I am well known for being quite critical I think.
Reloaded thus far has lived up to my own personal expectations as perhaps, though ideally looking for a great deal from the engine (any engine) I was not expecting to get it.
Ideally apart any well known core issues with the original FPSC classic product which I did not suffer from greatly myself until its later stages, though many others always did. I would have been happy to see Reloaded be a better Classic largely via providing a "somewhat" larger external outside world and better AI than Classic. One other thing I would have personally wanted as of great importance to me personally to round off a game making product would be "Third Person View Player". Without that games are very much limited by comparison with the additional potential it offers. Of course one then would have to consider that Third Person requires ideally a variety of different user controllable camera(s) views to make the most of it so it kind of mushrooms a little. In the main that's all I was looking for and anything else would be a bonus.
To date although somewhat some might say the Terrain feature is a little basic, the world size is about right and larger than I would have expected possible. Smaller would be ideally a little too small and larger to much to ask or expect. As we apart from recent concentration on the core at a stage where we have not yet progressed far beyond that larger world there is still much to do.
Point being the core had and quite rightly so to be dealt with first and you need an outdoors environment in if you are going to have on at all to do that.
Now we have come this far I would say its quite a step forward from Classic FPSC and has the potential progress to a level which is unknown but to date its now on track at least.
Personally I think Reloaded is better thus far than I had expected despite my being greedy and wanting more which perhaps was and is not very realistic.
As far as I have experienced personally once the hard coded entity limit was removed from Classic I never had any issues at all with adding very large numbers of entities, except in the case of dynamic AI characters and other AI entities which clearly were something of an issue with Classic. Static entities on the other hand were never a problem for me and I had a great deal in levels without any undue performance hit. Never found them a problem myself.
Clearly when it comes to dynamic AI entities then all and every engine will take a hit from them - Reloaded included - there is no way to avoid that as AI is complex and a drain. The more sophisticated the AI and the more of the AI entities active at any one time the bigger the hit. Thus Reloaded will get a hit. As with any engine if you want very complex and sophisticated AI then the engine has to be capable of managing that efficiently and always a balance found somewhere along the line.
I have always been a big supporter of advanced AI intelligence but within reason. I hope at the very least we can make some basic improvements over Classic levels of AI to say the least.
Despite the current issues with the AI enemies I can see there has been some improvement though it seems we will be having a new - start from scratch AI and that I think will be a good thing. Based on what Lee has already posted about this new AI it seems TGC again have it right and are doing the right things.
I would expect that indeed we will see a considerably improved AI within the limits of possibility and any core engine limitations. I say that as I believe TGC to be committed to now by and large finishing what they start to at least a large degree of completion before jumping too far ahead and like too many cooks, adding too many ingredients all at once.
I say that then Yes expect that Reloaded will progress more yet and meet with Expectations as long as they are sensible and reasonable to expect in a game maker at this level.
No reason why anyone should not be able to make a playable game with it. Hang on for the AI and the Con Kit if that is still in the pipeline and you should be good to go. Thereafter you can wait for the rest of the features set and whatever else may eventually develop while you build your basic levels and game worlds which you should have some decent AI inside to interact with while you do it!
Excuse my typos. Its late well into the early hours of the morning and I am half asleep.
