AfterWorld Survival Forum

Please read this until the end, specially you Anti

So ok, afterworld is dead... lets face it... but why not a reset? Start from the beginning.

The blueprints are already made... so my suggestion is restart everything with a new engine, Crytek or Unreal are quite cheap to get now, or unity. Engines that actually you can easily get programmers to do some work.

Start with steps. Get the world created, then avatars, then hunting, skills, mining, crafting. All this backed with kickstarter. Get ladders of financing levels that everyone seems to be using now!
Or do a inhouse kickstarter, see how much would you need to accomplish this to start and im sure plenty of us would gladly help. Get something cool to show and then escalate to kickstarter with the new fancy engine.

ANti, you have showed commitment to this game and you are realistic putting your hands down and throwing the towel on the floor, but basically the game engine, in my opinion is a big part of the failure. The game outgrew the engine development, and when you wanted to bring things to a new level things went wrong...
So this is my suggestion as a last hope for the game... A total reset from scratch.. Use crytek engine. It has given proof that it can handle a world like afterworld. You can get great fancy graphics with it, or Unreal.... Or, use unity with its immense support community, although im not sure how easily it could manage a open world like afterworld.

Looking back at 10 years of development, a change like this is not easily taken. It looks like all was for nothing,but it actually wasn't. The concept, creatures, loot, research, economy is already done. You have valuable lessons learnt with the mistakes.

On a personal note, there was one point in my life where i had to simply restart everything, from scratch and when i was thinking that tthe last few years where a total waste. But now. It was probably the best life decision i ever made. True story.

Think about this, i think this is a good alternative, a way that would actually be able to bring kickstarter investment.

You said you had gathered investment for the dotAw, why not get that investment and perharps, add some sort of in house kickstarter to actually get this rolling and actually make the REBIRTH of afterworld happen.
It could be Afterworld: Rebirth, codename Phoenix release

You probably will say that the money available is not enough, that it would take ages to actually recreate afterworld in new engine, but this is afterworld community. we are patient. And with a successful kickstarter, who knows, maybe things could actually go faster then they have been so far....
 

Agreed, Torque is a great testing/learning bed but is just too lacking to make a project like this, which is why bank has had to create so many customizations to get it to do what was wanted.

As I mentioned in the thread where Anti admitted that AW may end up going open source, taking all of the games current assets, plans, and designs to a new engine may be its only saving grace at this point. However, Anti did mention that the money that was offered to develop DotAW was only available while bank was the lead programmer, but now that he has left the project, so has that funding. Which is why Anti feels that there is little or no chance of getting backing from another VC or whatever they had for DotAW.

But I very much agree that a Kickstarter project created to translate (I won't use the word "port" because it leaves a bad taste in my mouth from all of the bad console-to-PC ports haha) AW from the Torque engine to Unity, Unreal, CryEngine, or any large, well-supported engine that is capable of handling everything that is planned for AW. If Anti believes it would take around $10,000 to make AW an open source game, I don't know why it would take much more than that to move it to another engine, except of course for the additional engine licensing fees.

Right, but these tasks would need to be undertaken to make the game open source as well since the Torque engine is not open source itself.

Huh, didn't know that. So I guess the only work to do to make AW completely open source is to unlock the custom coding that was done and submit it to the Torque 3D GIT? Or do they have third-party add-ins or something that makes it more difficult, I wonder. I've yet to work on any open source project so I'm not sure how AW could only be mostly open source.

The only thing stopping DL from dumping the source and assets into public domain is probably that some of the assets may still belong to certain members of the original DL team ... e.g. the creature models.