Godot Engine

[STT]

http://www.godotengine.org/wp/

This is legitimately amazing.

Why? Because it has the capacity to make 3D tile-based games (somewhat similar to Gen VI) and is open-source with code already available for Mac OSX and Linux. If we had someone who could model stuff, we wouldn't necessarily have to fiddle with RMXP's quirkiness, plus since we have code access, we could technically turn it into a Pokémon engine off the bat.

[ImmunityBow]

Looks kind of cool. I have modelled in the past and have an interest in reprising (given that I use CAD for set design). The most problematic thing is that Pokemon has an absolute ton of systems. Insane amounts of systems that it's taken huge amounts of work for the Pokemon Essentials people to get through and they still haven't really been able to keep up. Given our level of programming experience, would creating the game on this be feasible?

[STT]

At our current level of experience, it would be a slow process, but certainly doable. This is why most developers of anything continue to learn as they go.

[Cyndadile]

It's absolutely doable. The question is whether it would be worthwhile. We wouldn't have to deal with RPGMakerXP's quirkiness, but we would have to deal with GoDot's quirkiness and our own programmers' quirkiness, as well as the mechanics of Pokemon. We would be set back by having to build the engine pretty much from the ground up.

On the other hand, if we went with godot, we'd have much less trouble once we created a pokemon engine. The programmers would have spent enough time building the code that they'd understand it much better than RPGMXP. The game would likely work across more platforms, and we'd have an easier time customizing the game.

I still haven't looked at that link too much, but I'm not opposed to the idea of switching over.

[STT]

It's absolutely doable. The question is whether it would be worthwhile. We wouldn't have to deal with RPGMakerXP's quirkiness, but we would have to deal with GoDot's quirkiness and our own programmers' quirkiness, as well as the mechanics of Pokemon. We would be set back by having to build the engine pretty much from the ground up.

On the other hand, if we went with godot, we'd have much less trouble once we created a pokemon engine. The programmers would have spent enough time building the code that they'd understand it much better than RPGMXP. The game would likely work across more platforms, and we'd have an easier time customizing the game.

I still haven't looked at that link too much, but I'm not opposed to the idea of switching over.

Given that Godot is open-source software, if we find a quirk we could easily submit an issue on their GitHub, or if we find someone who knows/one of us learns C++, we could fix it ourselves and submit a Pull Request. It's not as annoying as having to deal with closed-source software bugs (especially since RMXP isn't updated anymore to my knowledge) that we can't fix. Okam Studio (the developers behind it) still actively update it, as well as the community at large being able to. Having may different programmers on the same project may be chaotic, but it sure gets the job done quickly.

Starting up would be a challenge, but starting on development is only a fraction of the total time spent on any given project in the game development world. Of course, we wouldn't have salaried programmers like commercial developers, but a lot of the ground work is done already, we'd more or less just have to implement Pokémon systems into our own engine branch (varying levels of difficulty), and a lot of that could be done through script anyway (possible exception being inventory management and the battle system, but we probably wouldn't even need to modify the core engine for that, as Godot supports plugins, and one of the developers noted on their forums that the 3D gridmap tile editor is actually an editor plugin). When that's all said and done, fixing bugs in engine code is a lot of the time easier than writing an engine from scratch. Maybe the ONLY thing that would require edits to core would be the semi-open world aspect, but that can be accomplished with clever mapping techniques and a similar system to the Map Trail in PE that keeps the previous few maps loaded in memory (which wouldn't be an issue on today's PC hardware given the minimum amount of memory among the gaming community seems to be 8GB, with 16GB being common as well, and the maps would overall not be that big and would probably pull from a shared resource pool for the most part, so we could load a texture/model once into VRAM (which again people have a lot of these days) and use levels of detail further away to save memory) for faster loading.

[Black Temple Gaurdian]

I personally think the idea of conversion is insane. Do we *want* to be in development forever? As is with RPGMakerXP and PokeEssentials we have *everything* we need to make a vanilla game, we just have to add our stuff onto it, you're talking about remaking literally *everything* from the ground up.

To emphasis the point, all you need to remake, say, Fire Red, is the maps and events. That's it. To use this to do the same, we'd need maps, events, and thousands upon thousands of lines of (probably buggy) coding just to get the previous two to work, let alone actual battles and whatnot.

EDIT: Also you all talk of "The Programmer" but I ask you "What programmer?" We don't have a programmer. And yeah, this mythical programmer might know it better *if he sticks around long enough to do anything more than the framework.*