Yes. War Angels is a ground-up remake of Infantry Online 1 with a few added niceties that I go into detail below.
The core of the game, or what makes Infantry Infantry, stays the same. We are working on making the game fully 3D while keeping the (approximately) same camera angle, same gameplay and the same trolling potential via macros. But we didn't stop there.
Over the years we learned a lot about how to approach writing networked applications. Things like having the launcher, the auto-updater, the directory server, the IRC chat bot and the commands you use in-game all funnel through the internet at a good speed is what makes for an integrated gameplay and communication. A number of these things like the account server and database server go unnoticated because only a handful of us need to deal with it on a regular basis. But it all works, and it works reasonably well for our needs as a tight-knit group of gamers.
However, Infantry Online 1 has run it's course. We have been a part of Free Infantry on and off since 2003, so we have been around to see it rise and fall for well over a decade. Infantry has the longevity of a community that few games can make claim to. We want to attract a new generation of gamers to Infantry, and it will take a significant amount of work to do so.
We are taking the best parts of Infantry, what makes it fun for us, and adapting it to the modern-day gaming by ramping up on the visual fidelity. My hope is that the final product will resemble Infantry enough that existing Infantry players will have no problem migrating over. A shift from 2D sprites to 3D models means that we need to make certain things like animations make sense at the new, higher quality.
We are taking what we learned from network programming to build a multi-zone/multi-server chat server. Your account details are all in one place, and you will have access to your stats, your squad and your messages outside of whatever zone you are playing. This system is called Arbiter and I discuss it in one of the news posts.
We are keeping existing small things from Infantry like macros, banners and GG nades. One of the features I look forward to getting in there are 3D Banners, which you customize and drop down on the battlefield.
Storyline is another facet of Infantry that we are keeping. I have collected all the texts written around Infantry and have combined them into one saga. Infantry's unique player-driven development approach means that there isn't a real canon to look toward except a few small pieces of text written as a timeline. Collectively, I have put the stories together into a canon that I hope to expand over time as zones are being developed.
No. There have been a string of planned remakes that I can recall going back to 2006 with a game by the name of Ahora Ahou that have not seen the light of day. Whether it's due to a lot of ambition or just motivational burnout, none of these projects have really hit any milestones with respect to development.
Unfortunately, in majority of cases the start-up is blazing fast with onboarding a lot of people but as time goes on, the project fizzles out and the people have a tendency to leave the community.
In some cases, the remake tends to explore areas unrelated to Infantry, usually dealing with major gameplay elements like changing from the top-down camera to something like a third- or first-person shooter view. In my experience, this is hallmark of little planning and taking on an unrealistic burden.
War Angels is an independent project headed by me, unrelated to any of the previous projects.
Since you are reading this you are part of the Private Test Group which means you are invited to help play, test and give direct feedback as the game is being developed. It also means you get to put up with things not working as expected all the time.
The first phase of the game is equivalent of Sniper for Subspace. This will be an opportunity to get a few people to test the network systems, the physics simulation and other things for War Angels.
As we get more people playing this version I would like to throw in a Fleet-like zone to get more objective and team-work gameplay going.
From here on, I hope to roll out a basic ground-level zone as per Infantry standard. Whether it's located in a space ship or on a planet is not as important as is making sure it works well and looks good.
The game will keep evolving in these small steps. Each time, more people will be invited to play so that we can see where problems come up with a large group of people. As such, there is no definitive release date where it's done. It will keep evolving and new zones will be added as per Infantry Online 1.
To get a good sense of where the project is, see the Development page which has a timeline break down of milestones and what is outstanding.
Infantry Online 1 spends a lot of screen space on showing the UI. In seeing that people prefer to play with a transparent UI background, I have opted to strip the UI down to it's bare essentials and only display things in full when required. Your items are still visible, but only the most important data is shown by default.
As an example of this philosopy, you can see a mock up of the chat box on the Media page. The chat bar can be collapsed down into a single-line bar that stays out of your way. Messages that are coming in will then scroll within the collapsed bar. The box is redisplayed when you want to type something.
Most of the game UI is intended to have a "full" and a "collapsed" view that displays to you critical information in either case.
I am exploring concepts for the mini-map. I will be posting some concept art when I am satisfied with the look.
We are raising squads to stand out and have more importance than before. Squads will have their own private channels, and squad members will be color coded in game differently.
Leagues are promoted as a corner-stone of Infantry. League seasons and rankings are displayed in-game.
I am investigating in-game VOIP as something for squads to use, but I am not sure of how useful it will be if everyone just uses Ventrilo or Mumble anyway.
War Angels is not using an off-the-shelf engine like Unreal or Unity.
The model for the game is such that we do not benefit from general-purpose engines. Even games that seem to be a good match have run into issues adapting their unique features to these engines.
In our particular case, we can take advantage of Infantry's top-down view to perform a number of optimizations that are not otherwise possible in a general purpose setting. A lot of problems go away because of this. This applies to networking, physics and rendering.
The networking stack and a system like Arbiter would have to be written no matter what, because it's relatively rare for a game to have a cross-server chatting system like Arbiter.
The base model for Arbiter is something like Battle.net, however we had our own ambitions for developing a more evolved system:
The chat on the website that you see at the bottom works through this system.
We are developing the game to use a minimum of Direct3D 11 – so Windows 7 and above. RAM and CPU wise, we are targetting the mid to mid-low range computers. A typical modern laptop should be able to run War Angels without any issues.
The requirements to play will be finalized at a later date.