GirianSeed573 wrote:I don't want to sound rude, but again I'll show my thoughts on your post.
Rest assured, I'm not taking anything here personally, and have no problem with people having different opinions from mine. I know that's against time-honored internet tradition, but that's me
GirianSeed573 wrote:1.) I would perfer to code from scratch, so as to give us complete control over the product.
First, I can't think of any real concrete benefit coding from scratch provides in this case. Renpy is not a "game construction kit" like rpgmaker or AGS, it's just a bunch of python modules, and it's all open source. You can extend it using straight python, as many have done, to do whatever you want. If you wrote it all in C (or whatever), you wouldn't code your own graphics routines, mp3 decoder, etc, you'd find existing open source libraries and use those. I don't see that there's much difference.
Second, I'm just being pragmatic (or pessimistic, your choice). The majority of all these projects do fizzle out, let's not kid ourselves. Writing an engine is tedious, difficult, and followed by an eternity of boring bug-hunting, documenting the scripting language for the scripters, tweaking and so forth. You're entirely dependent on your one or two coders not giving up on it or cutting the wrong corners. Personally I'd rather use something that's already done, that keeps me independent, than bet on that horse. I've seen these things die far too often to be an optimist on that point. And been involved in them, too, which sucked royally.
On top of that, having a tangible, playable product from day one is a huge motivation-boost (I think that's why mods of existing games seem to more often reach completion).
Either way, we have nothing now. So, if I, today, happen to have some energy and free time to work on this, I'm not really inclined to just do flowcharts and screenshots, when I could already be putting that effort into an existing engine right now, that already works and works well, and does 95% of what I need.
If someone does eventually produce a working engine that has real benefits, I'll be happy to port my work over. Because ultimately, that isn't such a huge deal.
But like I said, I don't mean to discourage anyone. Make it a pen-and-paper RPG, or write it in cobol, it's all groovy with me. I'm thrilled if people actually do go for this project in whatever shape or form. I'm just saying, personally, I'd rather not invests hundreds of hours building a house without a foundation, when there are completed foundations available. Excuse the dorky metaphor
GirianSeed573 wrote:2.) I think you missed the point. What Kerm was talking about was using it in the style of Policenauts. The Mouse support in your Proof of Concept is exactly like that of the PlayStation version's.
It's a long time since I played Policenauts, so correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it basically like a point and click adventure style interface? If so, then that's there already, it's just defining hotspots on the screen basically.
GirianSeed573 wrote:3.) LightGun support is, again, another good feature. Both the Mega-CD and PlayStation versions had this. The hard part would be implementation, but I imagine it wouldn't be to terribly hard.
It's basically the same thing as the above, thanks to the lightguns just being mice thing. The snatcher shooting sequences are just whack-a-mole after all, which is, again, just hotspots.
GirianSeed573 wrote:As for switching between graphic modes, I'm not sure if I exactly see the point.
There isn't a point, it would just be for nostalgia/completeness. I kinda like the crappy MSX graphics
GirianSeed573 wrote:My thoughts of redrawing the scenes were to take the best things from each version (Charachter designs, Censorship, etc.) and incorperate them all together.
If we have a good, motivated artist on board, sure thing. But that's a tall order, and it's a crapload of work. One option at this early stage would be to just stick to Sega graphics, and just include the non-Sega scenes that are clearly different/better on other platforms. If some artist comes along that can make it match the style, great.
GirianSeed573 wrote:Belive me, I'm all for the Japanese dub, but excluding thosse scens, when we are trying to make the most complete version, is just a self-contradiction. Using a hybrid of both dubs (Japanese for ingame, English for Demos) is also out of the question. I'd just seem too out of place.
I don't really think we have much choice. If we do manage to include a japanese audio version, we just have a selectable option to either have only the standard japanese scenes, or include the bonus scenes in english with japanese subs. I don't really see any other options.
If someone wants to shell out to hire talented japanese voice actors who can impersonate the originals, that's another matter
