An update to the open and honest letter of where are things and where are they going
It has been years since the last update. Someone asked me today if the project is abandoned, and I said no but I realize that no one else knows that. As mentioned previously, a series of other games to feed back into this one was planned. So things have been moving behind the scenes.
Short answer: No, it's not abandoned, but from the outside I completely understand why it looks that way. We are building using a far more round about method by releasing feeder games for financial and engine update reasons, and the first of those is about to be released!
Long Answer: What actually has been happening:
As mentioned in a previous update a few years ago, the idea was to create "smaller" games on the same engine that could feed back into Rank: Warmaster drastically improving it to make it more viable for a modern audience. Unfortunately, that is the key goal, making Rank: Warmaster more viable for a modern audience. There are a lot of things graphically and functionality wise that people expect as a minimum that the Warmaster Engine or its assets doesn’t meet. Spending the time it would take simply improve it and the assets, would be about the same time to just make another game, and back port the improvements.
As people may know, there is a lot of chaos and uncertainty in the gaming industry right now. I don’t have the budget or resources for the more direct approach, so I have to raise capital by making other games first. Rank: Warmaster Bunker Buster (RWMBB) is the first of those. Ok, what did that add?
32 bit to 64 bit engine conversion – The Warmaster engine that is used in Rank: Warmaster (RWM) is 32 bit. Bunker Buster provided the time to convert it up (which did take a while as expected). Modern game effects basically require 64 bit memory comprehensively together. RWM runs in 2.5 GB of RAM because of the limits of 32 bits only being able to address 4 GB of RAM with windows itself eating the top 1.5 GB. I hit an impassible wall with pure AMD systems which handles memory differently to the point the game wouldn’t run. That is the main reason I stopped doing direct updates to RWM because there was nothing I could do until the engine was 64 bit. At the time, it didn’t make much sense to spend the many months it would take to convert and just be in the same spot. The original public release demo of RWMBB was still 32 bit, since it still didn’t make sense to spend the time. However, after the game was complete on the coding end, and while the levels were completed out, it made sense to finally do the conversion. In so doing, while scary, the engine became more stable, I could use more modern tools, and I could implement more modern features that were walled out from before. Also, the AMD issue went away. But this only happened at the end of last year.
Addition of PhysX – Another upgrade was adding a more robust physics system. I had my own home grown one that did the job, but it isn’t on the same level as something as dedicated as PhysX is. RWMBB 32 bit had PhysX 4.X while the 64 bit version was able to go to 5.x. What does this mean? Now there are minor particle effects for show, but now there are actually debris from exploding that actually damages other ships and buildings. So the debris isn’t cosmetic, but it’s like having a big grenade go off (which you would expect). So now my dream of taking a disabled ship and throwing it into an enemy city as a grenade is now possible. Also now when a ship dies, it falls out of the sky, and tumbles and rolls as one might expect. This also allows force weapons.
Various smaller improvements such as shadows now working in the Navigation screen, a more unified UI styling, popup context menus, word wrap and scaling, updates to the campaign engine, a graphical overhaul of the terrain, cursors, options in the config menu, video screen resolution selection actually working, and a LOT of stability improvements. An incomplete list but all of this can be reported back into RWM.
Where things are going
Ok, this sounds great, but have you ported this back into RWM? At present, no. I’m still in the BizDev side of releasing RWMBB, and prototyping the third game. The order that things are done will greatly depend on the sales of RWMBB. If sales go poorly, then I have to push harder to complete the third game, which I can’t afford (time or financial) to take as long as the second game did. Read the previous update as to why things took so long. Doing the third game prototype allowed me to port some of it’s systems back into RWMBB, so the theory is sound. RWM is just a far more complex beast and needs a lot of playtesting before I would feel comfortable pushing it as a public release. As my needs for RWMBB die down, I can spend more time on doing the feature updates to RWM.
So that is the current state. It’s not abandoned, it is just taking far longer and a different path than originally hoped. The intent is still to do a 1.0 of Rank: Warmaster when the features and assets make it more viable. If there is a community push to change that order, I will certainly consider it.
I do appreciate those that have stuck with the project through all of this, and it was very important to me that you knew Rank: Warmaster wasn’t abandoned. And you deserved to know why the updates stopped and what was happening. I do appreciate your understanding and patience.
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