What ever happened to Meantime (Wasteland II)?

Ashmo

Ashmo

Half-way Through My Half-life
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I know Meantime reached beta before it was canned and then shelved because it was not deemed economical to continue working on it.

I also know that while EA has the rights to Wasteland, it doesn't have the rights to Meantime and its source should be lying around somewhere at Interplay HQ as they tried to port it to MSDOS before it was shot down.

Considering Interplay is practically dead, where's the Meantime beta source?

Has it been lost like the original 3D models of Fallout?

I doubt there's any way to get Herve to release it if the source still exists, but maybe someone has some insider knowledge on this issue?

Considering how much of VB leaked after its death, I'm surprised nobody seems to know anything about Meantime.

OT: Talking of VB leakage: Where is the bloody master document? I'm talking of FO3_Style.doc or what it was called in the leaked design documents -- that file would help putting the pieces together.
 
As I've heard it, there is no source. One of the programmers took it home with them to work on it and it got lost or destroyed somehow, and since the entire thing was written in assembly that was the end of it - no one knew enough about it to rewrite it from scratch and there were no other copies. Or something to that effect. Search around for the programmers and devs for Wasteland, one of them mentions it on their site.
 
So no backups? No design documents? Not even coffee stained print-outs?

I am sadness.
 
Ashmo said:
So no backups? No design documents? Not even coffee stained print-outs?

I am sadness.
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I don't remember Ranger HQ being where I read originally read about it, but they seem to have the same information (scroll down to "The Final Scoop!" if you get bored):

http://wasteland.rockdud.net/meantime.html

The lesson here? Don't give a "contract programmer" your only copy of a game in progress. Kind of disappointing to find out that it wasn't a sequel to Wasteland at all, but then again it's a bit of a relief to know that this great game we were all hoping for isn't sealed up in a vault where we'll never see it.
 
Lazarus Plus said:
But was it in the same universe, if not a "sequel"?
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No, its only connection with Wasteland was that it used the same engine and had a few designers in common.
 
So what happened to Wasteland's source code then?

Or any of the design docs?
 
Ashmo said:
So what happened to Wasteland's source code then?

Or any of the design docs?
Click to expand...

I have no idea, if they still exist at all they're probably in someone's basement. I'd assume that Interplay got rid of them pretty early on since no one has managed to dig anything up at all.

Ashmo (or anyone else who could answer), here's a somewhat related question: Considering that the Apple II is pretty much completely documented in every way, from hardware to OS, and had such a small amount of memory, registers, etc. - how hard would it be for someone to reverse-engineer Wasteland just using the Apple game files?
 
Well, as Wasteland was written in ASM and there already is a MSDOS port, one could just disassemble that one instead.

The problem is that reverse engineering needs someone who's REALLY desperate.

It's easier to rewrite Wasteland from scratch in a higher language than to attempt to make sense of the uncommented assembly code you'd end up with if you disassembled the EXE.

Disassembling the Apple II binary wouldn't make much sense -- you'd still need to port the code to the x86 architecture in order to make any use of that.

But really now, nobody is desperate enough to work with a game written in assembly. That's just insane.

I think there were a couple of Wasteland emulators in the works. Maybe one of them didn't get cancelled?
 
Ashmo said:
Disassembling the Apple II binary wouldn't make much sense -- you'd still need to port the code to the x86 architecture in order to make any use of that.
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Not really, there are a few Apple II emulators around that emulate it perfectly so you could just use it within them. The main reason I asked about Apple II is because I used to mess around with assembly with it when I was a kid and was fairly familar with how the insides of the II worked - not anywhere near a professional or even amateur level, but enough so that every once in awhile I get the idea that if I worked at it I might be able to figure out enough about Wasteland to at least modify the content. I've never actually attempted it though because I know it's more or less a pipe dream and not worth the effort even if it was possible.
 
Uhm, dudes, Wasteland had a sequel...But we prefer not to speak of Fountains of Shit.

Or am I confused?
 
FoD wasn't a sequel.

AFAIK it was a spin-off at best.

It also wasn't produced by the same dev team. IIRC it wasn't even the same company.
 
Montez said:
Not really, there are a few Apple II emulators around that emulate it perfectly so you could just use it within them. The main reason I asked about Apple II is because I used to mess around with assembly with it when I was a kid and was fairly familar with how the insides of the II worked - not anywhere near a professional or even amateur level, but enough so that every once in awhile I get the idea that if I worked at it I might be able to figure out enough about Wasteland to at least modify the content. I've never actually attempted it though because I know it's more or less a pipe dream and not worth the effort even if it was possible.
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That's really undoable. Assembly is neat and all, but trying to figure out what the code actually does there would require an insane amount of work and a really, really structured and extremely exact approach to it.
 
Kharn said:
Uhm, dudes, Wasteland had a sequel...But we prefer not to speak of Fountains of Shit.

Or am I confused?
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You are confused, there was no such game. Nope. Never existed. Let us speak no more of it.
 
Surely it must have taken many people to make the game and certainly they cared enough to not let it dissappear. I'm sure that at this very moment a copy is hidden somewhere either at Interplay HQ or in some developer's basement.

Finding could be the thing of film noir and nerds gone wild though...who would be up to the challenge?

Sincerely,
The Vault Dweller
 
Ashmo said:
But really now, nobody is desperate enough to work with a game written in assembly. That's just insane.

I think there were a couple of Wasteland emulators in the works. Maybe one of them didn't get cancelled?
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None survived; in fact I think none ever really lived (same syndrome as with Fallout mods - people start off planning big, making graphics and interfaces, then realize they have to do actual coding and disappear from the face of the planet). However, right now someone's working pretty successfully with figuring out the PC version, and the best bet for Wasteland modding seems to be to simply create new data and run through the existing engine.
 
There's a Yahoo group that deals in everything Wasteland where Brian Fargo used to participate sometimes, that's where we found out he got the rights for the name from the Yo-gi-Ho company (i'm not kidding, that's how he got the license back).

The Yu Gi Ho guys had the rights for the Wasteland name, they released an expansion for the card game with that name, EA had lost it already by then, so Fargo struck a deal with them.


I joined the group and had a .txt file with a lot of stuff about the old game and thoughts for a new one, but lost it in the December 2003 HD devastation i suffered, Per is still in the group, i think.
 
Meantime would have been a RPG unrelated to Wasteland. The game would have the same engine as Wasteland but it was not about a post-nuclear future.

Meantime was going to be a time-travel RPG of collecting various historical figures like in the movie Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

The Wasteland HQ-Grid has a short discussion on Meantime.

Wasteland HQ-Grid
http://wasteland.rockdud.net
 
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