Crossfire Mailing List Archive
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Re: CF: Ideas for the future



> 	There was talk a while back about making a new game (or rewriting
> crossfire in C++, java, etc.).  Has anyone persued this endeavor?  I have

Yes and no.  As far as I know, there is no one working on rewriting
crossfire in C++ or Java.  However, (even better, IMHO) there are
people at the University of Nevada at Reno, headed by William Bull,
bull@cs.unr.edu, who are working on a more generalized engine for
games of this type, written in Java.  (You may remember some talk
about this on the list last December and January.)  They are calling
their project "OpenWorld", and here's a little bit of what William
Bull had to say about it (I got this on March 6):

=>Well our system has developed into much more than Crossfire (as was my 
=>original intention.) We're not going for the March 31st deadline since 
=>we're also writing three articles on the topics: Java, OpenWorld, and The 
=>Unified Method.
=>
=>We've found that a complete rewrite would be much more successful than 
=>the current system. There aren't enough features for expanding the game 
=>and in order to offer new features is rather teadious. The system we're 
=>developing called "OpenWorld" is modularized and well designed out. We're 
=>using the Unified Method object oriented technique (Booth & Rumbaugh 
=>1994-96). This will allow us to easily account for weakness in sort and 
=>long term development. My goal is to allow for a remarkably generic 
=>development system. (With any luck we'll have a prototype within three to 
=>four months.)
=>
=>In short, Crossfire won't be in Java by us. It doesn't use to power which 
=>Java has and isn't very good as a general multi-user gaming environment. 
=>Hopefully we'll have one out soon.

I for one think this has the potential to be far better than
crossfire.  No offense intended to the wonderful crossfire developers,
but it has too many peculiarities ("no, they're features!") to easily
expand its basic features.  I intend to e-mail Mr. Bull back within a
day or two to find out what their current status is now (the above
text is almost 4 months old).  If there's interest, I could post the
response to the crossfire mailing list. For those who really like some
of the particular features of crossfire, I recall that Mr. Bull said
that it would not be hard to implement a game resembling crossfire
using their engine.  I am working on learning C++ (with Java to
follow) this summer, so I hope to be able to start on making a D&D- or
crossfire-like game as soon as they release their code (time
restrictions permitting, of course).  If anyone else likes this idea,
e-mail me and maybe we could get a group project going.

Happy gaming!

Michael Martin
(mbmartin@vt.edu)