What is Project Vaulderie?
Project Vaulderie is a non-commercial project that aims to recreate the Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines game to Unity. The goals we try to achieve with this tremendous effort are many. First and foremost is fixing a lot of bugs and glitches which can’t be fixed by normal fan made patches simply because they are caused by the protected executables and the Alpha state of Source Engine used by the game. Secondly, taking advantage of new features available in Unity engine as well of the new SDK tools planned along with it that allows anyone to mod it. Third, updating the game to up to date graphics and technology.
What is Bloodlines Resurgence then?
Bloodlines Resurgence was originally the project that aimed to recreate the game in Source engine. It has always suffered from progressive development, mainly because of the nature on how Source engine works. Source was built based on Half-Life and Quake code, also sharing their similarities on their pipeline. As for modding, the Source SDK always suffered enormous issues, not being updated for years, outdated engine branches and so on. Comparing Source with other modern engines, it’s rather limited in design and pipeline. Support is dropped in favor of the Unity port.
Why Unity?
The reason why we decided to go with Unity is because it’s the closest to get to Source. While there are already tools in development that make porting from Source transparent, minimizing the time for development and pipeline. The key is to develop a game that can take advantage of today’s technology in not only rendering but also in development tools. Unity is well known for its extensive scripting, plugin support and a high vast of tutorials praised by its consumers. Why Unity stands solid grounds Last year we had a small prototype test whether UDK would be more suitable or not. From the time we’ve experimented on it, their pipeline was drastically better than Source’s but it was rather limited when it came to their scripting and art pipeline. Scripting was done only via UnrealScript which is more or less based on C++ and you have little control over replacing parts of the engine since UDK doesn’t provide access to the engine code. That has to be done via licensing the engine itself. Importing the art assets was pretty straightforward, because it is similar to Unity’s, being able to import raw textures and models. But all of them had to be packaged in separate package files which also had its own limitations. On the other hand, in Unity everything is done loosely on the development part. As mentioned earlier, Unity is very expandable and flexible, can support editor extensions and plugins, Importing maps is almost effortless, with an few amount of reconstruction, faster prototyping, in-game preview of the whole scene without leaving the editor and more.
