Warzone 2100 Being Ported To Vulkan

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Warzone 2100 Being Ported To Vulkan

Warzone 2100, the real-time strategy/tactics game released for Windows back in 1999 and then brought to Linux after the commercial game was open-sourced several years later, is now seeing a Vulkan renderer in the works...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Warzone-2100-Vulkan

[Emdek]

Interesting, I wonder what is current status of assets overhaul (models and their textures), this was always one of the most important things to be done, to gain new users (plus recreating videos for campaign mode, these looked pretty bad even after upscaling with filters, not sure if something changed since 2012).
I remember that 2.3 worked without issues even on some ancient Intel graphics (AFAIR 8xx, something even older than i915), on some old borrowed Dell workstation. :-D

[Kemosabe]

Interesting, I wonder what is current status of assets overhaul (models and their textures), this was always one of the most important things to be done, to gain new users (plus recreating videos for campaign mode, these looked pretty bad even after upscaling with filters, not sure if something changed since 2012).
I remember that 2.3 worked without issues even on some ancient Intel graphics (AFAIR 8xx, something even older than i915), on some old borrowed Dell workstation. :-D

Is it worth fixing all this? Is this game iconic or something?

[Emdek]

@Kemosabe, there are many people (programmers, artists and others) who are working on this project for years, the answer is yes, it's worth it. :-)
I've used to be involved myself in the past a bit too (few small patches, translation etc.).

[vortex]

@Kemosabe, there are many people (programmers, artists and others) who are working on this project for years, the answer is yes, it's worth it. :-)
I've used to be involved myself in the past a bit too (few small patches, translation etc.).

This is not the case. They have only a couple people doing anything at all (look at github), and the latest version is super buggy compared to their old 3.1.5 release.
The art assets haven't been touched in a decade, though, there is 1 person (Jordi) trying to fix them http://forums.wz2100.net/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=5136, but, so far, progress has been slow, and not even accepted in the game. It is just a mod. They do look better, but, again, it is a mod, nothing else.

There is no hope they can do anything with the low-res vids, they don't have the source assets to change them, so it must be done by scratch, and there is nobody doing this the last time I checked this project out.

The Vulkan port is not even official, that guy is not part of the team listed on github. So, maybe it is safer to say this is actually a fork, since Mac's can't support Vulkan which means it is highly doubtful it will ever be accepted by them.
I also question the need for this, since the problem is not that openGL slows things down too much, it is everything else around openGL that is slow. The game won't run any faster with Vulkan vs openGL.

Yes, I have followed this project in the past, but, they keep removing things that were useful from the unit order menu, and even though pretty much everyone in the community wanted these back, the main dev, Per, said no. http://forums.wz2100.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12197


Then we have the tons of new bugs being added and tons of the old bugs not being fixed http://developer.wz2100.net/report/20 so, everything is pretty much a mess.

[Emdek]

@vortex, you know, I've been there for some time...

http://forums.wz2100.net/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=5136&start=45#p54184

Can't say anything about post 3.0, but I know (from reply in my own topic with proposal of recreating them using models by Jorzi and others) that some time ago someone wanted to work on it.

[EricBlair]

I love Warzone 2100!
I've been playing it for a decade and still play frequently.
Personally I play in single player mode but online games are a core feature.

My thanks to all who have contributed.

[yoshi314]

Is it worth fixing all this? Is this game iconic or something?

to some people, yes. it was one of the first rts games where you could put together custom units - you could put together drive (wheels/tracks/etc) , chassis and gun/utiity function into a custom vehicle which gave quite a lot of combinations. it was a really interesting concept, especially back then.

[Tuxee]

to some people, yes. it was one of the first rts games where you could put together custom units - you could put together drive (wheels/tracks/etc) , chassis and gun/utiity function into a custom vehicle which gave quite a lot of combinations. it was a really interesting concept, especially back then.

One of the really first games allowing this was Nether Earth on the ZX Spectrum in 1987:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nether_Earth

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0003391

[Emdek]

@Tuxee, AFAIK Warzone 2100 was one of the first 3D RTS games too.