All I
meant by my last post was this:
Doubling the code in any program more than
doubles complexity, it could quite easily quadruple the complexity. It's
quite common for mainstream games to have borrowed concepts from other
games, but again they have far more resources and man hours at their
disposal. Modifying the shades of doom engine would be nigh on a complete
rework. It contains armour, but not armour classes in quite the same way.
The armour in a FPS (first person shooter) is a property of the player, the
armour in a RPG is a culumulative total of the armour level of all the items
worn. Weapons again, multiple weapons exist in shades of doom but every
knoife is identical to every other knife. It would need some serious
adaptations just to have different types of sword, unless you want people to
be limited to ten or so identical weapons. Implementing a full inventory
system to shades of doom would also be serious work, since at present which
weapons and how much ammo is a property of the player and would need to be
altered to check an inventory instead.
When I say a property I mean
this:
The game may or may not have an "object" to represent the player,
which has certain pieces of information attached. If it doesn't use this
model the information would simply be stored in plain "variables" not
connected to anything, and would still need serious adaptation. I don;'t
have experience of programming games, but were I to program one I'd use the
object method since you can use the same code to apply damage to monsters
and players and make it so much more flexible.
So it would be possible to
adapt the shades of doom engine, if GMA wished to. But GMA might not be
looking in that direction, and it would take as much effort to adapt the
engine as it did to create it to begin with (or maybe more). GMA are being
quite successful as things are, so the owner probably doesn't want to take
the gamble with a vast amount of time on something which hasn't been proven
to work in the market.
Not flaming, just trying to explain how much more
adaptation would be needed and how even a small addition to a program csan
result in a massive amount of work.
cx2
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To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.