Update: PR:BF2 v1.6/WW2 Status Update March 2019

[AfterDune]

Originally Posted by WeeGeez

Very funny.
I realise the the main menu video would only be a few hundred K but it's not the point. The game needs optimisation. DOn't just mask it with ultra hardware, Why make software bigger than it needs to be? The ONLY primary target audience should be people who cannot afford mega rigs. One would think, for a game that is approaching 15 years old, this wouldn't be a problem, right?

Something I've never understood is why software devs can be so wasteful and make inneffecient software requiring mountains of dependencies. Not PR devs specifically but its true in most software is getting more and more bloated as father always says. PR Windows 11? good luck with that.

It's a philosophy
simplify and simplification becomes extrapolative.
complicate and complications become extrapolative,

WHY even waste time making a movie background when one round of PR already consumes an hour of ones life.

I'm sorry that this is a tiny bit off topic but I needed to be clear.....

Every KB should count!

The game is 15 years old. Unless you want really crappy graphics and much less stuff going on, we can't optimize it much more than we already did. We respect your opinion, but we simply don't agree.

[[R-DEV]​Senshi]

WeeGeez: You address two issues.

One is devs "wasting times on unimportant bits". That is a common misconception. Devs have incredibly specialized areas of expertise. And sure, more awesome modelers, texture artists and coders would always be great, but there's some that have capabilities in some specific niches that also make up a great deal of PR. There's been a number of guys that have exclusively contributed sound work, but don't have the first idea about textures. Others are great at videos, but have no clue about the game. Then there's bums like me who only deal with the webserver stuff.
Second part is, everybody is doing this as their hobby, so of course people focus on their pet projects that intrigue them. The main menu overhaul was one of these, and things like the main menu videos came up and someone grabbed it up and worked on it. This by no means has caused any delays for the production of ingame assets.

The second thing you address is optimization:
PR is based on an engine that was originally developed over twenty years ago (for Codename Eagle), and was last updated for BF2 fourteen years ago.
PR would be entirely impossible if not an incredible amount of optimization already was in place, and is still the biggest limitation and concern for any new asset that is added to it. Which is why so many community contributors get frustrated when their developments get picked apart by veteran DEVs. It's not to harass, it's to ensure that PR sustains a level of quality and performance.
Optimization is always a balance between features and performance, and PR has managed to navigate those shallows pretty well, I daresay.

[LEGIYA]

Originally Posted by Senshi

WeeGeez: You address two issues.

One is devs "wasting times on unimportant bits". That is a common misconception. Devs have incredibly specialized areas of expertise. And sure, more awesome modelers, texture artists and coders would always be great, but there's some that have capabilities in some specific niches that also make up a great deal of PR. There's been a number of guys that have exclusively contributed sound work, but don't have the first idea about textures. Others are great at videos, but have no clue about the game. Then there's bums like me who only deal with the webserver stuff.
Second part is, everybody is doing this as their hobby, so of course people focus on their pet projects that intrigue them. The main menu overhaul was one of these, and things like the main menu videos came up and someone grabbed it up and worked on it. This by no means has caused any delays for the production of ingame assets.

The second thing you address is optimization:
PR is based on an engine that was originally developed over twenty years ago (for Codename Eagle), and was last updated for BF2 fourteen years ago.
PR would be entirely impossible if not an incredible amount of optimization already was in place, and is still the biggest limitation and concern for any new asset that is added to it. Which is why so many community contributors get frustrated when their developments get picked apart by veteran DEVs. It's not to harass, it's to ensure that PR sustains a level of quality and performance.
Optimization is always a balance between features and performance, and PR has managed to navigate those shallows pretty well, I daresay.

Some time ago there was an idea of changing the game engine to bf 2142 i think. Is it still possible? Any plans?

[Raklodder]

As always, great stuff and glad to see that you're making progress, but that menu needs some desert.

[[R-DEV]​Arab]

Originally Posted by LEGIYA

Some time ago there was an idea of changing the game engine to bf 2142 i think. Is it still possible? Any plans?

Greetings

To answer your question, it is possible but it's not currently being focused on.
In the past, one of the R-DEVS was working on it and implementing some advanced features.
Last year, I've been working on it on and off as a side-project to see how it would look, documenting stuff etc but the team may be interested to experiment and work with it in the future.

Everything is portable from one engine to another. BF2Editor works with a workaround, and I manage to get our essential tools working to build archives and run scripts etc. But there are things that are a challenge to port.

One of the things is a substitute for the Grappling Hook. Battlefield 2142 has the Grappling Hook code from BF2:SF v1.5 update stripped out of the .exe, same with the Zipline.

Another is reintegrating PR-Mumble with the PRLauncher which is possible from what I've experimented.

We'd have to edit the binaries to allow 100 players, bigger squads, fix squad bugs, load times in linux and windows server etc. There may not be a guarantee that all addresses may be the same between binaries.

