Advanced Open Source Engine Based On Quake 3 137
An anonymous reader writes
"Phoronix is running a news story about the XreaL project, which its lead developer claims is the most advanced open-source game engine. XreaL is based upon the vintage Quake 3 engine, but it has been rewritten over the course of many months such that it no longer resembles the original id Software engine. The XreaL engine has its renderer written entirely in GLSL with compliance toward the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification in mind, but it supports the new OpenGL 3.0/3.1 specification and is able to take advantage of its new features. XreaL has also added an HDR pipeline to its engine and on modern hardware is actually GPU — not CPU — bottlenecked. XreaL can also load game content from Unreal Tournament 3. This engine, which is described to be as powerful as what can be found in Doom 3 or Call of Duty 4, is written entirely with free software. The XreaL project has created plug-ins for Maya to broaden their game development capabilities."
Awesome! (Score:1)
YAFPS
Humility would be a virtue (Score:4, Insightful)
YAFPS
Not only YAFPS, but also the screenshots are poorer than other FOSS FPSes. For example, they lack basics such as dynamic shadows.
It seems the article authors got excited from the claim that the engine is written in GLSL and is OpenGL 3.0-focused. That, and the engine developer is not exactly humble, with claims like "definitely the most advanced open-source game engine".
Instead of dissing other engines - which offer greatly superior visuals, to boot, just look at screenshots - he should let his achievements speak for themselves. They don't, thus far.
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I have seen impressive screenshots of the XreaL shadow-mapping capabilities. However, other engine projects seem to have more/better artists. It is not easy to show off all the latest tech using modified Q3A maps.
In fact, I am uncertain if using the Q3A code as a base for something like XreaL is wise. It might be better to start the graphics part from scratch, since the Q3A graphics stuff is from another era.
Re:Humility would be a virtue (Score:5, Interesting)
"basics such as dynamic shadows"
That's basics? Wow, times change fast these days, even I can remember the time when "dynamic shadows" weren't basics but rather bleeding edge, something you'd need a killer machine for to pull off at all. Maybe 'cause it ain't been a year ago or so.
You know what "basics" too many games lack these days? An interesting concept, some originality, replay value and generally something that makes me want to play them. If you can put that in a game, you can keep your eye candy. Eye candy is like new car smell. Yeah, it's nice, but it wears off too quickly and after it's gone, you only get to see that you have, essentially, the same crappy game that you didn't want to play a year earlier already.
If this means we have now a good FOSS engine at our hands that allows the development of games without first forking over six digit sums and thus being pressured to deliver something "mainstream digestable" (read: uninspired copy of something that sold well), we might get to see a few daring new ideas.
Re:Humility would be a virtue (Score:5, Informative)
The topic is the XreaL engine. Not games.
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(It isn't released yet, so I can't link you to it, and anyhow I don't want to toot my own horn in a discussion about another project. But, I felt I'd mention this just to show how much I agree with what you wrote.)
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What? Dynamic shadows were bleeding-edge about 5 years ago. Doom 3 has run fine on run-of-the-mill hardware since about 2006.
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You don't really understand what a game engine is... do you? Have you ever used one? Any engine with good scripting capabilities can be used to make good gameplay. It's the developers using the engine's fault, not the engine's fault, if the gameplay sucks.
However, although games are 90% art, you can not claim your engine to be "definitely the most advanced open-source game engine" if it doesn't even have dynamic shadows.
I'm currently using a free, open source 3d engine, that has dynamic lighting/shadows and
Re:Humility would be a virtue (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad art direction makes good engine look unimpressive.
And good art will make feature lacking engines look awesome.
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It's true.
Look at anything Blizzard has done.
Re:Humility would be a virtue (Score:4, Insightful)
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Just wait until you see Duke Nukem Forever.
The graphics are amazing - it's like an entire, real world, with cars, airplanes, and chicks, and ice cream! You can taste, smell, have sex, the whole thing! The resolution is incredible! Game play is s a hard left from the original game, which was mostly about killing people - most of the new game seems to be centered around making money and buying food, impressing chicks, paying bills, stuff like that.
It's the most realistic video game... EVER.
Of course, you can
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Duke3d could also do impossible levels (large insides to sheds for example), which makes it super fun.
