Anyone interested in client development?

[PixelEngineer]

A proposal.

Hey everyone. I am still quite busy with school and such and I had a rather interesting idea. As I am pretty much a one man team working on an engine, I will likely never get this client up and running as solid as I have wanted. Sure, I will eventually implement full rendering, animation, UI and possibly client support but in a lot of those cases, I am reinventing the wheel.

I have had an idea that combines the work I have already done with a preexisting engine. I'd like to finish rendering with shaders, finish up some bugs and then switch to an open source engine. The problem with many EQ projects is that people try to convert the EverQuest format to a more common format and import it into an engine (Unity, Unreal, etc...) which is neither suited or optimized for the way the zones were originally created. What I propose is we pick an open source engine and load the EverQuest data into that.

I have had my eye on irrlicht, which is written in C++, is cross platform and has quite a few examples of loading Quake style BSP maps. The EverQuest format is similar and with the already extensive documentation of the fragments, I don't think porting my work would be that difficult.

The downside would be that I would no longer be working directly with the core engine code (although as it is open source, I could still see/modify it). The upside would be that a lot of the features that will take quite a while to implement (collision detection, per pixel light, parallax mapping) would be supported natively by the engine and I could focus on making sure the data from the zones are translated into this engine accurately.

I am very excited about the prospects of a quicker development cycle. I feel my learning of shaders thus far has been fantastic and I also realize that I will still learn a ton while working with an established engine especially because it is open source.

My plan is to finish up this next release of Lantern and then after that, begin the process of porting my work to the irrlicht engine.

Any comments/suggestion/criticism are welcome!

Cheers!