Joined: Mon Jun 03, 2013 1:34 pm
Posts: 64
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Hi Coroner!
It's really great to read from you! TrueCombat holds a special place in my gamer heart, and it really makes me happy, as well as certainly all the other players, to hear from The Maker. 
The direction you are considering is exactly the one I would dream of.
However, one thing which I think is essential to its success is a bit of overhead planning and dividing the development into realistic steps. Asking a fanbase which, at the moment, it seems, does not have any professional C coder, to add new lighting features and z-feathers is something fancy.
Therefore, a realistic roadmap (IMHO) to achieve the goal you described would look like:
1 - Adapt an existing ioquake3-based engine to the game as it is
ETA: October 2014
This would likely involve mashing ET (or ETXreal) code on an ioquake3 base or the opposite. It would take so long because this first crucial decision must be taken and a team would need to be formed. ETXReal and ioquake3 both have experienced developers who mentioned that they would like to have a game delivered with their engine. You already mentioned the issues you had with Xreal-ETLegacy, it has to be seen if they can be overcome or if ioquake3 is the way to go.
Moreover, there are a lot of pros who know the Q3 engine inside-out hanging around at quake3world.com, I'm sure that there will be some willing to get involved or at least provide some advices.
2 - Add some rendering features and content
ETA: February/March 2015
Once the game is running, all the content coming from ET would need to be replaced, and new features should be put into use. ioQuake3 already has a new renderer which does real-time lighting and (I think) bumpmapping. So does ETXreal/Legacy.
There is also already built-in support for skeletal animation, but some content creation would be required to make use of it.
3 - Polish, polish, polish
ETA: May 2015
At this point (still IMO), some non-critical features could be added, such as more fancy rendering, anti-cheat system (something like a shared ban-list à la UrbanTerror seems not too bad), new game modes (I'm still such a great fan of Q3TC Mission mode!!!), and so on...
To achieve all this, it is essential to involve some of the people who showed a lot of understanding of how TC works, such as Marze http://marze3d.blogspot.com/, Damien, merlin1991, Stealth, DimStar (who is still putting out maps for TCE at an impressive rate!), and many others (sorry for those I'm forgetting, this is just from the top of my head).
Also, it would also mean a lot to all of us if you could give a pat on the back to those who show their love of the game through direct involvement like the aforementioned, or jussi, who forked the ET code on GitHub in reply to you: https://github.com/jussirantala/TrueCombat. We respect you a lot for all the work you have done, and having you just saying "nice!" when you see something you appreciate would really be a motivational boost.
Finally, when you see the number of players playing, developing, and making content for a game that never had a final release, shows how really great the game is, how much your work is appreciated, and how much potential there is in it.
Whatever happens, I know I'll always be playing one TC version or another for the years to come, and for this, you have my eternal gratitude.
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