For working with Source engine for these past few years, there’s only one thing to add: it’s horrendous. Source was built on the Quake branch, from which GoldSource was born and later on followed by Source. There was always an imprecation with creating mods on Source. The time it takes to develop a game can add up to months, even years compared to what modern engines can do. Unfortunately, Source always suffered and were criticized for their “painful to use” tools and the lack of providing a fully fledged engine and SDK to work with.
This is when we said, enough is enough. Bloodlines Resurgence always suffered because of that. Lack of programmers experienced with the Source engine, facing difficulties with engine branch versions, painful tool sets. The art pipeline is not much friendlier either. Creating models need to append to the QC files, compiling and so forth, but we will get into these details soon. It’s a lengthy process without leaving much reward behind it. Because of these, the project never really lived up to its expectations: to have a fully ported version of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. The only reason why multiplayer was taken into consideration rather than the single-player due to the expectations that are required for a fully finished RPG game: skill points, game mechanism, inventory system and so on.
The final straw came once we realized the potential Unity has over and seeing how the team behind Dear Esther were bold enough to move from a fully developed game for which they have full access to its engine code, got the whole game ported to Unity with amazing results. We were always skeptical in regards on what Unity can do but after seeing how much attention this move did, we decided it’s the perfect opportunity to get things done properly. I cannot recall how many times the project suffered because of certain issues, but experimenting with Unity in the last few weeks got us the needed risks to carry it further.
The porting experiments were amazing enough to see how beautifully it can come to life, and implement all those features we only dreamed since the beginning.
At the moment, the levels are converted to Unity through a plugin called VMF Loader that enables the VMF (map sources) to be loaded and converted into Unity as meshes. Right now it doesn’t support importing models and displacements as they are a work in progress. Lighting is fully imported but they will require manual editing to provide the same or improved results due to how lighting works in Unity. Everything is rendered in real-time within the editor, which makes everything easier for the level designer. Lights can be projected real time or baked to a lightmap through Autodesk’s Beast lightmap renderer (included with Unity) or can be baked externally with any of Autodesk’s 3D modeling software and Blender.
For now that’s all the technical details we will provide, but stay tune for more progress! We hope this project shows enough interest for both the fans and dedicated developers to shape it into a great result!