The Final Nights List of Playable Clans

Maybe if you get really creative you could overhaul Skyrim into a VtM game, but you'll have an easier time finding a Tzimiche with 10 Humanity than overhauling Skyrim into Bloodlines specifically.

If you want to run the game in a better engine, it would make more sense to use the engine of one of Valve's games like Portal or Team Fortress. IIRC Bloodlines is using an early version of the Source engine that was used for Half-life 2.

Tzimisce: Clan of the Misspelled.

I'm not sure about Skyrim... But again, I'm no modder either.

The hard part would be to find a free working engine...

Claudia wrote:

The hard part would be to find a free working engine...

Depends on how "free" the engine needs to be and what kind of "free" (speech or beer?).
And if you didn't understand that last part consider yourself lucky.

Anyway: Ogre is probably king of the free engines. Torchlight was made using it, though I'm pretty sure they negotiatied a proprietary license for their game. If you're willing to spend a bit of cash, C4 has always looked like the best of the Indie engines to me - $400 last I checked with no royalties or onerous limitations (I think you need to put in a splash screen when your game opens). It works with Collada formats so you can use modelling tools like 3DS Max or Maya instead of being limited to things like Blender, and has a pretty well defined class hierarchy.

Irrlicht is a name I see tossed around quite a bit, along with Torque (though all the research I did has convinced me to stay far away from that one). Unreal has opened up their engine as well, if you consider their plan "free" - and I think it is, monetary wise if you don't charge for your game, but you don't get any source code access either.

if you want an engine that is powerful try cryengine 3 it's cutting edge and "Anyone can now download a full version of the best All-In-One Game Development Engine, for free and use it without charge for non-commercial game development" (from mycryengine.com)

FallenRaven wrote:

if you want an engine that is powerful try cryengine 3 it's cutting edge and "Anyone can now download a full version of the best All-In-One Game Development Engine, for free and use it without charge for non-commercial game development" (from mycryengine.com)

Looks decent, though 20% of revenue is a mighty big chunk if you want to take your game commercial, though I suppose if you didn't invest a lot into it it would be alright. They don't print the license terms if you want source code access.

One of my goals for this year is work up to the Dragon Age toolset (with everything they pulled out into scripting you come pretty darn close to source code access) and make a decent game or two. Then I'll look into finally licensing C4 or some other engine (and with sites like daz3D there's a lot of art models and assets for sale for commercial use so you don't have to make everything yourself).

Edit: Dug a little deeper into the FAQ and it looks like you do get at least some level of source code access at the free level. This may be one to seriously look at, especially for something like an existing game conversion.

mouser9169 wrote:

Depends on how "free" the engine needs to be and what kind of "free" (speech or beer?).
And if you didn't understand that last part consider yourself lucky.

OK, I will bite. What does it mean?

Feral wrote:

mouser9169 wrote:

Depends on how "free" the engine needs to be and what kind of "free" (speech or beer?).
And if you didn't understand that last part consider yourself lucky.

OK, I will bite. What does it mean?

Free as in "free speech" (at least under the US First Amendment) is "free" in that you can say pretty much anything you want. No limits - although ironically, from a developers POV "free" licenses are often the most restrictive, GPL being the best/worst. Practically speaking the engine license determines what you're allowed to do (and what you must do) if you build a game (or mod an existing one) with it and then want to distribute said game to other players.

Free as in "free beer" means you don't have to pay for it.

Cryengine 3 is free as in beer, so long as you don't charge for your games, but not free as in speech.
Ogre is free as in beer, and free as in speech so long as you follow the MIT license requirements.
C4 is neither.


It's a saying in the Open Source/Free Software community (and you can google open source vs free software to learn about the "differences" between those two).

Voraxith wrote:

That's exactly what Bloodlines Resurgence is trying to do, but they've been quiet for a while now.

Yep, they all start with a lot of noise, and then it gets quiet...

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@ Malkav: yep, most people have absolutely know idea how large a job designing/building a game is until they actually get in and try to do it. Even working with an existing ruleset you've got tons of stuff that needs to be done.

@ Feral, Zero, and everyone else: Just rechecked the C4 page. Standard license is only $250 and includes perpetual updates. I could have sworn they had cut that down to one free year, with further updates available for a fee. That pushes C4 back to the top of the heap in my eyes (as 20% of gross can very easily turn into 100% of net, or pretty close to it).