I'm not sure we need PostGre, or even a database, since we have relatively few data to manage. a good binary or even text storage mechasim should be enough.
Steph, I think you are right about this. There's not much data and Postgres would be overkill...
Text files would work. They are simple to use and as long as there are good utilities to help users add/delete entries, I think it would be smart to use them.
Maybe multiple text files could be used to simplify things? One text file for government types. Another text file for units. Another for buildings. And so on.
And xml files could also be used to store some of the data. They are bulkier but at least they have a pretty good structure and they are easy to parse using C#
The big issue here is to get a team working "full time" on it. Far from easy. Personally speaking I think the project could be fun and I could be interested.
I'm glad this has sparked your interest because you are the perfect candidate to lead something like this.
And to work "professionally" on it, I'd need a guaranteed income of around 3500 € / month (net, after all taxes). So even if we can finish in one year, that's 42000 € budget just for one person (and not including tax).
I think that amount is perfectly reasonable. And if we limit the scope of the project to what is essential to make a good clone and figure out how much we need to fully fund a project like this, it's possible to raise the amount on Kickstarter. I went to their site and saw some games that got 100,000+ dollars worth of funding.
I know that I would contribute 50-100 bucks on something like this. (I'd do more if I could, but I am poor).
So what are the issues?
- The name: don't call it "civilization 3.5", find our own name
Right! It wouldn't be very wise to call it "Civilization".
I'm sure people here can come up with a good name. I remember Civ Army was trying to make his own game and he named it "Evolution". I tried to help him with the project but I had to gracefully bow out because I could not figure out how to use GDI+ or XNA to create a map...
If I recall correctly, XNA, even though it is a platform for gaming, seemed to have a lot of limitations regarding maps and memory allocations. So I think C#/GDI+ would be the best way to manipulate maps. But I only had basic XNA skills at the time and there's probably something that I did not know...
In any case, it sounds like you are confident that you could create the basic game mechanism and map.
I'll send a PM to Civ Army though and see if he is interested in something like this. He has awesome graphic skills.
- The graphics: there are plenty of artists and graphics here. We can use it... Or simply make an engine which come with only a few "sample" graphics, with a kind of importer. We don't provide any graphics from CivIII. But if someone owns CivIII, then he can use the graphics from CivIII in his own game.
Good idea. We just need to make a mod that is able to use the same graphic files as civ3 (flic files, pcx files, etc.)
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Legal Issues
New war games come on the market all the time and as long as the game we make has a unique look and feel, with a different menu system and different features, it should be able to withstand any legal claims by Firaxis or other companies. Also, using the same file types should not be an issue at all. There are a lot of games that use pcx and flc files.
Open Source
Needless to say, I prefer Open Source so that a lot of developers can contribute time on making the game. And it would be great to be able to look at all the code and functions and see exactly how the AI works/thinks. But I suppose it would be alright to make a proprietary version of the game and put it on the market. If so, I'd still want to be privy to the code, if at all possible.
Edit: Actually, I just believe in open source or nothing...
Hopes Up
Hopefully we can Kickstart this project. I've got my hopes up now. I really think it can be done if we get a good team of people. I'd volunteer if I felt better, but I have OCD pretty bad and other health issues and I'd never be able to accomplish anything worthwhile.