FPSC EA was less complex than it is now but had some basic features which are now missing dropped from later versions for various reasons.
Less complex means a rather more basic game making product and though more complexity often means more issues as is now, EU and early V1 had a few serious issues.
Of course it was well capable of making a game albeit slow and with some serious lagg in certain circumstances.
You can have ladders in current FPSC albeit not by default and perhaps not perfect for the need.
The Characters had some different Animation sets than current ones and for many purposes current ones have far to many animations attached to them for the end games own good - Not much point in having say 20 Animation sets attached to all characters when they may never use half of them - thats just a complete waste of memory usage and could b a big drain if you have many characters in a game especially all at once.
The Characters obviously had a Lay down on floor and shoot Animation that used by default the "Snipe" script which now of course does not call that Animation which no longer exists as far as I am aware?
Not sure anyone would want to go back to EA though some worthy things are missing contained in it.
There was nothing wrong with EA other than it needed some improvements and the fact that indeed it was superceded by newer technologies which made it obsolete as far as the base core was outdated by time and other softwares on which it relies to function. Much like if you like X10 was no longer viable but for other reasons - these are documented.
I still have a copy of the EA version on disk here though not sure how it would behave now if installed on a more modern computer. Either it would zip along at speed or not work at all and crash I guess or have issues much like all other later FPSC versions have had for me anyway. Dont think I am going to try and find out myself.
Ah for simplicity - those days are gone me thinks.
Hopefully FPSCR may offer a return to some of the basic features missing in FPSC, such as you may even get ladders back one would think. The new Physics system may offer the opportunity of missing or non existent additional Physics features scenarios for gameplay and so on.
I dont think any one would suggest a return to EA's basic core product simplicity but basic and simplicity are still well valued system criteria which any underlying core should have as being stable before being built carefully upon so as to retain that stability when developing forward into a more sophisticated product. Throwing stuff into an engine endlessly without retaining absolute stability at any point is no solution for game developers at all. You will lose track of and control of it.
Hopefully users and developers will know from past experience what is good and what is bad from that past experience and avoid the same in future. Repeating the same mistakes endlessly in the hope of a different outcome I am often told is madness. Must be why I am writing this.