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Quake always had horrible art direction, bland palletized textures, etc. Doom 2 had more artistic merit then Quake 1 and 2 ever had in terms of range of art and style.
I love quake 3 in terms of gameplay but even the art in quake 3 feels weird, random, and artificial . IMHO iD software has always had a problem finding good artists for quake. Quake 4 (single player) was a total joke, it was basically doom 3 redux except not anywhere near as good.
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The screenshots on the Phornix page are all of modified Quake 3 levels, which still use static lightmaps. So yeah, of course it still looks like Quake 3 - it's using Quake 3 levels, and full-blown dynamic lighting is mostly incompatible with lightmaps.
Have a look at the screenshots from the Xreal website:
http://xreal.sourceforge.net/xrealwiki/ScreenShots
The top screenshots are from a Quake 4 level. Quake 4 levels don't have lightmaps - all of the lighting in that level is being done in real time. It's using
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Did you read the captions of the screen shots? These aren't shots of their own maps.
Their engine is far more advanced than any of the other Open Source engines. What they don't have yet is a complete game.
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How about the OGRE rendering engine, used by e.g. OpenFrag? OGRE is highly advanced and even used by commercial games. Aside from being written in GLSL and targeting OpenGL 3.0, what does XreaL have that OGRE doesn't? (Note that OGRE has addons for a lot of stuff, like HDR, realistic water, etc. etc. - so take those into account in your comparison).
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I think the point of the article is, it scales well. The GPU code isn't heavily CPU dependant, so with a powerful GPU, you can really ramp up the graphics quality and amount of stuff onscreen.
ES 2.0 support is interesting. It means it might work on devices like the Pandora [openpandora.org] or iPhone [apple.com], with some modifications.
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There's this hotel... well, no. A LAUNDROMAT! And this guy is hired as a caretaker over... uhm... SPRING BREAK! So he and his family move into the apartment upstairs and instead of focusing on finishing his blog, he winds up in wacky adventures with ghosts from a tragic accident on a GGW video, four kids and a dog.
The whole thing ends up with a guy in a coyboy hat fighting off a giant sewer spider while a couple of old insomniacs are making out in a parking lot.
M
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'bout time (Score:2, Insightful)
Do they need non-open-source games? (Score:2)
I don't think so. Projects like Nexuiz and Tremulous exist without non-commercial variants. This may be different for office applications, where managers want a vendor they can hold responsible. For instance Sun which still sells the commercial Star Office that is not much different from Open Office.
This said, a big thanks to Id software for open sourcing their older stuff.
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Projects like Nexuiz and Tremulous exist without non-commercial variants.
And they also require expensive hardware: usually a separate PC and monitor per player, as opposed to four USB gamepads or Bluetooth pointing devices connected to one PC. Nexuiz doesn't support split screen [alientrap.org]. This is because most store-bought PCs are compatible only with high-definition monitors, and most HD monitors are 19" diagonal or smaller, too small for four people to fit around. Moreover, PC owners don't seem to feel like buying the $50 scan converter to turn VGA signals into composite or S-Video sign
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So what?
A lot of gamers have a PC anyway, especially those who are into programming and digital art. The latter are most likely to contribute to an Open Source project anyway. So the lack of a console version may limit the number of consumers who play these games, but it won't threaten the viability of Open Source games.
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A lot of gamers have a PC anyway
Owning one gaming PC != owning four gaming PCs. I'd need four for myself, the two cousins I'm babysitting, and the friend they have over.
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Why on earth would you want split screen in a FPS? Split screen is for Mario Kart and Super Smash Brothers, you know, party games. FPS are for single player, playing online, or LAN parties, in which case everyone typically does bring their own computer.
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Why on earth would you want split screen in a FPS?
Ask the developers of Goldeneye 007.
Split screen is for Mario Kart and Super Smash Brothers, you know, party games.
But for which open source games is split screen? Wii system software 4.0 isn't cracked for use with free software.
FPS are for single player, playing online, or LAN parties, in which case everyone typically does bring their own computer.
The other three people I mentioned use PCs with years-old GPUs, and they are too young to convince their parents to let them remove the PCs from the house.
We'll leave your lawn as soon as... (Score:1)
>gamepads
Stupid console kiddies these days think it is a good idea to play FPSs on a console and with a controller... GET OFF MY LAWN!
