BIG Maps with Flying Vehicles and First Person? Thread

Hello folks,

I'm looking for an engine that support BIG map sizes, and vehicles (flying and ground vehicles!) as well as first person capabilities.

If you've ever played 'Universal Combat', you'd get a sense of what I'm talking about (You'd also know that that game is useless from a modder's standpoint).

So where is my ultimate engine?? I want to make a 'Freelancer' type mod for a game where you can freely explore a universe, but also land on planets and get out of your ship, get eaten by aliens, etc. I have thousands of models, animations, etc, just no workable engine. 'Universal Combat' would have been the closest thing and proves that it would be possible, but the developer has made it very clear that he doesn't support modders.

So what are my other options? I'm looking for Planetary Scale or at least Continental Scale.

Does anyone know the scale of the maximum map sizes for Moddable games?

Games that I know of with BIG Maps:

UNIVERSAL COMBAT= Planetary Map Sizes, BUT complicated and completely unmoddable.

ECHELON, WIND WARRIORS= Continental Map Sizes, In-Game editor, BUT cannot import custom models, + no first Person element.

MORROWIND=Amazing game with great editor, Huge, detailed continent, BUT no support for fast moving space vehicles.

BATTLEZONE 2= Great game, Biggish Map sizes, Good editor, lots of vehicles, first person element, BUT very old game and only 3000 poly max model size, + very limited aircraft Class.

BATTLEFIELD 1942+VIETNAM= Great mod support, first person+vehicles, BUT map sizes seem limited to maybe 10 km a side. Is this correct? Can I go bigger now with BFV?

BREED= No real mod support, BUT has vehicles, first person, etc all good, map size seems to be around 5-10km a side.

CHROME= Good mod capabilities, BUT Small maps at around the 3 or 4 km mark, no Aircraft Class vehicles.

GROUND CONTROL 2=Great Mod support, great graphics, BUT Strategy game with no first person and smallish maps (10km+/- ?)

HOMEWORLD 2= Great space game with mod tools all over, BUT no first person, nor the ability to land on planets.

Even map sizes of only 50-100km a side can fake a planetary scale if done properly (No one really wants it to take 3 hours to get from one place to another).
Freelancer cheated with scale all over the place and still came up with a believable-ish, yet fun and playable game.

Does anyone know of any others that might have the potential that I'm looking for? I don't even care if it's an older engine. I'd have used Battlezone 2 even with the low poly limits, but the AIrcraft Class that was created was just too buggy and not supported with AI.

Cheers!

z

RTCW and Enemy Terrirtory would be good

Far Cry?

Unreal tournament 2004 aswell

bf1942.... holy crap those maps are huge....

If you scale your models down, you could use UT2004 quite easily. It has good vechicle support, and is also first person.

The Torque engine, plus the Torque Shader Engine for newer graphical effects

tourqe? meh, go with ut2k4. Or doom 3. That can handle anything

Not really, UT2004 is just a tad bit slower than the rest of the engines due to UnrealScript (Its 20x slower than C++, but that was with UT, so I don't know how much its been optimized. Doom3 doesn't seem to hold many players online at first glance, but I'm not sure with that.

Well, Unreal and Torque are going to be good bets.

BF1942/V/maybe 2 has quite limited terrain creation and vehicle physics, certain people may not notice but it is very clunky in general terms.

Far Cry can do it, the worlds are very simple to create and can be fairly long, with some great vehicle support, unfortunately, the netcode is poor, we were having trouble playing ctf at a lan with 1g dual channeled, 9800 pro 128mb, AMD 3200, and an a7n8x, so the thing could run it max with little general slowdown, but, people were jumping too often (and most of us are frame freaks with all settings turned down, overclocking, with high end set ups).

Morrowind is unfortunately horrible with indoor areas, I forgot the engine they used but it is the same for DaoC, and it requires indoor areas to basically be created as their own zone for the sake of proper processing, as well, I've heard the multiplayer doese not working very well, predictions with arrows and even most slashes (though I hadn't known it had mp for pc), but, you can indeed make a massive map on it and attempt to incorporate physics and vehicular movement, it's been done with HL mods. (and I do mean mods, anyone thinking the vehicles in that is a moron)

Breed no one plays, it should've come out so long ago, but, I've heard of multiplayer being fairly solid (not even sure off hand that they had it but, heard a few played cooperatively), though I think they are encountering slowdown with a few too many vehicles and players in play. The graphics aren't the best but are certainly suitable, and the environments can be quite large, I mean that intro scene where you're firing off at the radar towers in the dropship and then running across a huge island, that's all one and I don't remember any load lag. Unfortunately, I've not heard, nor really searched, of a Breed Editor in any sort.

