Projects

mech-arcade

Aim: The aim of the project is to reproduce the destructive joy of Mechassault 1, using the Cube2 engine. Background: Mechassault is a Mech shooter and was a flagship release for the much lauded Xbox Live service. The online play remains some of the best, even 7 years after release. Microsoft has ... [More] not supported the game well, and the future of the game is grim. Microsoft have not made it 'backward compatible' to run it on the 360. It is rumored that the only reason the original Xbox servers are still running is to support Halo, when they close, the game goes. The follow up game, Mechassault 2 was generally disappointing but does run on the 360 so has some future. UPDATE 2010 - the Live service for MA1 and other original Xbox games dies on April 15th. The Cube2 engine (see Sauerbraten http://sauerbraten.org ) is a well sorted out, open source, 3D, online, multiplayer, game engine that you can produce cross platform programs for Windows, Linux and the Mac. It uses OpenGL so the 360 is out, unless someone has ported OpenGL to the 360 recently. There are a number of games produced with it including some commercial ones. Perhaps the slickest of the open source games is Blood Frontier. Blood Frontier is a rewrite of the Cube 2 engine that looks very promising but is not quite complete. For the intial part of the project we will use the original Sauerbraten, which the intial versions of MekArcade will 'piggy back' on. Please note that while the engine is open source, the content may not be. Incidentlly, you can visit the Sauerbraten page at Koders to view the source live and see the estimate of the cost of producing the engine to be 1.2 million $. Wow! My other wow factor thing are cube ports, there is a Wii port by the authors in the making and there has been an iphone demo project. Double wow! Read more in the Mechawiki Welcome, see how Phase1 is going and don't forget the MasterPlan for world domination. I really want to have a Mech running about in the cube engine convincingly by Xmas/New year and to that end we are going try to commission the production of a mech, if we can't get one going ourselves. Name: The working name is MekArcade, hopefully its 'different' enough to avoid IP issues. Note the logo is slightly wrong. An alternative with considerable personel appeal is Metal Commander, my House Euphrates rank. Teamxbow are also looking to commision some open source licensed Cube Maps see here. from an experienced Cube mapper. and even a mech model, I have produced a brief description here along with a request for tender. Contact cdxbow@yahoo.com.au if you are interested. Update 2010 - March 22nd Development is shifting to the BF 0.85 engine - I was so impressed by the Beta2 release. See: http://code.google.com/p/mech-arcade/wiki/2010SecondQuarter [Less]