Give us an operating system that can reliably address four keyboards and four mice, and we'll get off your lawn.
It's not up to them. (Score:2)
Quake3 was released under the GPL. That means no non-open-source games with it, ever, unless id changes their minds -- and even then, they'd have to get a release from every participant.
Not that it necessarily matters. As Loneowolf666 points out, Nexuiz is very playable (and fun) without needing a commercial game.
On the other hand, not all commercial games would be ruined by an open client -- for example, Second Life already has an open client, and their client arguably sucks performance-wise; something lik
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I stand corrected.
I don't know how effective that would be, as it hasn't been tried beyond old games like Quake 3.
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The pure potential is awesome. If, however they are uptight about letting people develop non-open-source games for this it will fail, hard.
The original owner of this code is id who released it GPL so you can't use it for closed source for free.
You can buy that engine from id software for a nominal fee like everyone else ;)
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The game and the engine are two separate properties. You can have a closed-license game thta runs on an open-licensed engine. You can't close up their GPLed engine as if it was BSD-licensed, but you can certainly release a game with proprietary models, textures, music, maps, and scripting. None of those things are object code linked to the engine. They're all just data as far as the engine is concerned.
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It should also be noted that iD does just that: The Quake 3 engine is free, Quake 3 is not. If you want the data and such you have to buy the game. Only the engine is open source.
great (Score:4, Insightful)
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What's funny is that it's all there. You have a ton of people who love to be creative, draw and model. Various pages dedicated to displaying your art are proof enough. You have equally many people who enjoy coding. Linux alone works as a proof for that, together with the lot of FOSS that's readily available and of high quality.
Yet for some odd reason they don't "find" each other. FOSS games are usually mediocre. And I wonder why. FOSS software does not have to hide behind commercial software. Hell, some is
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Why does the combination not work out?
C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures [wikipedia.org]. Each needs to make overtures to the other.
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The trouble, I suspect, is that most FOSS games don't build up the very large followings from which modders often em
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Actually, I suspect it depends on the modders.
Some modders will release their stuff entirely free, forever, either because they buy the open source (or just free-as-in-beer) philosophy, or because they hope to impress a game company (and get hired).
Other modders will keep their code proprietary, either because they've never heard of FOSS, or in an effort to prevent cheating, or because the SDK forces them to -- but more likely, I think, it's because they hope their mod is eventually successful enough that t
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Maybe we, as a community, should start putting more emphasis on the developers and their names. I mean, everyone knows CS, but how many of those avid CS players know its maker?
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Well, we do, in a few cases -- see Shigeru Myamoto, John Carmack, John Romero, Gabe Newell...
On the other hand, we also emphasize the actual studios responsible -- see Valve, Id, Ubisoft, Bungie, even *hiss* EA...
I can't really say whether either one is a good thing. For instance, Gabe Newell did pay a lot out of pocket to finance Half-Life 2, but to call it "his" game is to trivialize all the hard work put in by pretty much everyone at Valve. There's also a certain amount of accountability when we think of
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This is actually not true. The only thing open source that the standalone "mod" (now a game on its own accord, but heh) must do is keep the engine itself open. The game data, including models, art, even QVM code, is perfectly fine being proprietary. In your own examples, World of Padman is precisely developed like this; the game itself is proprietary while the engine is free. Although there are many, like Tremul
Re:great (Score:5, Interesting)
I know some artists who tried this out, only to find themselves in a failing project.
The way to go is to create some prototype with placeholders as game art. Something that can be demonstrated to artists. This attracts a lot more people than a paper with fancy ideas. However, guess what - most of the time, the paper with fancy ideas is presented. No wonder the experienced artists stay away (unless they get paid).
Also, most projects don't have something resembling a lead designer; instead, one of the programmers is the lead. This is a bad idea, since the designer is the one who cares most about the "big picture", the overall design. The lead designer is the one who takes care of keeping things together and coherent. This is a full-time job, and often underestimated, especially by open-source game projects.
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The simple truth is that trying to build a FoSS game based on a commercial model is stupid, unnecessary, and in any case bound to fail anyway. The great thing about an Open game is that it can be worked on for fucking ages and still come out to be positive. A good game is always good whether it is the latest and greatest or not.
