RoboVasion is a Real Time Strategy game in the classical sense, no special extras like RPG elements are planed at this point. It should consist of quick&clean one army against another fights.

RoboVasion tries to use the Freecraft Engine (now named Stratagus) to produce a complete but small game, completly unreleated to Warcraft2. RoboVasion already existed before Freecraft got shutdown, so its not directly born out of the Freecraft shutdown, even so that gave it a small boost. Robovasion is not a fork of the engine, it only uses it. The engine is developed in the Stratagus project.

ProjectInferno is beside Stratagus the second fork of the Freecraft engine, since RoboVasion uses Stragaus. ProjectInferno and RoboVasion are not directly releated, compatible or anything, they only share the same roots in the Freecraft engine.

Stratagus is the new name for the Freecraft engine, it is basically the same as before, just with any Trademark problems removed. RoboVasion will only provide game content, while Stratagus will be the engine that is used.

After all I have read, Blizzard doesn't seem to be guilty for Freecrafts shutdown, it seems to have been no more than the trigger which caused the already demotivated developers to shutdown the project, nothing more. No negotiations between the Freecraft developers and Blizzard ever took place and a name change might have actually been enough to make Blizzard happy. See for example:

• http://www.battle.net/forums/thread.aspx?FN=warroom&T=17874&P=1

or visit:

• http://transitexec.sourceforge.net/

which seems to be the new game of the remaining developers.

To thus that hope that ProjectInferno will rescue Freecraft I can say that Diablo-D3 is basically planing to rewrite huge parts of Freecraft and doesn't have any plans to keep it as it is. So even if he gets something done, it might take month or years before anything playable is available, which after all means that Freecraft in its current form will not be continued by ProjectInferno, it will really just recycle some parts, while throwing away others.

It continues under the name Aleona's Tales.

Short answer, no. RoboVasion will not use a 3d engine and will not use anti-aliasing or alpha-blending, so the final game graphics will be quite a bit more rough.

Because I like that and don't play all that much with colors, the final game will have a few more colors, but in general it should keep at least a bit of the sterile look&feel of the current stuff.

Nope, it will use a normal tilemap, which just happens to look like a isometric hexgrid, even different heights of the map should be possible without actually changing anything of Stratagus core, see this picture for a demonstration.

This is a good question and after all an important one. Freecraft basically got shutdown due to the lack of contributions and the same might or might not happen to RoboVasion, depending on how much you contribute.

So what skills are needed to contribute to RoboVasion? Well, first of all motivation is the most important thing, if you can't code, but have enough motivation, you simply learn to code, same with graphics and stuff, it might take you a while, but RoboVasion doesn't require any master degree in arts. Beside motivation, the following skills would be good to have:

• knowledge of Freecrafts CCLs, there working and there limitations, especially when it comes to the graphics and animations
• Blender modeling and scripting knowledge, after all RoboVasion should in the end provide a set of scripts to easily manipulate and create new sprites for the game buy providing a simple 3d model
• C coding skills and some knowledge of graphic programming, we will need a few fixes/changes to Freecraft and some graphic conversion/merge tools
• any kind of music skills, after all a game needs good music to be interesting
• sound effect creation skills, games need good sound too