Alienbreed Remake - what happened - resurrect it?

Many of you will probably remember the Alien Breed community remake that was started by Rob Farley?(I could be wrong).

As far as I remember it seemed like the game 'engine' itself was fairly complete and that the main things it needed were content (mainly in the form of levels.)

Is there any interest in the blitz community to resurrect this project?

Alternatively - if an engine and media were available that allowed for the same or similar gameplay to Alien Breed is there an interest in creating levels as a community project?

Just some thoughts...
From Matt

Most people these days would go here-

http://www.dream17.co.uk/downloads.php?cat=1

And download a few of the games for WinUAE (after buying Amiga Forever, of course).

This isn't Blitz but it's damn good, I played it all the way through:

http://www.binaryjoy.co.uk/games/games-news/alien-breed-obliteration/

I believe the problem with the Alien breed project was that everyone else stopped working on it, so Rob eventually said he wasn't going to keep going all by himself.

I think the problem was that it simply got too big so people did not feel they could just jump in to contribute anymore. That was what worked out so well with the Jump around project,... it started very small and grew slowly, so people could jump in and out as it progressed.

Judging by the popularity of this thread I think there's a distinct lack of interest!

I'd love to see this project revitalized. That was one of my favorite games of all time.

Yeah it was looking good! But I think it would still take a herculean effort to make it something quite special. It's interesting to read the comments of support from the peeps at Team 17 though.

Surely the problem with any Alien Breed project is that you're essentially recreating a flawed and mediocre game, which is a demoralising task. Sorry Manny, but a lot of Team 17 games were lacking (e.g. Superfrog, Cardiaxx and Body Blows). Sure, Alien Breed had some interesting gameplay elements (as I recall, the "you can't see the bullets but I'm shooting an automatic weapon at you" thing). No wonder they fell out with Mr Campbell, he always did (actually, still does) review a game based solely upon it's individual merits, rather than how much he wanted to be liked by the producers.

Remaking Nebulous, E-Motion, Buggy Boy, Stunt Car Racer, Rotox, New Zealand Story, Rainbow Islands, Dungeon Master, Paradroid ('90?), Uridium, Armalyte, Jet Set Willy, Hexic or plenty of other really fun games would be a far more rewarding task.

I can't say as I've ever seen remakes of most of those. Perhaps the threat of possible copyright infringement is enough to keep people away from bothering. I still keep plugging away at my re-hash of Revolution (Simon Pick, C64) because it's a worthwhile exercise, plus I have permission ;)

Good call.

Sledge: Shame the original game was poorly marketed and produced. It really was a winning formula.

C'est la vie.

Rotox! funny I was just thinking of that yesterday. Interesting game but too sloooow.

Stunt car racer... weeeeeeee.. :)

Didn't someone make a really good remake of SCR in blitz some time ago?!
How did that turn out?

I believe that person is already in this thread, or did you know that already ;-) It was never finished though IIRC.

I think maybe part of the problem with recreating these old games is that the major appeal of most of them was their 'wow, look what my computer can do'. Stunt Car Racer was real 3D that wasn't just a graphics demo and super realistic physics. Completely taken for granted these days, so you realise that the game is shallow.

Gamers are harder to impress now than they have ever been. Games developers keep on trying to do it, but they are running out of things they can impress us with. Graphics, audio, physics, AI... all things that are only a few years away from effectively perfect (for the purpose of games).

What milestones await us?

1) Realtime raytracing.
2) Solid geometry modelling.
3) Realistic environmental audio (because let's face it, we ain't there yet).
4) Dynamic fluid simulation (PhsyX was supposed to bring this).

Can't think of many more.

I was quite involved in the ab3d project with Rob. It ended largely being just the two of us, and we both lost motivation. I think that the problem was that we'd built most of the engine (the fun stuff), and had a working editor and playable demo level, but then we needed to work on building an actual game structure around that: how do levels connect? scripted events? etc? We had a whole bunch of ideas in this area that never made it anywhere...

I have also attempted migrating it to bmax before (works quite well with skid's improved bb2bmx & b3d sdk, only a few manual tweaks needed during beta). Not sure if this is a direction that would reduce or broaden the audience, but does appeal to me in some ways.

I do still have the source on my HDD (somewhere), but have been away for the past two weeks, and will be busy for the next few days. I will try to dig it out in the course of the next week, might try to see if Rob's happy to put this up as a SF.net project, or GoogleCode or something so that people can grab it and play, and see if we can get any further.