why don't we get together and make a fan made game?  superhero of course.  we've got the talent, the devotion, all the right ppl.

we need someone to be in charge of it.  someone willing to get ppl together and make the final decisions on things.

what i can bring:  i can do meshes (altho other ppl can do them better than me.)  if we could get some of the mesh creators who made the entire mesh themselves to donate (tommyboy comes to mind)  we would already have a start.  we wouldn't want to use the nif format, probably .3ds.  we'd need to agree on an engine that some of the coders could work with.

anyway.  what do you think about this idea?

Man, I was about to dismiss this until I saw it came from Bearded and not some kid who hasent built in game stuff before. I think it would be great and I have some game ideas which I'm not going to force on you guy's (since everyone has game ideas) but then again it is quite a challenge. Look at Liberty Bay... it has tons of amazing work poured into it and pretty much every aspect of it imrpesses me but with a limited number of developers and a limited audience it is easy for those involved to get burned out.

well, we would have to make it for ourselves, you know?
as for me, i'd be happy with a superhero roguelike.
the main thing is finding a game engine that is either free, or very cheap. i actually bought one, darkmatter, but it's not very good.
and what you said makes since.  the ppl here have devotion.  how many years now?  if we could start something...

Well, you and I have discussed this before Bil, so you know I'm willing to participate.
But the Buts are pretty big here.
The community has the art assets chops, and maybe even the programing skills, and enough creativity to hang an original story/world/characters out there to base the game on.
But we don't have an engine. Something free, open source would of course be a favourite, but what? Quake3? Unreal, Half life?.
And after that, the bickering begins. Is it third person action (a la Marvel Ultimate Alliance), or top down mouse controlled rpg strategy action like FF?
I would assume we want to be able to re-create every comic character ever (purely unofficially, of course), as in FF (or MUA), so you need a flexible engine or scripting system that can handle all sorts of powers, weapons, combat etc etc etc.
But but but but...having seen various Mod projects, of my own individually, and collective efforts dwindle away, I'm aware that it's very hard to see these things through, and that's with a game engine already in place. Creating it all from scratch would be immense.
Worth further discussion, I guess, if others are interested.

yeah, tommyman, you're digging me.  i'm imagining an open game that ppl could contribute to freely, without any sort of commitment.  something fairly close to open source so the coders could patch in whatever they wanted.
as for the game style, i'd say something close to what  :ff: is.  but with a good enough engine, it would be possible to switch from 1rst to third person.
has anyone looked at panda3d?
http://panda3d.org/index.php
really, to get it going all we need is a 3d engine and a rules set, for stats and combat.

Installing Panda now. I'll take a look over the next few days, as and when I have time/the mood takes me.

Edit:meh, not a good start. The manual says they have plugins for max 5,6,7, but in actual fact there are no plugins for 5 included. So straight away I'm dead-ended. I'll poke about online, see if I can find the 5 plugins, but this doesn't bode well if they cant keep basic numbers sorted out.

The basic Glest engine might work, heavily modified.  Don't know enough about it to really say, though.

I dunno... Making games is so much work. Especially when you are non-compensated and you have to have a real job to actually live. I've tried it before, in various forms. Never got that far (although I have this one tutorial for a zombie-based action/adventure game that is awesome).

I don't really see it panning out in the end, honestly, but maybe that's just negativity on my part. I mean Counter-Strike was originally just some fan thing, right?

Absolutely, which is why it's better to have an open source game that uses svn.

i just figured out what would be fun:
superhero football.  like blood bowl, but comics.
i'm going to look at glest and see if it would work for that.

I think that would be great and it's something that has not really been done outside of the strangers mod (where it was a blast to play). You've got teams of Superheroes and Supervillains which you can pad out with anti-heroes and mercenaries.

If you guy's need any surpluss characters I've got a bunch I created for a potential card game and some freedom force tournaments I've ran.