FOnline Engine

Patreon.com

Motivation

Not sure whether you're acquainted with the FOnline engine, but if not then in short, it's an isometric sprite-based engine, development of which started as a modification for Fallout 2 back in 2004. I joined the process in 2006 and ended up leading the development efforts. I work on this project to the best of my ability, learning gamedev as I go. There have been different methods of engine distribution: binaries, source code, some mixes of both. Anyhow, there is a need to structure this whole thing.

The idea is to unite the efforts of all active Fonline servers and finally release the first official version of the FOnline engine. Currently everyone's using old builds deeply sinked in legacy code, not having the time or the knowledge to switch to a newer version. There are two essential reasons:

1. There's no new version. The new version has been being refactored and finalized for ten years with no final release.

2. People get used to the old, not-so-perfect mechanics. Since they know how to operate them, they keep doing it in utter hopelessness for real changes.

My idea consists in the union of all the key developers who still work on their servers. Together, we could contribute a lot and finally release the first version, after which we can help each other to migrate individual servers to this final version.

I believe the ETA for this is around four months, so the API will get freezed for this period and we'll get a new shiny engine. After that we'll update the game based on the engine.

Why not Unity or Unreal? If it's about Fallout spirit, having Fallout graphics system, and it's online, then it would require reengineering the original Fallout spriting system, isometric render, serialization system, network connectivity and transactions, all kinds of format parsers and loaders and other things. This engine is almost 16 years old. We didn't have Unity back then.

The engine will remain free under the MIT licensee.