The Duke Nukem State of Mind (Score:2)
The great thing about an Open game is that it can be worked on for fucking ages and still come out to be positive.
You can't sit around for fucking ages waiting for everything to come together.
You have to make it happen now.
Projects need leadership. Projects need discipline. Projects need goals.
The FOSS developer can't expect an unlimited commitment from outside talent that sees significant opportunities opening up elsewhere.
Re:great (Score:5, Informative)
The reason is that doing a complete set of artwork for a game is hard, and extremely time consuming. Most people, if they have the time, skills, and interest, will join a mod project, rather than develop something completely new from the ground up. Most of those mod projects subsequently amount to nothing due to poor interpersonal communications, inability to meet deadlines, real life getting in the way, etc.
So for a FOSS game artist, you're asking that a person be talented, dedicated, able to meet deadlines, not interested in the mod scene, technically adept (probably), good at working with others, and willing to work for free.
Then you have to find the same thing in a half dozen other people, some on sound, some on levels, environment, character models, etc.
Making a video game is a tremendous undertaking these days. Anyone capable of making a good game for free probably shouldn't sell themselves for that little.
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With coding you can come in, submit a patch and leave again. It doesn't really matter who wrote the code, as long as its functional. With art on the other side you can't do that, if you just accept each and every random contribution you will easily end up with an ugly inconsistent mess, no matter how talented the individual artists are. And thats exactly the problem, a commercial game just needs way to much art to be doable by a single person and the chances to find enough people that stay with the project
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You might find greater consistency problems with artwork
The thing is that you have close to zero consistency problems in software on the code side. Look at Inkscape for example, large parts of the code are old Sodipodi pieces written in C, while other stuff is written in C++, its quite a mess. Does it matter much? Nope, because no user will ever sees a piece of any of that. Same with coding standards in general, it just doesn't matter if its SetFoobar or set_foobar or if you indent with tabs instead of spaces, just implementation details no user will ever see.
Ar
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There are assuredly many talented people working on many different OSS projects. Most of the heavy lifting in OSS is done by paid developers, though.
Also, for games, the goalposts move very quickly. To be reasonably current, you need to either do what major studios do, which is to throw lots of money and man-hours at a deadline several years in advance, (that is, build next year's technology yourself) or you need to have a very short development period.
I think a reasonable analogy might be trying to do Inks
...Depends. (Score:1)
The reason is that doing a complete set of artwork for a game is hard, and extremely time consuming. Most people, if they have the time, skills, and interest, will join a mod project, rather than develop something completely new from the ground up. Most of those mod projects subsequently amount to nothing due to poor interpersonal communications, inability to meet deadlines, real life getting in the way, etc.
So for a FOSS game artist, you're asking that a person be talented, dedicated, able to meet deadlines, not interested in the mod scene, technically adept (probably), good at working with others, and willing to work for free.
Then you have to find the same thing in a half dozen other people, some on sound, some on levels, environment, character models, etc.
Making a video game is a tremendous undertaking these days. Anyone capable of making a good game for free probably shouldn't sell themselves for that little.
Well, if it's based on Quake, it might be wotrh playing, if this ancient machine of mine will run it. the biggest game i've run is the online Instantaction.com games.
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Writing a set of code that wraps that artwork into a game is about as hard and time consuming. Your point being?
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Artists I know LOVE to show off their work, but are very possessive.
"giving away the rights to my work scares me" was a quote from someone who looked into selling to a card company.
I get this impression from artists that they feel they own what they create forever, and others best recognize.
Look at CC for example. Almost all CC I come across is with the NC clause. Artists just don't appear ready to truly give to the community, showing off not withstanding.
This may be because it is harder to make a living
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Artists also act like this because of the way so many people shamelessly swipe their images against their wishes - there are a lot of people who ruin everything they post online with huge ugly watermarks because they'd rather that than find it reposted to some kid's Deviantart account as "theirs".
