Hi there,
I read a couple of the first pages of this thread only, so I may say something stupid / repeat what others have said.
I don't want to burst your little bubble here, but RA2 is a VERY old game, especially in terms of libraries it uses. Let's take the Havok engine. It's based on a build made for 3ds mx VERSION 4.2. Right now we're at version 12.0. The game is programmed in Visual C++ 6.0, which is an old compiler, and porting it to any modern Microsoft C++ compiler / g++ would require loads of work. RA2 uses DirectX, which also is a waste, since it makes it very unportable (in practice only to the xbox).
Our best bet is to write our own game. I think it should mainly be programmed in Python, with the CPU intensive parts in C++. If we want it to be truly portable and open-source, we should also use ODE, the Open Dynamics Engine. It may not give +10 leet points in terms of cloth physics, etc, but it's enough for us. And if we don't like it, we can always fix it :3. Oh, and World of Goo uses ODE.
Yes, it will take a sh**load of time and work, but if we get a big enough team (mainly programmers and 3d/2d graphics artists) it's something we can achieve. Yes, there was some sort of effort to create such a game, led by eFFe and me, but it failed miserably because of our n00bness and wrong choice of programming language (strict C++ with some scripts in python). I'll try to get in touch with effe and talk about starting the project again.
Time will show what these efforts will lead to.
