Question about Future of PR.

[STORM-Mama]

Best thing about BF2 is not the 64 player limit but the squad- and commander-system. Is there any other game that have something similar? ArmA doesn't have i IIRC. PR wouldn't be what it is without these feautures.

[General Dragosh]

A DEV has spoken, amen

My personal wish, keep PR in BF engine in the future, i hope FB engine will be at least as modable as BF2's engine, and maybe we will get a 64+ player capabillity but if not than it means EA pays people to not work as they should

[scandhi]

I have read somewhere among all the reviews of BF Lite that the player limit is set at 24 cause of the console market. Those machines have problem with all the extra objects needed to be tracked, etc. But if they could be upgraded or optimized in some way I'd guess a increased limit wouldänt be far away.

Or NOT!

[GR34]

IF PR switches to another engine I think it needs 2 minimum requirements

VOIP: the ability for players to have 3-4 different channels if you will
-Squad chat(your squad only)
-Inter squad chat (select a specific squad to talk to)
-Proximity chat( any one can here you within 10-15m)
- Team chat
64+ players:
- Needs to support a minimum of 64 players
-128 players (64 v 64 would be perfect for more realistic matches)

[Colonelcool125]

eggman's post puts my mind at ease and makes me happy.

[McBumLuv]

Yup, Eggman's both satisfied and piqued our curiosity at the same time. I hope to be there one day saying "I was there when pr was just a mod, and now look at it now, more members than WoW"

Seriously, that would totally make my life

[Truism]

PR has the potential to go beyond just a little indie game - it has quite a bit of market appeal, and there are some incredibly talented people who work on it.

Sleeper hit?

[eggman]

The cost of developing PR to it's full potential would be far too high for a typical studio to take on. The goal of developing the best platoon level combined arms simulation (while still keeping it playable) is something that would have only niche appeal (at least relative to the costs involved in developing it).

So I can only see it being economically viable if the devs involved regard it as a passion / hobby that might actually pay some money one day. It might be achieveable. We'd need a lot of support form a gaming community and some C++ programmers who are fanatical tactical gamers and want to donate their time to make it happen (in addition to the already abundant talent in the PR team).

I've been working on some stuff around the fringes of a PR2 project. I went through a 35 page design document I created *7 years ago*. Nobody has done the stuff that in 2002 I figured would be common place by now. And it's not because the ideas are shite or anything... the basic elements of my 9 year old design (I spent 2 years thinking about it before I documented it) are stuff that still to this day represent what a lot of tactical gamers refer to as "the ultimate goal". But nobody is doing it! PC gaming is getting neutered by piracy and consoles and studios are far too concerned with mainstream market appeal and sales figures to create "the ultimate first person war game".

Most of you will be too young to remember Falcon - circa 1987. At one point Falcon and M1 Tank Platoon were games I played endlessly, usually with "null modem" connections to a mate's Atari 1040ST - effectively a hacked 2 person network. In 1989 Spectrum Holobyte, the makers of Falcon, acquired Microprose, the makers of M1 Tank Platoon - an outstanding tank sim in it's day. They started to advertise an A-10 simulator as part of their "electronic battlefield series". I just assumed that Falcon, M1 Tank Platoon and the advertised A-10 simulator were going to be released with some sort of Infantry simulator and the virtual battlefield would be a reality. It never happend and by 1999 Spectrum Holobyte had dissappeared.

Nearly 20 years since I first recall pumping an Aim 9 into one of my best friend's blocky polygon F16 the closest thing to a virtual battlefield has been the horribly crippled World War II Online (which I was a closed alpha and beta tester for nealy a year and subsequently played for another year after it's release).

If we can manage to pull off a PR2 indie game... I think we have a lot of the things in place that could make some long standing tactical gaming "nirvana" a reality.

egg

[Comptons]

Loved the nostalgic touch of your words eggman, even though im really too young to have played the games you mentioned but i felt i was right there!

[Silveryvisions]

Well I clearly know nothing about developing games and I know little about the relationship you have with EA and the politics of it all, but what's stopping you from cracking into the engine? Surely BF2 doesn't sell any more copies, I'm pretty sure they've stopped making copies of the game now, and I can't see them bringing out another expansion pack. It's not as if cracking into the engine to change a few hardcoded things is all that bad is it? Of course it would be different if you were selling PR, but you're not. Do you really think EA would take legal action over a pretty much dead game (vBF2)?