Ground Control 2 I'd say go for it, I mean, you can go deep into view of your forces, it isn't that hard to change it to a first person perspective, an engine doesn't require you to specify this through the entirity of it and that's the only way you'll get it, it will certainly change renderings but, you could have a well and playable game if you're smart enough, I've played WC3 in a locked 3rd person, it worked. Plus, netcode was damn good for GC, I haven't played online but I'd imagine so for GC2.

Chrome is one few people know about, I wouldn't suggest it, small maps for the most part anyway, but, it does have fairly good netcode with it, I mean 200 ping is still playable, unfortunately, alot of the rendering techniques aren't really techniques, they are faked by and large and that means less quality for the similar resources, but they have vehicles, the AI can be smart if you need it, and making a flying vehicle of some sort is not too hard, I'd suggest hovering vehicles like a helicopter type.

Unreal is a good choice depending on map size, if you can break it into maps it will work very well, the load times will hurt a bit because the maps can often become so large with good content, but, they have everything that is necessary, with at the least a fair map size, vehicle code (Raptor and soon Cicada, but, no direct planes), high enough detail, much improved on an already good netcode, and, the Unrealscript isn't really slower in actually running the game as it is in starting and caching, at least to my somewhat limited knowledge now.

Torque, go and buy it, I mean you can have the source code for like $250 right now including the shader engine, it comes with enough editing, an integrated physics system, they've had planes in Tribes and all sorts of vehicles, the player size can get enormous, and I think most people still agree it has the best netcode around, at least for an engine that was actually used.

I really suggest torque, they give great support, and although a bit dated its constantly being updated, not to mention the exterem level of help that the team behind it will provide.

Morrowind is unfortunately horrible with indoor areas, I forgot the engine they used but it is the same for DaoC, and it requires indoor areas to basically be created as their own zone for the sake of proper processing, as well, I've heard the multiplayer doese not working very well, predictions with arrows and even most slashes (though I hadn't known it had mp for pc), but, you can indeed make a massive map on it and attempt to incorporate physics and vehicular movement, it's been done with HL mods. (and I do mean mods, anyone thinking the vehicles in that is a moron)

There is no multiplayer for Morrowind. Full stop.

Also, Morrowind isn't exactly moddable. You can add stuff, but say, you couldn't change it to fit into a futuristic setting... unless you want your guns to act like Crossbows ^_^

true..

Why not tribes vengence or tribes 2. It's already has that type of gametype. And as far as what I've seen tribes 2 is written in something like C++ and tribes vengence is based off the unreal engine.

And this was bumped because...?

well after reading this again and playing Tribes vengence you would be perfect to use that.

Mind you your team and coder will need to be good and not lazy this will not be a easy engine to use.

Battlefield 1942 would fit, because they're big maps, you can have flying vehicles.

Yup, I'm participating in this thread since BW72 did

Battlefield is the way to go.

RTCW and Enemy Territory? God, those don't even support vehicles.

BF 1942. Breed would work wonders but it has no SDK, so thats no go. IMO, Universal Combat sucked. Just the fact that trees don't clip annoys me.... of course in Breed people don't clip at all when vehicles hit them.

Why not make your own engine or use someone elses so that people can play it without in need of the game. It should be hard to accomplish what you want. I'll try to help out with the coding if you want. Just PM me

I'm going to hedge my bets and say that BF2 will use even larger maps than either BF42 and BFV.

But yeah, the physics in their engines is quite buggy. How many times have you been killed because your jeep starts acting like it's possessed just from driving down a hill

I believe those problems will be solved in BF2, a lot of things are to be improved in it.

Jihad_Jeep wrote: I'm going to hedge my bets and say that BF2 will use even larger maps than either BF42 and BFV.

But yeah, the physics in their engines is quite buggy. How many times have you been killed because your jeep starts acting like it's possessed just from driving down a hill

I once slowly drove down the hill and it exploded

Has that ever happened to you in real-life, chis?

no, i would assume I woulden't be on this forum today if it did

Can anyone give me a link to the Torque engine? Thanks