chipgw

I’m quite surprised no one’s brought this up before. Sure, the SAGE engine is fantastic but it’s limited these days. A few weeks back, I started on something similar. I never really intend to release it. It’s more of a personal project to see what’s possible, rather than anything else.

 

Personally, I chose Unreal Engine 4. Mostly, because I have previous experience with it and Blueprints allows for rapid-prototyping. There really aren’t that many hurdles to overcome to make it happen, at least, in the short-term.

 

Essentially, for models, there’s really nothing stopping them from being brought right into Unreal. Import it into Max and export it out into the correct format (in this instance, fbx). They’ll work – but they won’t be animated.

That’s where it becomes slightly more tricky. Unreal only allows for a single root bone to be present. BFME and SAGE don’t conform to that standard. Yet, it’s not a problem that’s particularly hard to solve. Simply put, it requires modifying the skeletons and animations themselves. It’s more than able to be done (and I’ve attempted it successfully).

 

There’s some definite benefits that a more modern engine (like UE4) would bring with it and even the possibility of large-scale battles never thought possible of in BFME. But, it’s mostly a pipe dream unless a team attempts it, of course. It’d take more than one or two people, in my opinion (the sheer amount of assets that need to be ported over alone would take time).

 

For me, I spent about a week working on a port of BFME1’s Moria level from the campaign. I’d never worked with the Moria assets during my modding days, and quite frankly, they were terrible. As such, I spent around two days breaking them down into individual parts and unwrapped them from scratch (fun!).

 

Next up, I started porting over the actual characters I’d need for this purpose. That includes the fellowship, trolls, goblins and the balrog. I have most of them done, and simply need to finish up a few animations before I bring them in. After which, I’m planning on incorporating AI and the like. There's very few props on the Moria map at the moment, but I have them ready to bring in next. The lighting and mapping overall, could use some work, as well - I'll be the first to admit. I'm not a mapper, and lighting is far from a strong point of mine. Here’s what I have running in UE4 at the moment, though:

 

 

That's pretty neat. I could probably get it looking nice as far as lighting goes, but unfortunately porting assets by hand like that isn't something legally possible AFAIK. My understanding is everything would either need to be imported at runtime or created from scratch...

Between myself and the other person we decided it would probably be best to put work into Thyme. Once that project is finished enough that it longer requires code from the C&C Generals game.dat it should be relatively simple to make a BFME version of it. (that is, simpler than starting from nothing)

You can connect with the guy who's making Thyme, the open-source reimplementation of C&C: Generals/Zero Hour, which was originally made by the same team on basically the same SAGE engine.

He actually contacted me a couple weeks ago with a question about the .big file format. It sounded like his project was heading in a different direction (integrating with C&C's original code), but I guess that's just different means to the same end. Maybe I should look into it more...