Also, the culture of artists has been handed down through eons of scarcity: we have been trained to see our art as a scarce resource, and to require money for its creation and/or reproduction. The culture of progra
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Hey, my code IS art! Even arcane, according to some people who had to debug and maintain it! :)
Funny comments aside, but I guess the mindset comes from the fact that, as a programmer, you're used to standing on someone else's shoulders. You need an operating system, an API (probably more than one), an SDK, a compiler and various other tidbits before you even start to write a line of code. Aside from brushes and paint, an artist needs nothing (beside experience, if he wants to be good). But these are tools,
Re:great (Score:4, Interesting)
I won't disagree on the code-is-art front; I've done enough programming to know there is a near-infinity of ways to solve a problem, and an art to picking which one to use!
Visual artists stand on the shoulders of other artists too; we constantly steal from each other (or are influenced by each other - same thing, really *grin*). We need each other's critique, we need each others' lessons. We don't rely on each others' work quite as directly as a programmer - I can as easily sit in a cafe and draw in a sketchbook as I can do it here at home with a ton of reference and inspiration in reach. But I wouldn't draw the way I do without having had them in the past.
Young artists also tend to be insanely paranoid about ART THEFT. We tend to see our art as this super-precious excretion of our SOUL and there is no WAY we'd let just ANYONE play with THAT. And again - this is the culture surrounding the core skills. This is what we're taught as we decide to become artists. A scarcity culture.
People will download huge torrents of comics while being worried someone will steal their precious, precious (derivative) creation. One foot in the post-scarcity world where stuff is infinitely duplicatable once it's digital, one foot in the scarcity world where every item is as valuable as the time you spent, because you can only sell it once... but programmers have a culture that came out of the science world, which is all about sharing information, and was shaped by the incredible ease of sharing bits.
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It seems to be the same case with board-style computer wargames. If a community of game designers could get together with programmers who play wargames, a really sophisticated (and fun) platform could be developed to build and play wargames. I am surprised that this has not happened yet.
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Not really.
Yes the engine is FOSS but that doesn't mean that the game data has to be.
I remember that RMS even suggested this as model for game development a few years ago.
It would have to be DRM free but you could make and sell a game based on this. All you would have to do is provide a link to the source to the game engine.
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No, that would be because open-source games tend to have poor artwork, horrible animation, tediously derivative gameplay and level design, and no plot.
For some reason, people with talent in these areas and an interest in giving their work away for free tend to concentrate on making mods for commercial games. Perhaps it's because they want their work to be free-as-in-beer rather tha
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No, that would be because open-source games tend to have poor artwork, horrible animation, tediously derivative gameplay and level design, and no plot.
It worked for Halo.
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A few reasons why you tend to see that:
1) Commercial games have better tools. Many OSS engines seem to have NO tools for people who develop anything but the code. Often commercial games have some really solid ones. Unreal Tournament 3 would be an excellent example. Its tools are top notch. This is of interest to people who are making mods. If you want to do level design, you'd much rather do it with an excellent level editor than in a text file with only some vague descriptions of what does what.
2) It gets
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Most open source games feel like they're build around some code that was produced without any kind of vision, with someone else entirely picking it up and extending it.
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open source gaming will finally conquer the world (Score:1, Funny)
tux racer will never be the same
Not so great (Score:1, Informative)
I've messed around with this thing over the past few years since I have a lot of interest in any new developments in the Q3 engine. My feeling is that it's klunky and not very optimised. Running on the same system that I am able to play such games as Timeshift or Bioshock completely fluidly, XreaL offers pretty poor performance. The last build I tried a few months ago also didn't look all that great, especially for shadows.
XreaL gets a lot of appreciation for what they are trying to do, but it's more of a t
Nice (Score:2)
now if there were games that use it...
Cool but... (Score:2)
... the major cost and time sink in game development is content generation.
The question is, is the engine good enough to be used by commercial industry and would they want to given the fact that companies are a bunch of copyright nazi's?
It's cool to have an open source engine but it's highly unlikely any open source developer will be able to develop a compelling game on it given the enormous time and resources it now takes to create a modern game and live up to today's expectations.
I'd really like to see op
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If Web 2.0 (or the internet gaming community) told us anything, then that people love making content if you give them the tools to do it. Yes, you'll get 99.999% crap and garbage. Which isn't such a problem with thousands of people doing it, one or two of them will generate some worthwhile content.
It's likely that the time is long over when one person could create all the necessary goodies to make a great game. I somehow trust the internet, though, to bring people together to make different modules for a ga
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That's sad and true. But there's actually two kinds of artists, or rather, two different reasons.
