I for one can say I'm 1000% confused as to WTF is going on here. So, sorry for my previous random comment, I try to be welcoming to new people with a bit of humor.
If you want to see how a developer can come to this forum and build a following, check out the Admiral's developer thread on Task Force Admiral. He came on, was open, friendly, and directly discussed what he wanted to do.
He got volunteers, financial offers, and a lot of support and advice. We keep on giving it too.
Being a Grog absolutely means there's some grumbles. But, we're still a community that goes back to the old Wargamer days. We have a sense of humor to which we are not apologetic. And we also deeply support people that want to build and develop. We just kind of like to know WTF is going on first.
Forgive us for being a bit contrary and confused for a lot of people with less than 10 posts appearing and not telling us who and what they are. We get a TON of bots here and sometimes we expect the worst.
Anyway, accept my apology for a random funny comment, or don't. I can grumble with the rest of them, but I prefer not to if possible.
No worries. I completely understand. What we'd like to do is write a wargame to replace TOAW. We're sick of the vaporware shuffle and we're trying to take matters into our own hands. So far there's only 5 of us but it's only just now gotten off the ground. We're moving over here from the Matrix site to avoid any unpleasantness or lawsuits, etc. I'm one of the TOAW playtesters and I detected my boss peaking in yesterday so he probably knows what we're up to. Oh well. Can't keep it a secret for long anyway.
I'm wondering if we should write it from fresh scratch in C# or if we should use one of those game-building software packages. Anybody have any experience with those? I'll have to look into it. Google "free game building software" or something. I've already downloaded the 2017 version of MS Visual Studio (Enterprise Edition) for free and installed it. Now I need to teach myself C# I suppose.
I have no idea what we're getting into but who knows it might be fun.
If you want some honest advice and thoughts based on the comments I have seen here and read over at the Matrix forum? Team is well underestimating the effort to pull this off. Creating a modern cross-platform strategy wargame would take considerable effort and skill to pull off. Most of the discussion so far was about what development language or what file format the editor files should be in.....those things should be the furthest thing from your mind at this point. How are you going to come up with the actual game design? How are you going to figure out the AI? How will this be different from TOAW? TOAW was built over the last decade or more, how are you going to replicate that kind of knowledge? Where is everyone going to find the time to devote thousands and thousands of hours to complete this work?
After you figure that out, you will eventually need to figure out how to physically develop it. The tools mentioned so far are not going to cut it (i.e. Python, software game builders, COBOL, etc.). Do you have people well versed and available to create code in modern tools? And then when your complete, your going to give away in free open source?
Certainly applaud you for your goals and desire, but think your in for some surprises and a long road ahead of you.....