This has been brought up an inordinate amount recently and based that it might be time to take it seriously. Here are a few resources from past discussions and proposals:
Recent thread (Very recent, only a few weeks old) :
http://armageddongames.net/showthrea...m-Scratch-Plan
Old DarkDragon post that was previously hidden from public view:
ZC 3.0 proposal
I'll step forward and make some concrete proposals for ZC 3.0. All comments are welcome.
The big picture: goals of ZC 3.0
1. Legitimacy and modularity
ZC 3.0 will be divided into two parts: a 2D game engine, and a Zelda "content pack," likely distributed separately. The game engine will be generic enough that we can develop and promote it with no fear of violating anyone's intellectual property rights, and would be capable of playing any of several user-developed content packs.
2. Usability
The engine, combined with the Zelda content pack, will allow a user with no knowledge of programming or scripting to create a quest of complexity similar to Link to the Past. Both the game and the quest editor will feature a modern GUI. The engine will be Internet-aware, with in-game support for downloading quests from and submitting them to the Internet.
3. Customizability
Users who are comfortable with scripting will be able to customize most aspects of game play, up to writing their own content packs.
4. Fresh start
ZC 3.0 will not be able to play 2.50 quests. Auxiliary tools may be able to convert some 2.50 assets (tiles, etc) to 3.0 format.
Technical details
The game will be written in C++, using Qt for its user interface, and LUA for its scripting engine. The code will be as cross-platform as possible, supporting at a minimum Windows XP and later, OS X, and Linux.
To summarize, any discussion on this in the past two years has just boiled down to the following:
1. Will be open source and primarily written in c/c++.
2. Take advantage of well tested 3rd party libs for portability (ie,; windowing, input, etc.). Don't use allegro.
3. A game engine or framework should be at it's core, and should be independent of Zelda-related IP or other copyrighted materials. The community can easily add a Zelda resource pack just like using a tileset in ZC.
4. Use qt for the GUI.
5. Use a fast and powerful scripting language like Lua, or C#. (Alternates have been brought up before, such as python or javascript, but are usually met with mixed results, however there's nothing stopping anyone from adding bindings to all of these later on!)
Obviously no single person is crazy enough to do this by themselves.
I'm willing to contribute one component to the project if it gets started, and maybe more as things get finished, or I finish with that. I also have a lot of things that I've done for my own project that may be able to be used without much work as well. maybe more if the core code is very similar. Maybe lots if it is compatible.
If anyone is interested in working on it then reply here and feel free to throw yer two cents into the well and make a wish.
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Side note: This isn't a "Add more combo flags to ZQuest, or add this feature to ZC" discussion. Please use the suggestion forum for that.
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