1 we could blend 3d-objects and 2d-objects easy as pie (fully lit and shaded planets/objects on map!)
We could create 3D-Backgrounds instead of the backdrops we have now, animated , asteroid belts, nebula and swirls/blackholes and stuff.
Nope, none of that. AI War has always been based in a 3D engine, but we use a 2D plane in order to achieve that. In the case of Unity, we're using an orthographic camera, which rules out any possibility of 3D models. I don't want to get into the 3D models thing, anyway, despite my past experience with that (
outside of games). I just don't have any interest in going that direction, for a lot of reasons, and it's fundamentally incompatible without current rendering methods in Unity, anyway.
We could have actual shader based effects (explosion distortion, ripple, desaturation, oversaturation, smoke and explosion blend properly without performance loss.
But yes, all of that stuff would be possible. However, pixel shaders do come with a performance hit, especially depending on the graphics card. The main thing is that it would not be as large a hit as it otherwise would be, and it could be easily turned off on lower machines, etc.
So yeah, the amount of stuff change to Unity COULD bring to AI-War is staggering. But i think this is going to be a huge undertaking, and if done should focus on bringing mod-ability to the game. Simply because if its not done at that point, it will never be done ;p
As I noted before, it will probably never be done, we aren't interested in having a lot of mods. Until such time as we (in the distant future, when we've lost interest in maintaining the game) open source the game, we won't be emphasizing mod-ability any more than we are now.
Even if no modding comes, if my "mockups" in the gfx section of this forum become reality then that would already immensely increase the range for AI-War.
We definitely do appreciate community submissions of stuff, and build that into the official game where we can, though. Certainly a ton of your stuff has been implemented in the past. There's definitely going to be some nice new eye candy with the 4.0 version, but it may not be staggering overall, as we're going to be primarily focused on getting it running and efficient, etc. A lot of the key improvements I have already mentioned, like the GUI and the tractor beams (and other colored lines), but there will be some other things, too. I think that we could actually cut down on RAM use some by removing animation frames that are just "engine effects" and converting those into engine bloom effects that could be configured via dat files. So that way players could contribute to the engine bloom work, if they are inclined.
Having community participation, and having mod-ability, are two totally different things in my mind. We always lean toward the former, at the moment.
And if shader effects come the scope of additional eye-candy is massive
Yeah, that is really true. We've done a bit of simple experimentation with Tidalis on that (nothing in the final game), and it's really powerful. But of course Unity has its own shader language (since it works with OpenGL, DirectX, and other platforms), so that's something new that we'd have to learn (and shaders are new to me in general). I expect we'll do an increasing amount with that over time, but right at the 4.0 launch I doubt there will be much. It's definitely great to have the capability, though, and I think it's something we'll grow into increasingly over time, partly through our work on Alden Ridge and other games, and then wrapping that back into AI War like what we've done with what we've learned through Tidalis. Exciting stuff.