The TIS (UGL distance setting), Thermals haven't been tried out yet. Reintegrating things between PRLauncher and BF2142 is also unknown.

Porting python via copy and paste may not be guaranteed if some things have been changed, and if they haven't, they'd need to be reworked with the current system. Haven't looked into it but there are some improvements iirc.

Then there's the new menu system which is a .fla format compared to the .swf format which I haven't figured out the program to edit and is a totally different system. We might be able to port everything that's showcased here to the new system minus the Soldier class stuff but it's unexplored.

Shaders are slightly different comparing it to BF2. Not sure if the lightning system will work in BF2142 but there is an in-built snow, rain system which works like the Ambient Effect mapper-place triggers that a mapper may add for rain or snow.

The amount of menu classes is 4 which can be increased to 7 like in PR. In-fact, BF2142 has a built-in kit customisation menu. So it's a matter of reworking existing kits to allow custom weapons or disallow it.

Also the export tools may be the same as in BF2142, but that's an assumption.

The debugger tool from BF2_r.exe doesn't work, so the BF2Editor would need to be used or perhaps it can be modified to work in the BF2142.exe engine.

And there's so much undiscovered differences or similarities that may or may not work differently.

TL;DR: Officially, no. There isn't any plan to do it anytime soon as the team prefers to focus on the BF2 Engine for now, and there's a lot of uncertainties and challenges.
But it's something to consider if the transition will be smooth enough and documented to be worth the effort and time. We would need to do all the documentation, testing and work :P But yeah, currently working on v1.6 at the moment and it's in the backburner for me.

[Scubbo]

am wondering if should focus on dare I say it... a gameplay/asset mod for Squad (yeah I know its like pr2 but not) but could do it a lot better than squad for PR's sake hahaha eh well

(squad is limited to a retail product so can't keep the gameplay as nice as PR wink wink)

[selman]

what is the benefits from changing the engine.

i mean what is the differents between bf2 and bf2142 engine. and how can it benefit projekt reality

[LEGIYA]

Originally Posted by Arab

Greetings

To answer your question, it is possible but it's not currently being focused on.
In the past, one of the R-DEVS was working on it and implementing some advanced features.
Last year, I've been working on it on and off as a side-project to see how it would look, documenting stuff etc but the team may be interested to experiment and work with it in the future.

Everything is portable from one engine to another. BF2Editor works with a workaround, and I manage to get our essential tools working to build archives and run scripts etc. But there are things that are a challenge to port.

One of the things is a substitute for the Grappling Hook. Battlefield 2142 has the Grappling Hook code from BF2:SF v1.5 update stripped out of the .exe, same with the Zipline.

Another is reintegrating PR-Mumble with the PRLauncher which is possible from what I've experimented.

We'd have to edit the binaries to allow 100 players, bigger squads, fix squad bugs, load times in linux and windows server etc. There may not be a guarantee that all addresses may be the same between binaries.

The TIS (UGL distance setting), Thermals haven't been tried out yet. Reintegrating things between PRLauncher and BF2142 is also unknown.

Porting python via copy and paste may not be guaranteed if some things have been changed, and if they haven't, they'd need to be reworked with the current system. Haven't looked into it but there are some improvements iirc.

Then there's the new menu system which is a .fla format compared to the .swf format which I haven't figured out the program to edit and is a totally different system. We might be able to port everything that's showcased here to the new system minus the Soldier class stuff but it's unexplored.

Shaders are slightly different comparing it to BF2. Not sure if the lightning system will work in BF2142 but there is an in-built snow, rain system which works like the Ambient Effect mapper-place triggers that a mapper may add for rain or snow.

The amount of menu classes is 4 which can be increased to 7 like in PR. In-fact, BF2142 has a built-in kit customisation menu. So it's a matter of reworking existing kits to allow custom weapons or disallow it.

Also the export tools may be the same as in BF2142, but that's an assumption.

The debugger tool from BF2_r.exe doesn't work, so the BF2Editor would need to be used or perhaps it can be modified to work in the BF2142.exe engine.

And there's so much undiscovered differences or similarities that may or may not work differently.

TL;DR: Officially, no. There isn't any plan to do it anytime soon as the team prefers to focus on the BF2 Engine for now, and there's a lot of uncertainties and challenges.
But it's something to consider if the transition will be smooth enough and documented to be worth the effort and time. We would need to do all the documentation, testing and work :P But yeah, currently working on v1.6 at the moment and it's in the backburner for me.

Thank you for your answer!

[[R-DEV]​Suchar]

Originally Posted by selman

what is the benefits from changing the engine.

Just a few examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9m8...ature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alH-6JoCzII
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_f8U-n7xbo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkjKVoQfr8U
https://youtu.be/fiubkfeQEFY?t=62

[[R-DEV]​Outlawz7]

Last one is already in.