The main problem I see with any remake I have seen is the project is either moving at a snails pace or is so slow it might as well be dead the game does not seem to be any close to being remade the farthest is the main one Trespassing Petrolia and that I have been following for nearly a decade now with no major updates
The majority of Trespasser remakes have been made by one person. It take a massive amount of time for a person to take on any project like Trespasser. Even making a small fan level for the game can take weeks, spending full days modding.
I am willing to start work on something akin to a remake soon but other projects have to come in ideally I am looking to be the most focused on remaking the game as I am not gonna bother building it myself but rather getting a small team of indie developers...
I think you in a way give the reason why other people have not succeed in making a full on remake. It is very difficult finding the people with the right skills to even take this on, specially in their freetime. Most people have other hobbies or projects and have a personal life outside of that. Few have even a few hours a day to put into it.
-Dinosaur A.I
This will very likely not be possible without at least a few very skillful programmers with a lot of time available. The Trespasser devs never figured it out, and AFAIK there is no other game to this day that succeeded in emotional based, non-animated AI.
Physics systems nowadays come baked into stuff like the unity engine as so are as easy as making a pie to implement the game itself will not require too much effort to remake I can imagine just 2 years of dev to get the game to a playable state with a hardcore and dedicated small team of developers which will be incentivized by payment to get the project going and into playable.
I am unsure if even modern engines have physics that is similar to Trespasser. They have better physics for sure, but I am unsure if you can have physics the way Trespasser does without some heavy coding. Even games with experienced people behind them using these engines today have engine issues, one reason being that they can't fix bugs themselves in the engine when they pop up.
"...because you are 'technically' infringing on their IP by making your own version and could be asked to cease and desist but considering how forthcoming and open the developers of trespasser are with the community i doubt it will be a problem."
Whatever the devs support the project or not, they have no matter in the say as they have nothing to do with the IP rights. I know for a fact that most Trespasser developers would probably be interested and support any remake of the game fans take on. However, they have no control over IP rights.
There is a recent major JP fan mod that people looked forward to that earlier this year got a letter from Universal forcing them to remove anything JP related in it, which made them decide to not release the mod publically anymore cause it would ruin the whole mod by removing the JP references.
I'm not trying to be pessemistic, but the project simply doesn't really sound feasible to me at the moment, especially without some source of funding which could potentially drag the game into infringement territory.
I agree with what TI say in this post.
Even remakes of more "simple" games by fans have taken years or even decades. And there is AFAIK very few fan remakes that have been released for free that are of high quality.
like a small indie game so the development costs will remain low and as far as the source of funding goes well that comes from my various investments I am somewhat of an online entrepreneur and am always building up new investments so the project itself would be just a small side project that I pay for with the profits that I get from my other projects that being said it is not something I can do right now but it is something I might be able to do within the next year or two we will see
In several ways the game is still groundbreaking, as some aspect has not been recreated in a working order yet. See my reply about the AI.
one person working on a trespasser remake for a full decade at this point and still nowhere close to finishing it is just downright a waste of time not to say that the work he has accomplished is not impressive
I wouldn't say that. If I were s1n31, I'd absolutely be proud of what I accomplished with Petrolia, especially if I enjoyed doing it. Not to speak for him but I think a lot of others would agree.
I myself worked for over ten years on the unfinished Return to Jurassic Park mod, and I certainly wouldn't consider it a waste of time. It wasn't about making money or creating a product, it was first and foremost a hobby that I hoped others might be interested in, no matter what state it was released in. Whether RTJP was impressive or not doesn't really matter to me (though I hoped to make at least some sort of impression), what DOES matter to me was the time myself and the team spent having fun discussing and working on it and the people who followed and played it in the end. Enjoying yourself isn't necessarily a waste of time.
What s1n31 has done is massive impressive. No fan remake have come near what he's done.
As TI is saying, if you see that as waste of time, it means any hobby you have is a waste of time. The majority of things you do in a hobby is never shared or ends in a finished "product". And just like with any Trespasser mod I've been working on, I never done them for other people, I've done them for myself to enjoy my freetime. If you see enjoyment as waste of time, you haven't learned how to look at something and what you've learned from it.
Again I would never ask for donations as that makes no sense I would pay out of pocket for the project and that is not a joke I would drop a lot of money to see this project finally go somewhere.
As TI already mention, the devs had millions in the budget and a bigger team. Unless you plan on buying genetic assets, paying someone to remake all of them is a huge cost. Even big AAA companies buy genetic assets and modify them cause the cost of making them from scratch each time is too much.
Donations would make more sense that paying all yourself. It is a massive cost and even small indie games requires several tens of thousands to produce a project that still ends up in Early Access. Of course asking for donations would mean you will risk people hating you if you don't end up with a product.
In the meantime I hope to pump out a few levels for you guys to enjoy as something I do in my spare time hopefully that is something I get started on I am extremely busy as I am launching a new project soon with my business partner.
You just gave another reason why no one have manage to release a full remake, even a simple one. Few people will spend full-time for a few years doing it, it is not worth it.
I am with TI, I am not against a remake, but there have been several people joining in the past thinking remaking Trespasser is so simple. Even porting a game into another engine is a massive undertaking and a reason why you will find very few proper ported games that work well. And it is way to easy and tempting to end up changing stuff you like to change when you get to that point, often resulting in a game that feel and look too different.
Again, I am not against a remake, but people don't understand how big undertaking it is, and even more if you don't have any or little experience with making games or in the gaming industry. It is like people thinking it is easy to get rich on the stock market.
Of course, on other notes. If you do end up starting on something, let us know. We'd happily follow it.