Porting First Strike to BF2 feature

Frankly, I have been pursuing getting First Strike or First Strike models and maps into other game engines. First with Battlecry on the Unreal Engine and then with Galactic Civil War on the Unity engine. Battlecry fizzled out, but we actually got some First Strike models into the Unity engine, before the team paused work because of EA stopping fan based games. The unity game was actually playable with several developed maps. It may even restart at some point.

EA basically killed BF2142 when they dropped the master account server. Unlike, BF2 which was designed to be played in offline mode, BF2142 was designed to be played only with an online account. The difference is the with BF2142, if you play singleplayer, you are playing with your online account player. In fact, you have all your upgrades - you just can't earn any new upgrades. DICE [BF2142 creaters] did this because players were complaining that in BF2 they could not use the upgrades when playing singleplayer. The result is that BF2142 game requires an online account but is actually buggy without it, which was discovered after EA dropped support for BF2142. Other fans have picked up and created their own master account server (Revive and then Reclamation), but that means that in order to play First Strike, we are relying on another team to keep running the master account server. It would be possible to reach out and find out how to pick it up in case they ever shut down, but the reality is that BF2142 was never as popular as BF2, and player counts were already getting low when EA shut down BF2142 support. Furthermore, with the game no longer available except in the resale market, it just is not worth it to continue development of the First Strike on the BF2142 game engine. With that being said, I have been asked, and am willing to put out a new client and server versions that with and bug fixes, but as far as new development, it just is not really worth it for the BF2142 engine.

On the other hand, BF2 still has a huge fan base, can be played in offline mode indefinitely, and has a debugger, so a scaled down port would be worthwhile.

There are some limitations for a port to BF2:
- BF2 can not support mechs (AT-AT, AT-ST, AT-PT). The best you could do would be how the mechs were animated where the legs were tied to a rotation animation, which was more like pretend riding bike. It worked for the BF1942 mod, Galactic Conquest, but that was almost 20 years ago. By today's standards, it would look lame. In order to get the mechs to work in BF2, they would have to be re-imaged with alternate mode of transport, such a tracks or repulsor lifts.

Galactic Conquest 1942 mod: Moddb.com

- Space map would not work in BF2 as is. In a BF2142 patch, DICE made it so that ground was not required, which allowed true space maps. Work arounds would have to be made. Galactic Conquest used black water and a grid pattern at the top and bottom of the maps to help give perspective when flying. Some space maps could be re-imagined as an atmosphere map (high in the air over water).

- Automated personal droids would have to be modified. The automatic weapon feature in BF2142 which allowed the droids to work automatically does not work in BF2. You could drop a drop a droid for health, supply, repair, but they would not follow. The attack droids would not autofire. - Not a deal breaker.

- Autofire weapons would not be possible. First Strike multiplayer did not use this feature, I mainly used in in singleplayer. There are ways to spawn bots into weapons instead, so there are work arounds.

- EMP weapons, like the Demp would not work the same in BF2. They could be set to damage only vehicles, but they would not shut it down.

- First Strike has a large number of weapons, but fewer classes. It would be possible to add more classes to give players a better weapon selection list.

So, I would be on board if there was interest in porting First Strike to BF2. The plan would be to start with the land maps and then do some testing on space maps, depending on community interest level and support. There are also plenty of models from Galactic Conquest for BF 1942 that could be cleaned up for use with First Strike.