Wow, this thread seems eerily
familiar!!
I've been involved with Legends since the beginning. It was pretty much my idea. That said, I've had 4 and half years of under my belt trying to recreate the Tribes 1 experience on the Torque engine.
Here's the lowdown: We've talked extensively with Jeff Tunnel, Rick Overman, and most importantly Mark Frohenmayer about our work. We also worked extensively with Sierra via Alex Rodberg (when he was managing the brand) about all the legal ramifications.
Here's the bottom line:
1) Sierra will not allow a T1 remake, commercial or not, and will treat any such product as copyright infringement.
2) The Torque Engine is NOT the T1 engine. We actually _HAD_ T1 physics at one point, I'm talking the actual same algorithm used in T1. The problem is that there's so much of the Torque Engine that has changed. The entire world rendering portion of the engine is based off of different numbers. So the code that worked magically in Tribes 1 was completely incompatible with the Torque engine.
3) The biggest problem with Legends has always been modelling, textures, and sound, and to a lesser degree project management. It's a group composed of people from Tribalwar, which is needless to say less than professional. Organizing a project of this magnitude where people are spending their free time on it, for ZERO payment, is a phenomenal task.
Sure, you can start over again. Hell, there's been times I really, really wanted to. And a part of me feels that Legends _SHOULD_ be scrapped and redone from the ground up with a fresh version of Torque (or even the Torque Shader Engine).
This is a huge task. If you want to go ahead and tackle it, go for it. Legends is pretty much, for all intents and purposes, dead. I have my band to deal with, the two most active developers (justin and xgalaxy) are now full time employees of GarageGames. The other mappers/artists/modellers/scripters have moved on to other projects. And that just means that loop doesn't have a team to run.
So yeah, you could try this. Just do it better than we did

If you have any questions about it, shoot me an email (
[email protected]) and I'll try to help out as best I can, time permitting.