Slashdot Mirror
Babylon 5 Games Coming?
Johjn Callaham writes "Today at Gamecloud we chat with J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of the sc-fi TV show Babylon 5. He hints that a new game based on the show is a real possibility." From the article: "Every year or so, WB makes noises about a B5 game...and they're making them again this year. Whether or not this actually goes anywhere this time, we'll have to see. Certainly the B5 universe is almost tailor-made for a game, especially an immersive, online experience."
There is a B5 mod out for the game Nexus. I haven't followed it at all but a co-worker talks about it all the time. Check it out at http://b5col.firstones.com/
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
Wikipedia to the rescue.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There's a freeware B5 game available at http://ifh.firstones.com/ called "I've Found Her: Danger and Opportunity". It's a prequel to a full game, and has a good couple of hours of playability in it.
It's not a mod, as far as I know. In any case, you don't need to install any other game in order to play it.
It's a linear mission-based fighter game (Starfury), similar in structure to X-Wing, Wing Commander or Starlancer.
I enjoyed it.
How is that sad? The pilot was from 1993, so they probably started on it in like 1992. That's 13 years ago. Thirteen years before B-5 was 1979. We went from the Atari 2600 to the SNES in that length of time. The level of visual detail in F-Zero certainly wouldn't have been doable in real time on any sort of consumer hardware in 1979.
.LWO's in my last interactive animation project. Have somebody write some glsl or equivalent for any procedural textures used on the models, and you are should be able to have a great time.
If anybody still has the original models, it would actually be quite easy to incorporate them into a game engine. They were made on Amigas using an early version of Lightwave. Not only does Lightwave still exist, so it could open the old files without much trouble, but the file format is extremely well documented. I used
And, really, most of the CGI wasn't that impressive even in the mid 90's. What was cool was that they managed to do it every week for a TV show. It also allowed them to have fighters, while Star Trek relied on large ships. With model shots, it's hard to have many ships on screen. With CGI, it's pretty easy to have a squadron of fighters flying in formation, etc.
It took some digging, and Google was not as helpful as I would have liked, but I found the new home page here:
http://www.hard-light.net/hosted/babylon/
I'm downloading the current version now. It includes the Freespace 2 engine, so you don't have to buy Freespace 2 in order to install and play.
100,000 is trivial these days due to the use of normal maps. Most models for modern games start out at something like a million polygons. They're then reduced to a few thousand polys for in-game display, and the normal map simulates the difference to make them look like they still have a million polys.
It's probably pretty easy on modern hardware to render the TV models to LOOK pretty much identical.
Additional info for those that download the game:
Downloading the base package is not enough - neither campaigns nor missions are included. Those are downloadable separately from the same site.