LINUXGAMES

Shacknewshas interviewed Hassan Kazmi and Chris Hager of the Beyond the Red Lineproject about the genesis of their BattlestarGalactica-themed total conversion which utilizes the open source Freespace 2 engine. Ithought this exchange in particular was interesting:

Shack: What is the SCP?

Hassan Kazmi: The SCP stands for theSource Code Project. When the FreeSpace 2source code was released, a bunch of fans formed a team to work on it. Theresult was FS2_Open, which is a vast improvement on FreeSpace 2. We couldnever have made this project on FreeSpace 2–not without cutting seriouscorners. The SCP coders are responsible for making the engine, and then themod teams use it. For that reason, there isn’t a separate Red Line codingteam–we make requests of the SCP. That doesn’t mean we don’t need coders,just that they’d be SCP coders who primarily service Red Line requests.

Shack: So basically it’s a shared coding team between all FreeSpace 2 modprojects?

Hassan Kazmi: Yep.

Shack: That’s a pretty interesting solution to the general lack of codingtalent in the mod community.

Hassan Kazmi: It has nice side effects too. Quite often a request from anotherteam makes something possible that we’d never thought of before. For instance,we’d have never bothered adding a system to make atmospheric missionspossible, but the Starfox mod team is adding one. If we like it enough, thatmakes missions based on [Battlestar Galactica episode] Exodus Part II apossibility.

You can download their demo release; there’salso a recentforum thread discussing a new patch.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 1:29 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.