I wouldn't imagining it happening for atleast a year, but I'm a big proponent of SOE just doing the necessary legal work to protect their IP, and then just making Planetside 1 open source. Lucas Arts recently did something similar with Jedi Academy, Microsoft did it with .NET... at this point is there that much code worth protecting in an 11 year old game?
So, if Planetside 1 were made open source, what would you recommend the talent within the community to focus on? (CC and Wasp fix aside)
For me a few big ones would be:
- Restore the continental map view. It's a mess right now.
- Cut the time it takes to reload or change weapons in half.
- Look into the game being made *entirely* server-side to reduce a majority of the cheating. Game was built to work with T1 at best, and most of us have 10x that now and can afford the ping hit.
If you think the server couldn't take it, someone from SOE had said that an old Pentium 4 is what runs the current server PS1, so I imagine with a modern $4,000 server (we'll need some donations >_>) the game could easily handle a server-side load.
- If server-siding doesn't solve the ADADAD problem, see about making strafing less effective.
- Close-range infantry combat is fairly terrible in PS1. I wouldn't recommend reducing the TTK, but maybe add in locational damage similar to the new War Thunder: Ground Forces to spice it up and make it more interesting.
How 'bout you?