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Just curious, but why did the coders walk away from this project? If at all posible if its something we can avoid on this project, why I'd like to hear the reason.
I also took on more responsibility than I could handle but I didn't know that at the time (if you really wanna know, lookup executive dysfunction, if you have more burning curiosity, PM me). I'm a good coder but I have trouble organizing myself and am clueless at organizing others, this isn't a problem when working with game mods, I made some pretty big mods for Warcraft3. It's much easier to make small(ish) incremental changes to an existing body of work.
I would agree that we need Civ 4 with SMAC flavor before we have a total conversion, but I consider the partial conversion a milestone, rather than a goal. I imagine we'll have many intermediate versions, since we're lucky enough to be starting with a fully-functional game. I would expect more problems bringing together parallel changes from multiple programmers than problems implementing SMAC features.
There are two reasons I think this way, firstly is for the benefit of those who only have a Civ4-background (both players and modders), moving too far from Civ4 could easily alienate them.
The second, and I'll be perfectely blunt in my usual style. SMAC is a great game, the flavor is done in a most excellent style - I'd say best game ever in this regard. However many of the gameplay mechanics were implemented in a hurry and with little foresight, for example there are a large number of gameplay & balance problems associated with Crawlers, they are fairly unstrategic - kind of a low risk high profit use everywhere thing, the upgrade+cash in is an exploit plain and simple (or if you don't want to label it an exploit because it's available to everyone, it is a HUGE meta-game balance problem) - the AI doesn't even know how to use crawlers properly indicating how little time there was for implementing and testing them. Similarly there are some nearly broken features in the combat model, such as self destruct and the balance of choppers is dubious at best.
The growth, population and happiness models frankly SUCK, they are incredibly micromanagment intensive in ways which they don't have to be. There is no way I could in good faith allow them to reimplented should Civ4's models prove generally more enjoyable.
With all that said I don't actually object to people working on a more exact clone which removes Civ4 features and reverts to old combat models and such but I feel it should be the fork rather than the mod itself (mainly because it involves a lot of extra work for little or negative reward). Ideally we'll use a game/mod options system to reconcile differences, the feasability of using such an options system (hopefully Civ4 naturally has good support) should be looked into ASAP so that new code can be integrated into it from the start (and also making it easier to use the code for other unrelated mods). OO Programming and Python make such an optional modules approach quite plausible (Python is particullary neat in this regard).
The modcore should basically be all the facilities, SP's, terraforming and techs changed to SMAC, including associated voiceovers and such. Also renaming of Civ4 concepts as appropriate (Great Prophet -> Great Empath) and leaving out referneces to religion and other entirely inappropriate Civ4 features. Getting this done should be the highest priority as it gives us a solid, stable non-controversial base to work from - it will be mostly XML and Graphics work (but the graphics aren't high priority, placeholder art will do).
Then we start adding options, the first one probably being an adaption of the Civ4 combat/unit model to SMAC, adding in a selection of units like Scout Patrols, Formers, Impact Rovers, Shard Choppers etc. Intially there wouldn't actually be an alternative to this option, it's just to get the game into a playable state asap so that other stuff can be tested and played around with. The Unit Workshop will be a huge task which will require quite some experience to do satisfactorily and it'd be nice to have the mod playable much earlier. [It's reasons like this that we MUST take a middle path, otherwise we could get stuck on something big and complex like the Unit Workshop].
Then we start adding new options/modules which may be large scale modifcations of Civ4 systems, or newly coded systems from SMAC such as Orbitals or Ecodamage. These should only be considered ready for full inclusion when they are stable, the AI can work with them and they don't break existing gameplay too badly (before they reach those criteria they would be labelled as EXPERIMENTAL or something).
While, in the perfect world coders would be given tasks to do, it is more likely that inspiration strikes and they have a really good idea on how to implement some system, and off they go and do it (often in an all-nighter orgy of coding and testing), some tasks will simply be easier and require less experience and these are the tasks that will tend to get done first, other tasks will become more feasible as collective modding experience increases, "democracy" and "polls" have no real effect on this process, which is not to say that coders (and other modders) wont want input from the community! Just that ultimately, the people doing the work make the final decisions, based on technical issues and feedback they get.
Since there will be a lot of exciting things to do with Civ4 modding I doubt a Dictatorship approach would work very well, if modders feel their creativity is being stifled they'll just scamper off to some other project. So our goal should be harnassing that creativity even if it doesn't always fit exactly within our visions of the mod.
Well that's my 40c on the topics in this thread for now
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if everyone was equal (on technical abilities) then anything getting done is only possible if all cooperate. where would pbems be without CMNs? i sure wouldnt play without a referee,not in a game this buggy
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