Currently, there is a lot going on behind the scenes in the development of CWAEMU. We decided it would be best to share this information to provide clarification for the lack of new updates you may see in the upcoming months. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it's not because we aren't working!
More Original Data
We've found a way to convert all the original UI & 2D Minigames' positioning, scale, and animations from .SWF (Flash) files. This is a massive help for recreating those games. We are going to be rebuilding our UI, fixing bugs, implementing features in better ways, replacing incorrect assets, and adding all the missing details. A major part of the UI rebuild is separating each of the parts into their own prefabs, as opposed to having a massive UI prefab, which we called the UI Manager. There are a lot of benefits to doing this, notably modularity.
The 3D assets that have been used in the alpha were converted to the .OBJ format with an older converter, a few years ago. This format lacks a lot of the features that the original game's assets depended on, such as the ability to have multiple UVs. The other assets we have are also missing shader data, weighting data, and more. Reimporting these newly-converted .FBX files will help us better remake the original game, but there is an important caveat; nearly everything has to be reimported and/or rebuilt. All of the maps need to be recreated and all gear, companions, and mounts need to be reimported. The benefits of this will be massive, but reimporting all of the files will be a time-consuming process. Benefits include more detail in the levels, more optimized game levels, and animations displaying properly. The animation system also needs work, and we have plans to revisit it soon. This leads into the next major point.
Custom CWA Shaders
We are working on reverse engineering the original game's shaders. This will result in a game that looks much closer to the original. The data from the new imports also gives us a lot of the information we need. Maps will be rebuilt with these shaders and scaled properly. Having a consistent scale will make handling a variety of things in-scene easier and more consistent across maps.
Reorganizing our Project
This will be a much longer-term project, but we are in the process of reorganizing all of our files. Thousands of files had been left unsorted, and those that have been sorted are not up to our current quality standards. This project will help us to better develop the game going forward, and eliminate time wasted looking for things that should have been sorted years ago.
Remaking Republic Defender and more...
The internal state of Republic Defender is not up to our current standards and as such we have decided to rebuild it. Without going into much detail, rebuilding this game will allow us to simplify the level creation process and eliminate many of the bugs and shortcomings in the current version. This will all happen behind the scenes and will be released some time in the future. Features will be built modularly, and Galactic Forces compatibility will be kept in mind, simplifying the development of the fan-favorite minigame which will continue being developed during this time. To add on to this, Lightsaber Duel will receive similar treatment in the future, and games such as Daily Spin, Daily Trivia, and Stunt Gungan will receive similar facelifts.
The State of the Auth/Game Servers and Creating A New Development Environment
We are working on improving the code behind both of our servers, eliminating bugs, revisiting poorly implemented features, and improving the way things are set up overall. In addition to this, we are working on a separate development server, something we should have done a long time ago, to help us better fix these problems without the risk of breaking our Closed Alpha server.
Original Date: 10/18/2022