Looks like I missed your initial post.alex wrote:I don’t remember if we ever used those words, but it was definitely something we were aware of. We played a lot of quake (and later unreal tournament) in the office and one of the things that really struck us about it was the vibrant community. Maps, mods and genuine improvements were everywhere. When working on warzone as engineers we made decisions to leave openings so that people could make changes where they saw fit. Examples including using a scripting language (the slo,vlo’s) that wasn’t compiled into the game so users could edit them, or choosing zip as our packing format instead of something proprietary. I still think it’s a positive thing to do on pc titles, am I’m busy still doing it today!
Anyway, for the scripting language, do you recall what you used to debug those things? It is pretty difficult to debug scripts, and there are not that many lex/yacc people around to help improve the parsers.
For the text in bold in your quote, I could of swore that this project converted .wdg (the proprietary format that pumpkin used) to zip files. Or did I get the facts wrong?
Was there any thought of going to a client / server model over the current p2p style it has now? Right now, the biggest problem with the net code is that certain updates must be turned off via the turnOffMultiMsg() function, and the (lack of) good sync code to handle all the (possible) loss of information that comes with that. We also got a few cheaters, and it would seem that only a client / server model would limit most cheaters...This ended up benefiting us too. While we always intended to do multiplayer, skirmish started as a bit of a hobby for me. It grew into something fun because the flexibility of the scripting language really opened up the possibilities (thanks to John Elliot)
By demonstrating our commitment to the users through the various rapid patches after release we were trying to build a community of people who would be able to keep making changes to the product. There was an intention to make warzone2120, so it was the feedback from you guys that would have really driven that title.
I still think the release of the source code / data files was the best thing to ever happen to Warzone, and if you ever see your friends from Pumpkin again, please tell them a big THANKS! from all of us.