OK, after much deliberation the decision is made based on the following:

• Replacing the EkiOne AI engine, which is no longer compatible with the current version of Esenthel, is currently not possible as there is nothing comparable on the market that could replace it without a huge financial layout.
• The engine is currently so embedded in my game code that to take that out and write my own AI code would not only take a considerable amount of work but would also undoubtedly severely degrade the quality of the envisaged final AI, as I am not going to be able to replace the considerable functionality and tools available in the AI engine.
• The AI is more important to my project than the additional features/fixes in the current game engine, as welcome as those are.
• The version I am currently using is more than sufficient to complete the initial planned level of the game.
• The absence of support for the version I'm using is of less concern as this is not a commercial project and most of the functionality I need has already been at least tried and tested.
  

So I will continue and move forwards with what I currently have.

I have spent the last two weeks exploring the AI engine in depth and have gained a far deeper understanding than I previously had. It's a travesty that the finance was pulled from the company as the underlying design is superb, the tools brilliantly implemented and the product was so close to completion.

I look forward to hopefully demonstrating just how powerful the combination of Esenthel and EkiOne can be, sobeit using a somewhat outdated version of Esenthel.

(12-10-2019 01:06 AM)Pixel Perfect Wrote:  OK, after much deliberation the decision is made based on the following:

• Replacing the EkiOne AI engine, which is no longer compatible with the current version of Esenthel, is currently not possible as there is nothing comparable on the market that could replace it without a huge financial layout.
• The engine is currently so embedded in my game code that to take that out and write my own AI code would not only take a considerable amount of work but would also undoubtedly severely degrade the quality of the envisaged final AI, as I am not going to be able to replace the considerable functionality and tools available in the AI engine.
• The AI is more important to my project than the additional features/fixes in the current game engine, as welcome as those are.
• The version I am currently using is more than sufficient to complete the initial planned level of the game.
• The absence of support for the version I'm using is of less concern as this is not a commercial project and most of the functionality I need has already been at least tried and tested.
  

So I will continue and move forwards with what I currently have.

I have spent the last two weeks exploring the AI engine in depth and have gained a far deeper understanding than I previously had. It's a travesty that the finance was pulled from the company as the underlying design is superb, the tools brilliantly implemented and the product was so close to completion.

I look forward to hopefully demonstrating just how powerful the combination of Esenthel and EkiOne can be, sobeit using a somewhat outdated version of Esenthel.

it's always sad to see really good middleware disappearing(I also often do not like powerhouses like Autodesk or Adobe buying up everything everywhere as they are not always interested in maintaining them or they change them or they split the middleware into multiple products in which you need to pay 3 times more for because they are charging the old price for each and everyone of the split product packages, or they start drowning them into sub categories which requires you to get their entire suite of tools to get ahold of, or they buy them up then they disappear into oblivion never to be seen again)

Hi Zervox, good to see you too, it's been a while!

It is sad. It seems that bigger companies often acquire smaller companies because they perceive them as a long term threat to their own business or simply to bring the talent into their own organisation and apply it to suit their own goals. It often results in promising products never seeing the light of day and is certainly a lesson to anyone considering the support of Venture Capitalists, who can turn on you when you least expect it and sell you off to the highest bidder!

It's a dog eat dog world out there and unfortunately, it's often the highly innovative solutions that are seen as the most threatening and fall prey to this, or as you illustrate, are monetized to the max by the new owners, with us the consumers being the end losers.

I now have a fully working Editor again having manually rebuilt all the projects in Visual Studio 2008 and made the necessary modifications to the Editor code. This is based on the source code I had kept from my initial year's subscription following the end of version 2.0, so has minimal changes.

   

This now at least allows me to continue the project which would otherwise have pretty much proved impossible with the Editor locked in demo mode following the removal of the Licence authentication service from the Esenthel server.

Otherwise I'm deep into planning the Ambient AI for the Village scene, which is also going to result in a massive model, prop and animation workload to compliment it. Should keep me pretty quiet through these winter months

Well done!

Work contunues after a long break ...

great to see you back

Thanks, it's great to be back. Got a bit disallusioned with the amount of work it takes to bring my project to fruition, but after a long break I feel re-energised and motivated again to move it forwards

Aw yes, welcome back!

Welcome back!

Thanks again guys, I've been following both RedcrowProd's and Dwights projects with interest for some time now, so not been completely out of the picture. You've both made great progress. Great to hear from you as well Tottel. Good luck with all your projects. Tipforeveryone's project is looking interesting too.

Esenthel certainly has served us well over the years and retains our interest and involvement, all thanks to Greg who really deserves so much credit for this great engine and without which this community would not exist.

Have spent the last month restructuring and further optimising my existing code, never having paused for long enough previously to actually do that. Also spent quite a bit of time refreshing my memory of the various pipelines I'd established for animating characters and lip syncing and retesting them.

Definitely excited to be back. I'll post again when I have something substantial to show, which could be a while as I have a list as long as my arm!

Happy to see some more progress But for me, I'm patiently waiting until you update to the latest engine version

Thanks Greg and yes, that's fair comment. Unfortunately thats not going to happen on this project for the reasons already specified.

Should I start a new project it will be based on the latest version to utilise the many improvements/additions you've made to the engine and of course the huge benefit of it having ongoing support.

Been a while since I posted anything so thought I'd put together a quick video of where the game is as of now. It's only a hobby, which gets the lesser attention of my other two, so progress is slow but I enjoy working on it when I have the spare time.

This attempts to give a feel of some of the features of the game and the game environment and contains some combat that I've finally coded into the game towards the end, so be it You Tube appears to have destroyed the quality of that section as it doesn't appear to optimise foggy views very well, which is unfortunate!

Best viewed in full HD (1080p)

Kingdom Of Soul progress

Really cool, i like the magic effects, looks great !