cloaking and converting was fine, but I want to choke a unit and zap him with bolts or push an army back a few steps to delay the attack a little while longer.

4. More air units. CAPITAL STARSHIPS DAMN IT!!! I want to be able to put a squadron of TIE Fighters inside a Star Destroyer and cart them over from my base to the enemy base and then unleash hell!!!

5. This is actually the topic of another thread but I'll talk about it here. Space battles and land battles should not mix. I didn't like fighting it out on "asteroids", it felt like Starcraft, I never saw that in the movies damn it. I want to pit my fleet against your fleet, space battles should be very different.

6. Let's talk about the engine. RoN would be nice because of the large scale of it but not so great because of the fact that cities aren't exactly built from ground up like in SWGB or AoE. So the grand armies of RoN would be nice but not the cities, fighting in cramped streets is fun. I haven't played Generals and I won't, it's not a true C&C game to me but it sounds like it uses a very similar air system to Total Annihilation. If anybody played that game, you know what I'm talking about. Total Annihilation had the greatest system for air units EVER. It was sheer brilliance, still is. I haven't found a game that has anything like that. The Hawks zooming by at unparalled speeds right by your screen, firing a few missiles and passing over their target, then slowing down, turning and going back to fire another round. Brilliance it was and that's what SWGB2 is gonna need. Bombers don't sit on top of their target, fire and get killed, they zoom over and splatter the place with bombs. In terms of engine, LA should make their own but must incorporate many good elements of other engines. It must also keep some things from the original SWGB, like fortresses, those beauties can keep you alive and buy you enough time for a counter attack if you place 'em right in your base. Some things must remain unchanged in SWGB2, but I think that there is a lot fo change to be done. I want more units and unit variety, I don't want to ugprade a heavy trooper in a repeater, those guys are too different for my taste. You should have a repeater and a heavy trooper, separate. Same goes for fighters. Once again, capital starships would do miracles and create some spectacular battles. Finally, 8 civs is nice, but I'm sure there are more than 8 civs in the SW universe. Anybody forgot about those Hapan guys, and the Corporate Sector Authority? They've got at least 60 plus star systems under their belt and could be very good civs.

Last word, SWGB and SWGB:CC were great, but as someone said elsewhere, they felt like really professional mods. A graphical boost in to 3D land, more units, change some things with upgrades and jedi/sith, throw in a few more civs to attempt to cover more of SW universe, and you might have yourself a winner. Here's hoping LA does it right.