Oh Defender...
TG3D, has much better water physics, not sure if its better the Unity.
Water "physics" are a matter of applying drag to a player, there's nothing in the world that could possibly be unique about T3Ds handling of water that couldn't easily be replicated in any other engine, it's mathematically not possible.
Moving this game to T3D, is the way to go...
No.
Starting from scratch would take way to long..
This is at least half true, it will take longer, but it's not much more cost-prohibitive than T3D, and when you look at upgrading the visual quality of the game in any significant way, the costs quickly approach each other. Unity is far easier to work with, from near 1-click asset imports to an animation system that is several times better than anything T3D could ever hope to have.
The terrains and structures from are current maps could be ported directly to T3D..;
It's trivial to yank out the heightmaps into 16 bit raws, not that any of the maps are particularly complicated to recreate. Any structures can easily be yanked from the dif files into different formats. From there they can easily be manipulated and buildings can all be easily recreated using much easier to work with programs than Hammer.
The legions player physics, jetting, skiing, will be hard to recode in a new engine..
There are hard things about moving to Unity, but these are not them. Code is a rather minimal time investment when compared to art, your biases are showing.
Its not the netcode, its the lack of settings for it in Legions...
No. The real world is inheritly biased toward lower ping players.
The 'lack of settings' in Legions is something I did completely intentionally. With modern connections and the nature of Legions, it's not unreasonable for it to use a high update rate. I couldn't introduce variable network settings without
irritatingly complex and notoriously fiddly measures. Those settings all had a tendency to increase latency well beyond what is necessary. Anybody who actually remembers how Legions played on IA knows that the game plays much better now.
The Legions team needs to give better control for server packet settings to server admins..
If you run a server on tribes2, you can adjust those settings lower witch evens out the playing field.
limiting the packet size and rate, evens it out between low ping players and high ping players..
You're essentially saying you can increase the latency for low ping players so that the high ping players are at less of a disadvantage. This isn't actually good networking, this is just making the game worse for the majority of the users. If you want to have a good experience,
don't play on a high ping server.
Also with lower packet size and rate you can host more players on your server, witch is always nice..
right now low ping players suck up way to much bandwidth..
Latency is completely unrelated to bandwidth. The only reason a high ping player would use less bandwidth would be because of packet loss of them sending their
movement update packets, which are, unsurprisingly, minuscule.
I hate to be a know it all
It would help if you got your facts straight before you tried.
but I ran a server back in 2001, and had 30 players on many a night...
Legions can easily handle that many players.
It makes you wonder, who at GarageGames.com removed this feature from the later touque engine versions that where built off the tribes2 engines if it worked so well.
It wasn't anyone at GG, it was me. And it was after I measured and tested and found that the game behaved far better without them. The old settings were made and optimized for 56k, quite a different world from one where you can buy a 1gigabit symmetrical connection for 70usd a month.
adding vehicle combat on a massive scale.
Not a snowball's chance in hell.
If the next Legions is going to be opensource
Absolutely not.