Display MorePrompted by a handful of questions at the CIC Forums, AllTinker has provided some updates that detail his ideas and plans for the Confederation project. It's some nice insight into what's in store to expand the capabilities of the original WC1 engine. Here's what he had to say:
I've been working on it on-and-off since 2016 or thereabouts, but posting about it (or more the community response) has been a big motivation boost.
I plan to implement [enhancements] gradually in layers, but yes - ultimately some kind of dynamic/strategic campaign system is exactly the sort of thing I'd like to implement.
The current plan is that the first layers of that will actually be released prior to the WC1 campaign being fully playable; i.e. simple preset or dynamic scenarios to test things out.
Having the WC1 campaign fully playable is the primary goal until it's achieved, but the way we'll get there will be a little bit roundabout because of the nature of the project - e.g. I want to look beyond WC1 and make sure the core systems will scale up into the open world of Privateer.
Right now I'm churning through lots of dull-but-necessary stuff, e.g. polishing up the addon system (essentially a mod manager) which lets you add/overlay content; change the load order etc... Lots of stuff to get through, but good progress is being made!
I'll be releasing two optional addons to begin with, both for WC1 - my widescreen art package which is very nearly complete, and another which fixes the minor errors I've spotted in the WC1 art. Adding Halcyon's missing pips during the first medal presentation frame, removing a rogue pixel in Iceman and Angel's portraits, and changing "Dart" to Hunter, "Joker" to Maniac on their helmets:
If anyone's aware of any other art hiccups, let me know and I'll try to add fixes for them.
Just on the addon system, I've decided to go with a Quake 3 approach, where they're just renamed ZIP files. That should make life as easy as possible for people creating their own addons. New game modes, missions, campaigns, art, translations and so on wouldn't have to obey the limits of the original engine, since Confederation isn't based on the original game engine(s) at all; new content isn't stored in the old formats.
Virtually all of Confederation's high-level gameplay and game interface logic is written in AngelScript. All of the scripting is accessible in plain text and moddable via addons. So while I fully intend to work up an expanded gameplay addon (sounds like), it's by design that others can create their own addons to give a totally different experience; or just make minor tweaks to ship stats, whatever!
