Making Op2 In Gamemaker

[Savant 231-A]

I've being thinking and is ti possible to make the game by Game-maker?

And the answer was yes. The game could be made by Game-maker. Just the problem would be music, extracting sprites of vehicles and else, everything else will be nice.

In Game-maker you can make games WITHOUT writing any scripts.
Just, some scripts should be made in order the game would work like original.

I made by myself few good games (really good) and making OP2 in gamemaker will be nice.

 :op2:  

[Brazilian Fan]

Why would anyone want to make OP2 of a different manner? If the OP2 in the GameMaker is different, ok. But remaking OP2 the exactily same way (the sprites, music, movies, etc.) would be a time waste.

[Savant 231-A]

Why would anyone want to make OP2 of a different manner?

Did I say i wanted to make OP2 in a different manner or to re-make it?

[Freeza-CII]

your going to make op2 with this game maker that would be a remake or a down grade because i have tryed some of these so called game makers before and there output is rather Noobish

[Savant 231-A]

lol, no one hears me, i just said that it is possible to make op2 in gamemaker.

[BlackBox]

I've used that exact program before and I can tell you this much, it might be able to make a platform game with ease but it is no solution for RTS games.

Furthermore because these programs are geared for people who don't want to have to program to make a game, they encourage lousy game design.

They are also completely non portable (and the game 'engine' is closed source as well).

If we want to re-make OP2 it would be in our best interests to write a *REAL* game engine using a *REAL* programming language such as C/C++ which runs at acceptable speeds and is fully open source / portable.

As for the value of a remake itself, there are many valid points to it.

OP2 in its present state will only run on Windows. It will not run on a different OS without some sort of emulation present (i.e. Wine on *nix, Darwine on Mac OS X) Even with emulation the game is too slow to be played (and there is some severe bug with multiplayer under Wine; when attempting to create or join a game it freezes up).

And no, there is no way to 'port it ourselves' without rewriting the entire game.

Another reason is for modding the game / missions. Having source code available would allow people to easily extend and modify the game and missions, and allow us to add new features easily and without the bugs.

Finally there are a lot of shortcomings / limitations / bugs in the original OP2, we could easily fix those (very visible examples are the earthworker / invisible wall bugs, pathfinding bugs, etc; less visible examples are the maximum 2048 entries in the mapping table / 1024 global unit limit / 256 ScStub-derived objects alive at a time).

If we are to do a rewrite it must not be something made in some useless game maker software. We would need to write something suited for an RTS.

The only barrier is the amount of time and resources it would take (really just programming resources; we have all the sounds/graphics/etc already made for us).

[dm-horus]

Savant, if youre interested in making OP2 in Game Maker, stay tuned. Colony3 will be going live in the next few weeks. I think you could use the resources we will be hosting there.

[Savant 231-A]

Colony3?
If there is some job for me, i'm there!

[lordly_dragon]

Those type of sofware are only good for the good old 8 bit sns era RPG for the rest it is kinda poor and exaustive

[Sl0vi]

Actually, gamemaker is a very good program for making games. It's different then any other game making program I've seen, you can make almost any kind of game with it and it has a nice scripting language. Altho, it does really have some big downsides, most noticable is that it's game engine is extremely slow do to it's huge flexibility, compared to an engine made specificly for a certain game.

Making a remake of OP2 with it, would most likely require a monster of a computer to run properly or have some much higher limitations then in the original.

Imho if you think you can pull it off, go for it. Just be ready to face the downsides of making it in gamemaker.

[BlackBox]

Exactly. The program is still usable if you want to make _a game_ but it is suited to much smaller / simpler games (like platform games and such).

Writing a full scale RTS *might* be possible but it will have very severe limits. (Only runs on Windows, slow, hard to expand, etc).

The only thing I would disagree with, is it being a fully "generic" game engine suitable for any type of game. It also depends how widely you want to define "game engine." This could be a full fledged system for designing an RTS game, which would be specific for RTS games; or it could be as simple as a cross platform HAL (SDL for example).

Gamemaker programs like this typically are completely interpreted languages; like Java (yes, you have to compile it but the result is a bytecode file that must be interpreted by the Java virtual machine). As a result they tend to be too slow to be usable for anything major.

Bottom line is: if you don't have a clue about programming but want to make a game, then programs like these are great. But if you have programming expertise (or access to such), as we do have in OPU, then writing a game from the ground up using a compiled language is a far better idea, IMHO.

