From what we know nobody, not even Square Enix, has an existing copy of the source code. So as in contrast to AOE 2, there won't be a remaster - ever.
A spin-off from SupCom wouldn't be SupCom anymore and therefore split the community eventually. There are people happy with FAF the way it is (or even was). We already lost players to to changes in balancing. Imagine what happens if you change larger things.
"Nerds have a really complicated relationship with change: Change is awesome when WE'RE the ones doing it. As soon as change is coming from outside of us it becomes untrustworthy and it threatens what we think of is the familiar."
– Benno Rice
?!? Seriously Brutus? On one hand that is unbelievable given well are playing it right now but second hand, wouldn't surprise me through (or this its own by like 5 different people issue)
I’m a shitty 1k Global. Any balance or gameplay suggestions should be understood or taken as such.
Project Head and current Owner/Manager of SCTA Project
Well you need to see it from a legal & business perspective: When the gpg developers were layed off, they returned their devices and/or deleted everything that they legally didn't own.
Square Enix bought SupCom for the intellectual property, not for source code. They have no interest in doing any patches of SC1 or SC2. People are buying it as is, all they need is the binaries. So it seems like nobody cared to archive it (all of this is hearsay of course).
Also when I spoke with GOG on their release they told me they needed to make changes (e.g. remove gpg lobby integration) and did it without access the original source code as well, so it sort of confirms the rumour.
"Nerds have a really complicated relationship with change: Change is awesome when WE'RE the ones doing it. As soon as change is coming from outside of us it becomes untrustworthy and it threatens what we think of is the familiar."
– Benno Rice
Fascinating so even if Square did give us offacialness we'd still not be much better off then we would be today really. Cause we wouldn't get the source code either way.
I’m a shitty 1k Global. Any balance or gameplay suggestions should be understood or taken as such.
Project Head and current Owner/Manager of SCTA Project
In theory, someone might still have the source code. If they did, they would probably be breaking the law.
IF we did acquire the rights to Supreme Commander game(s), we could offer to pay anyone who came forward with the source code. Sure, they would have broken the law, but no one would care about punishing them. So we could offer to pay them for the source code "no questions asked."
It's all theoretical until Squenix decides it's even willing to entertain sale of the IP. If they committed to a particular price, we could see about creating a crowdfunding campaign to attempt to reach that price point. That is basically the only way that this could ever go forward--that or a single very wealthy person suddenly taking an interest in FAF and negotiating directly with Squenix for the rights. If someone had a big enough bank account, Squenix should be willing to talk to them.
A single very wealthy person had already taken an interest in FAF and negotiated all of this. It’s why we know Square Enix doesn’t have the source code. I very much doubt a crowdfunding will get anywhere close to the source code and frankly I don’t even think it’s a good use of such absurd quantities of money.
This thread reads like a project plan where the first thing in your plan is “assuming we have a paragon for infinite money.”
Also access to the source code doesn't make things suddenly move forward. The things people dream about is eventually a rewrite from scratch.
"Nerds have a really complicated relationship with change: Change is awesome when WE'RE the ones doing it. As soon as change is coming from outside of us it becomes untrustworthy and it threatens what we think of is the familiar."
– Benno Rice
Love the energy Spy but i I'm afraid a lot of the negative Nancy replies on this thread have a lot of truth to them. Square Enix seem happy to let us tick along the way we (because our community is still getting some copies of the game sold which is extraordinary for a 13 year old RTS) but ultimately they seem very disinterested in any kind of development for the title. I don't really blame them for it, It's their IP and we operate completely outside of their control. They may or may not decide to do something with the franchise again at some point but its not good business sense to let outside interests mess with your assets either way.
Having said that, if some business guru with a passion for FAF wants to come along and start working miracles, I'll happily prostrate myself before them and declare myself their slave.
