Port Glestimals from GAE

[Pizza90]

Reference thread: https://forum.megaglest.org/index.php?topic=3440.0

GAE is dead and one of the cool feature they never implemented was glestimals. Like in Warcraft glestimals would be wandering animals which if killed could give you gold or food. There were plans to make them either neutral, defensive or aggressive towards the player. I am not able to tell the status of the project but from the photos they seem to be quite done so. They would not add much to the game but they would help (maybe) in the first phases of the game, and some dead code would be revived.

[andy_5995]

Ability to harvest animals would be an excellent feature addition for modders; I don't see how it would work with MegaPack because some factions don't require food.

But this feature would surely give modders a lot more meat to play with.

[Pizza90]

yes that's a good idea for modders! i also like your (unintended?) pun about meat 

[andy_5995]

Intended, and glad you caught it.

[wciow]

Reading thru that old thread brings back some memories 

Working on GAE was great fun. It was never really a unified project, just people (Daniel and Silnarm mostly) hacking in some pet features.
The code ended up kinda messy and buggy with loose ends, but had some really cool features. Such as...

Working water units (surface and underwater) with ports to build from.
Shader support with working normal maps
Unit teleporting and multi-building
A 'spell' ability (kinda more complex attack boosts that could be applied to self or other)
A fully skinnable, moveable, in-game UI with re-sizeable map and tool-tip descriptions.
Sub faction tech-trees
Ability to import and switch music tracks
An earthquke ability which deformed the terrain.
New unit stances like patrol/guard.

Plus some other stuff I've probably forgotten about.

Sadly I no longer have the art files for Glestimals, pretty much all of my historical Glest work got (accidentally) deleted a couple of years back 

[Pizza90]

I just realized the link to download throws a missing file and since your files are lost as well seems there is no hope to reuse such stuff