[Sirbomber]

Mmmm, there's nothing quite like Outpost 2 done room-by-room.

[jwhiteheadcc]

What about an engine like Stratagus?
It's open source and uses LUA++ for it's scripts.
The key part of going this route is to create an 'extractor/loader' code to read existing data.  Translation into a more editing-friendly format might be better though.  It depends entirely on the needs of the specific game being rewritten.

The one annoyance I had was that it takes a faster system because it's using a more generic RTS engine.

[TRIX Rabbit]

um... won't it be kind of hard to make OP2 in to a game maker because:

1) OP2 was made by a corperatly funded programming team of many people, and

2) The source code for OP2 was destroyed years ago for reasons unknown.

so if you did'nt have the source code, that would be a hell of a lot of programming, right?

[BlackBox]

What about an engine like Stratagus?
It's open source and uses LUA++ for it's scripts.

From what I've seen, Stratagus probably wouldn't work very well for an OP2 remake. It's geared toward old games like Warcraft 2 (where you have simple tilesets, simple units, simple everything). I think we would need a lot of modifications for OP2 to work with it (for example, take morale. I haven't seen any game that has anything like morale in it).

Yes, it does use Lua for scripting but I have a couple gripes with that:
-- Slow; the generality of a scripting language isn't necessarily needed either. We could just code the logic in C or C++ and it would be a lot faster (and still easy to mod later)

-- Having text files on the hard drive makes it really easy for something to change the inner logic completely. This is great for custom modding and such, but it could potentially make it easier to cheat (i.e. if the main part of the OP2 logic is implemented in script, you could easily change that script to give yourself a slight advantage over the other players; and still have it work fine. For example, to make your pathfinding more accurate, etc).

Furthermore it just seems sort of 'unprofessional' to have text scripts just sitting on the hard drive. Then the core has to parse these each and every time the game is loaded.

-- Lua's syntax is kinda weird, I personally don't like it.

Scripting would be nice for some things like missions, and maybe plug-in AI routines or something. But the core of the game shouldn't be based on scripts.

I think it would be more worthwhile to just write a new game engine specifically tailored for OP2. It would be faster, lighter, and better.

As for the data files themselves, it would probably make more sense to use new formats for them. Some of them (especially the map/saved game format) have some real inefficiencies and could be greatly redone. (For example, there is a max of 1024 units and 2048 tiles at a time on a map).

@Trix: yes, we would need to write everything from scratch. If we had the source code available we wouldn't need to think about any of this at all
That brings in the possibility of some things not working *exactly* the same as they did in normal OP2 (we do want a 1:1 mirror right?)
We could eventually get there but that would require more study of the assembly in outpost2.exe.

As for corporate teams and such, remember we don't need to make new artwork or sounds for anything. All we would need to write is a replacement engine, and then convert the existing data to new formats.

[jwhiteheadcc]

Morale is just like any other 'hidden' element of a game.  I think we know enough about the generalities to kind of feel our way to a game with very close gameplay, but as far as being the same game - that's just not feasible.  Yeah, I think having nonchecked and non-precompiled scripts lying around is silly for a game to use in multiplay.  :whistle:

I just mentioned it because there's a lot of tools in the project's trees and projects based using it that could be useful.  It's not like I'm saying "yeah I'll only help if we use that" or other such nonsense.

I suggest using something like a .TGZ file such as what Open Office (try changing the extension to TGZ!) uses since it's easy to use and source code is free.  You could make a campaign a single archive that wouldn't need to be decompressed.  It could even have some (optionally) signed manifest data to prevent cheating.  Using a CRC exchange is also a good idea.  There are free signing libraries, too...  Isn't it nice to think of things besides the game engine that could use a lot of off the shelf stuff?  Making all the clients use a new networking layer is probally our only choice unless there's some magically overnight reimplementation I've not heard about.  <sarcism>

The back end of the game's file formats should not be too hard.  We already know the format of volumes, maps, sounds, icons, bitmaps, and scripts to a great extent from what I've read in the documentation provided on the site.  Making a convertor for some of them would allow us to use many of our existing resources - no need to redraw stuff for example!

As far as rewriting most of the game from scratch, I agree that we don't really need all of the game to in script files but maybe just the levels themselves.  If included in the compressed archive, then there can be automatic detection of unsynced versions.  The graphical and sound routines in many of the open sourced games have plenty of variety.  Good mouse libraries are a dime a dozen too.