Honestly from the sounds of it, this seems like rumor creep based off earlier half-witted attempts to do the same thing. Again, I understand having a strong shit-screen, and I understand running a lean operation to keep money flowing in and not risking angering the community.
I just have to re-iterate how large the success was with AOE2 2019 release, and what would be illegal is deleting useful project files in an ongoing business, even if your being laid off. That being said, all of those small losses can be replaced with a properly funded and stream-lined initiative.
I'll be honest I'm working on a side project game, and wanted to share some of the ideas here first because its very sup-com inspired and doing simple fixes like 1st person and floating camera options and VR compatibility (eg fix camera to floating point then allow head looking) are quick and allow attraction to a broader audience.
The game itself deserves the legitimacy that an all in one client could give. Just try and find the group ethic to get Square Enix to explore this idea, and lets wee where it goes from there. I want to see hordes of new players pulled off advertisements flooding the ladder and multiplayer games. That's the real goal here, game health, and health of function. Just think if FAF / Supcom rushed an almost identical product forward with VR, it would be ground breaking as the first title to provide VR environment for elo score. I think that would be a big deal, and it would set precedents for many titles to come into the extended future.
@Spy_Emanciator said in FAF Spin-off title & Plans to take Supcom to the next level:
Chieftains
Ung-grungung, chieftain of the mapping tribe here.
Just thought I should remind the thread that this is an idea that is suggested every week.
This is not an exaggaration, it's brought up every, single, week.
If you really want to try and wrangle an IP from a vicious japanese games company for a scenario that doesn't benefit them, you're going to need a plan that you actually iterated and found plausible, not one that you "dreamed up".
I would also like to remind people that the popularity of this game is in part due to having one of if not the largest quanitity of user created content, and repackaging the game or updating the engine will both:
A: likely lose you access to the existing content
B: likely not allow users to create anything as they do now.
It's not something that is bought up but should be one of your major considerations.
The "we should remake the game" bi-weekly conversation should be made into a FAQ. It's honestly insane how many times i've discussed this with people by now, and noone ever attempted to iterate on it beyond what it is and always will be: an utopic pipe dream that crumbles when you have any knowldge of what it would take to acomplish.
Also, you keep bringing up VR. I don't see why would would want to play this game as a first person VR. You wouldn't play pubg with a wiifit board, you wouldn't play dark souls with a duck hunt gun, and you wouldnt play RTS with a vr headset. games are designed around input schemes for a reason.
@biass You sound like you like the idea but are filled to the brim with salt from the ongoing observation of gloom.
my retorts:
A: likely lose you access to the existing content
will monetize existing content into advertising money to expand the number of active interest users
B: likely not allow users to create anything as they do now.
will not change at all as the existing function of the faf client will simply exist within the fast-tracked game client including rewarding contributed content
As for your VR headset retort I see that as a new player access group, and when I watch Gyle casts and he does his camera trickery, I often wish those were options for me to view the game steadily during low intensity moments where I can monitor the larger game by mini-map and fast camera cue switches suing shift-tab and tab. Set that up with a VR headset floating look feature and now I can really feel like i'm in the a battle-space.
Don't whack my dreams with your rigged up street sign hammer...
It seems like the would-be parties are saying, "you first."
Find an investor. Convince the rights holders (Square?) to let us put our version on Steam (they will probably want a cut). Come back and let us know how it goes.
I don't think putting FAF as an add-on for FA on Steam is out of the question. ...if you can get the rights to do so.
You keep saying everybody here is just lazy/disillusioned/filled with salt... what work have you done besides making a forum post?
@Pearl12 Before an investor will bite on a second string of capital investment, there has to be a consensus from the appropriate parties for that the plan I put forward is agreeable and everyone is willing to shift gears a bit and do whats necessary to make that happen. For me to "go first" and seek investment would be inappropriate if all the staff are "burned out" or not looking for any new opportunity.
