posted on September 8th, 2014, 11:40 am
>> Do you intend to include a mod system like the current FO version or various Bethesda games, Civilization games, etc.? Also, if there is a mod system, would it be possible to use it to override bits of the engine with custom code to add new features or modify existing behavior?
The way you can mod a game depends on what exactly it exposes. Most games allow to configure internal game objects through text files, thus enabling some degree of mod-ability. This can already go a very long way.
What many games do not support, is to add proper game code via plugins (DLLs). Scripting is sometimes possible, but what you can do with that (especially performance wise) is often limited.
Generally ez is designed to be quite extensible. It does have infrastructure to dynamically load plugins and add new object types. So from our end it should be possible. However, most of what you expect depends on what the NX team does on top of our infrastructure. As far as I know the NX code is quite data-driven, so a lot of stuff will be configurable and thus mod-able. Whether they will also allow plugins to load additional game code, is probably not yet decided, but there should not be anything holding them back from our side.
>> I actually think this creates more questions than gives answers. I'm sure the NX Dev team will try to address those in upcoming news posts. For now I will abstain from asking the ones that come to mind.
Well, just ask them, otherwise we don't really know which questions you might have :-)
>> Just to make sure I understand correctly when you talk about the License and Pricing, does this mean I would be capable of creating a game using the ezEngine and selling said game as a commercial product?
Yes.
>> I've been desperately searching for a commercial engine capable of supporting the style of RTS that Fleet Ops falls under.
Well, this is a bit more complicated. ez itself is not an RTS engine. It provides the functionality that basically any engine would need (e.g. platform abstract file-system access, resource management, rendering abstractions, multi-threading functionality, etc.). This is all of the stuff that gets very hairy to support on multiple operating systems, unless it is done in a clean way. This is where we currently invested most of our time. So for example when the NX team wants to read data from a file, they have ONE way to do this, and it always works for them, because ez takes care of that. However, inside ez we actually have currently two implementations for opening a file, one for Windows, one for Mac and Linux. We could easily add a third way for other platforms, without the NX team even noticing, since it is all abstracted away.
For people not familiar with engines, this might sound a bit weird. If there is interest, I could go into more detail about what kind of infrastructure we provide at some point.
What ez does NOT provide is the high-level stuff that actually turns the NX engine into an RTS engine. So for example we do not have code for space ships, for moving objects on the battlefield, for commands and AI, etc. etc. That is all done by the NX team.
So when you say you want an engine to do an RTS game, that would mean that you need both the ez code (which is free) AND the NX code. I have no idea, whether the NX team considers open-sourcing their code at some point. But maybe the final result would be flexible enough so that you don't even need the code for most things. I don't know, we'll see.
