Pixel

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:

Typically, it's best to go with quads. They're better for deformation. Though, you can use a combination of both quads and triangles without issue. Especially for BFME, where the poly count is rather low - to say the least.