Search "Top RTS Games" on google and supreme commander comes in at #4. In terms of quality of play its in my option #2 mainly because its reception is somewhat unknown compared to the blizzard machine.
I think you will find the staff less burned out if you find a way to take action yourself instead of just making forum posts telling other people what to do. Volunteer as a dev, get your name on some gits, and prove that you know what you're talking about by showing us, not telling us.
As I've said many times when this sort of thing comes up, it's far more realistic (and even then, not that realistic) to get all that crowdfunding money and spend it on developers and artists to reimplement FAF in SpringRTS. Rather than trying to squeeze blood from rocks at S-E or any other publisher.
SpringRTS is already 80% of the way there, so it's the closest thing to FAF that's fully under community control. Perhaps FAF's "steam copy required" thing could be used so that the resulting game just rips its assets from an installed legal copy of the game. That would maybe provide a tiny bit of legal cover to re-use official assets.
Otherwise the typical SpringRTS thing of reimplementing all units models and renaming them would be required...
I agree on the ideas of most concepts to modern practices will most likely take about everything FAF started as and with and made from since, to just throw it away and call it moving forward.
So most of that isn't reasonable to consider to say a reasonable point.
Steam is a nice platform but all and all the overall value of gaming is hardly supportive at a time. Not only will their have to a further effort as normal from developers to get it to steam, anything of the community would have to also say compensate for say the same differences.
I don't favor steam for anything really but number say games but even then that is just for thoughts 99% of the time and I still use a mouse, keyboard, computer, speakers, monitor to run faf, which im completely fine with but just still further away than just being thoughts to run it.
I know I've been scrambling for thoughts, say for the interests of most of the same purposes. But despite say the modern day of anything, there are just a few things that really matter the most on why alot of things could possible happen and those things have say been around since before modern times and they just are not in our favor these times around.
Yes, im sure something could happen, but what and when seems to question the idea of for how much loss and why not sooner to much to keep anything still for a real gain out of it all that most would be interested in just still for something out of it all.
Since Ive been gaming in my life I know one thing is for certain about it.
At times once you have something good or great, it may be the last time it will happen.
Yea, there are still say alot of games because a game was done and definitely say same game again because there was another one of it, but at time there is just the one or the few and just wait after that there is another or something like it (mainly just names changes only, but that is really farther and fewer between really to get that lucky) to say get by or make due.
Eventually pooling what can be pooled would make the greatest effort but I still feel alot of the work from when pooled has been done before any pool was say filled, so..who knows.
Thanks
Not sure why the edit of my last post made a double post but still.
After reading some prior posts and a few I must of missed seemed reasonable to still post in.
Anyone have thoughts on say New Supcom being done and having FAF packaged with it as like an extra/bonus content??
I know there is alot of back and forth and 50/50 in such, given rather a new Supcom could be with/in FAF but given SC2, that should have a reasonable answer.
Or is that anything new would have to be different even to the point of abandoning the progress of SC2 for an undertaking to happen??
I'm sure this conversation comes up often and would be nice if the same conversations would still just end up to have the one of it for them all.
VR is whatever, to a point should be something not restricted in not being able to have but any further more is whatever. A PC at a time is a PC.
I mean, in some contrast of course, why not Mirror or Tonal FAF for some modern approach of interactivity standard??
Or watching replays of FAF on a mobile device??
Sometimes I agree, when things are brought up, costs and contrasts are really considered but presenting ideas should still be able to have without the difference of course, but outcomes probably still worth what has been considered to say.
the desire of the players to make the project better for me has always warmed my soul as long as there are people like you, my favorite game will live thanks to you for this. you know when I accidentally found out about this game I was happy thanks to the streamer for that. but what I understood so unfortunately this game will not have a continuation in the form of global changes. to be honest, I like the game in the form in which it is now. the only thing I would like to fix is the number of players and ads to attract new ones. ultimately I believe in the people who are doing this project right now, I am sure that every day it will get better and better. and thanks again for the job!