I always had been of the opinion that it wouldn't actually take all that much effort to use the maps and dialogues of good old 2238 and the FOnline engine in order to create a Fallout 2-esque COOP (or singleplayer) game, in a slightly more modern guise. Now it's time to see if I was right or if I'm grossly understating the amount of effort this requires. In any case, here are a couple of bullet points to summarize this project.
- This is designed for singleplayer or co-op play, not as an mmo (though I probably wont go out of my way to prevent it). It will be hosted individually.
- As the name suggests, while it does use 2238 maps and dialogues, it is based on the Ashes of Phoenix sdk and will feature its gameplay.
- As such, this project does not necessarily aim to accurately recreate Fallout 2. However, before any new stuff is added, the goal is to recreate all the quests and interactions from
both Fallouts as a baseline. Aside from more weapons added, it will try to stay in canon.
- Due to the changes in character design, combat mechanics and items, it should prove a much more challenging game. No free APA from navarro and
no Turnbased (sorry), only real-time.
I have started a public Trello to communicate the progress on the game and, for the most part, to help myself in organizing the workload.
https://trello.com/b/uu44VXjg/ashes-of-californiaThis is a personal side project of mine and does not include the whole NoNameYet Team, though I will be relying on their help. It also does not mean that AoP is dead. Contrary to popular belief, it is actively being developed and will see game-changing updates
soon.
Any help is welcome, especially in the Quest and Dialogue departments. I will try to handle this project in a transparent way but while I'm generally all for community projects and teamwork and such, I am primarily doing this for the fun of developing a creative work and because of my belief that a Co-op, non-pvp fallout game is long overdue. I can see that many will disagree with my choice of not supporting TB and using AoP in the first place, and with those major points already being predetermined, I can hardly declare it a community project.
The turn of this project will largely be determined by the amount of support it receives. Since I am mostly developing it alone for the time being, I have set my own goals to recreating the Fallout 2 mainquest, with the bonus of being able to visit Fallout 1 locations and doing their sidequests. The next stretch goal would be to include the loose ends which the restoration project tried to tie up or other parts of the story that felt like they deserved more attention, like more late game content from Metzger as a slaver, more quests for the NCR rangers and a proper Ranger HQ, essentially creating more Fallout 2. Stuff like fleshing out big players like Enclave and NCR, quests and events that would change the game world or a whole new mainquest are things I wont be able to promise, until more people are willing to work on that sort of stuff.
At this point I can not estimate the amount of effort required until a release candidate has been produced, but hopefully the next days and weeks on trello will tell us.
Having started this project practically
today yesterday, I'm already making good progress with the map integration and will now continue with dialogues. Once I am finished integrating the 2238 assets on the AoP base, it is time to start on bringing back the classic fallout content, a task which is tedious but one that can easily be shared among different people.
For anyone who feels like they want to play this game rather sooner than later and want to help out a bit, I will be available almost daily on irc://irc.forestnet.org/AshesOfPhoenix and can be reached easily on
http://fonline-aop.net/forum/index.php 
Topic: FOnline: Ashes of California Co-op Project (Read 7779 times)