Blood and Steel 2.0 is going to be a thing.
For those of you who've forgotten or just never played it, Blood and Steel was one of the first released Warband mods, years ago. It's been downloaded a lot over the ages and I still break it out to screw around with once in a while, because it's still Fun.
Why, after all this time?
Because I wanted something easy to mess with while I was really busy messing with other things that aren't game-related
Features, thus far:
1. I have reduced Mount and Blade: Warband's memory footprint by about 3/4. Like, wow, the mod is running in 500MB or less now, with the giant amount of content the mod added... still intact (bigger, actually).
2. I have successfully gutted just about everything, code-wise, that didn't get gutted the first time I wrote Blood and Steel. This means that writing the features I wanted at the time is now less like Coder Whack-A-Mole.
3. The mod's going DirectX 9, officially (since that's now a switch we can throw when the engine starts), with a much cleaner shader system (and hopefully not buggy on initial release; testing on ATi).
4. I've been cleaning up a lot of dodgy code (well, other than the giant swathes that have just been cut out with a giant scythe of Efficiency).
5. Giant battles are running smoothly on a single core; the giant battles Blood and Steel was really known for running (well, not lag-fests) are bigger and better than ever on a decent machine. We're talking something around 600-800 Agents running around 40 FPS. Oh, yes, the spawning system is back in action; you can really fight 10K guys in a sitting without your game crashing, now.
Plan:
1. Flesh out the strategic side of Warband and fix all of the major suck. I.E., no more mess of menus, dialogues, etc., to manage your empires; play the game at the strategic level nice and fast and tight, the same as the tactical level.
2. Finalize the storyline elements that were gradually becoming present in the last builds.
3. Make battles fundamentally more interesting (again); introduce new ways to achieve objectives and variety of fights.
4. S'more content, yup yup. More troops to bash with, weapons and armor to drool over, etc., etc.
5. Steam support and release.
If, by chance, anybody's out there that remembers the mod still and is interested in alpha-testing it, I'll probably have early builds up in a month; a lot of the really major stuff is done, now I'm fleshing out features.