First, the "it's MINE and you're not allowed to touch it kind". They basically operate under something like a CSS mindset. Look at it at their page, but don't you dare copying it.
And then there's the "my art is PERFECT, don't you dare to RUIN it" kind. They don't mind if you take their art and spread it, but they view it as a personal insult if you "improve" it. In their mind, it's perfect as it is and you shoul
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Well, considering that art is almost always about sharing an idea in "your own words" so to speak, if someone else improved or modified the art, then the message becomes skewed and the original artist might be misinterpreted as a result.
So yeah, the culture of ownership exists because I as a musician, express myself this way, and if someone like you came around and did a remix, then my ability to communicate becomes skewed, and I can no longer express myself properly.
The other thing you talk about, sharing,
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Under any common FOSS licence, your art, sound, story, etc. aren't any less copyrighted or proprietary (if you want them to be) just because they are distributed with a FOSS game engine. You, the game
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That's what I was thinking. Why not sell your game on disc and include the source on the disk. Maybe even throw in an open source compiler specific to the target platform, with adequate "tech support does not support compiling issues" warnings of course.
You're not selling the engine, you're selling the game data, and giving the engine away, like you should be. Putting the source on the disk itself (as opposed to the required link to source) might even serve to bring a few smart gamers into the programmin
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Under any common FOSS licence, your art, sound, story, etc. aren't any less copyrighted or proprietary (if you want them to be) just because they are distributed with a FOSS game engine.
That depends on how many game rules are part of the game engine and how many are in interpreted scripts.
Re:Cool but... (Score:4, Informative)
The question is, is the engine good enough to be used by commercial industry and would they want to given the fact that companies are a bunch of copyright nazi's?
If you look at the FAQ, you will find that they use the GPL. Not the LGPL. Which means the commercial game companies would have to hand out the source code for the entire game. Not gonna happen.
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If the engine is written so that this is required, then make the necessary changes to the game engine and release those changes for free.
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If you tied, say, the Lua engine into XreaL, and wrote all your game logic in Lua, then you'd be fine keeping that source closed. The artwork would be similarly protected.
Ray Tracing (Score:2)
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I'll take playability over eye-candy any day of the week. Playability is why it's common to turn off many of the graphics features, even with a decent rig.
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Ray-Tracing in Java... sorry, my mind just assploded.
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It shouldn't. The ray tracing will be handled by the hardware/library. And Java's JIT compiler is getting pretty dang good.
Try Eclipse.org sometime. While not a game it will show you just how good a java application can be.
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You must be very short of ram then. I run it all the time and don't have any issues even on older slow machines.
Do not get the version with all the plug ins. Some of those are real pigs.
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Completely unprovoked hostility FTW! USA! USA!
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If they do raytracing in Java, FPS will become the *only* major factor people worry about.
There are already numerous easy-to-use game development environments (such as DarkBASIC), but have these resulted in any games that are great-looking or innovative? Generally, lowering the entry requirements for making games just results in people who lack the required skills, knowledge and experience trying to make games - the results are not usually anything to write home about.
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Raytracing isn't a solution, its just another way to tackle the problem. You still have to fix all the same visual inaccuracies that you get in normal rasterization. Raytracing doesn't give you soft shadows, it doesn't give you dynamic scenes, it doesn't give you ambient occlusion, it doesn't give you global illumination and many many more things. You can write a raytracing in a few dozens lines of code, but that will be one that renders shiny spheres, not something that can keep up with a commercial game e
A proposal for an agreement with game companies (Score:1, Interesting)
The biggest problem in the OSS gaming world is content, that is, graphics and sound; for every programmer we need 5 artists at least.
Game companies usually employ a lot of skilled artists, but their content is closed as hell and is soon forgotten once the game becomes obsolete.
What if we could allow those companies to use this engine without publishing the source and modifications, which normally would be a violation of the GPL license, but arranged in a way they give in return the use of their art only in
Game Modding (Score:5, Informative)
One of the things these people have to do is take a page from Valve and Epic and look closely how the two created modding tools for their engine.
Well, Unreal Editor doesn't really allow you to make an entirely new game out of the Unreal engine, but it's an incredible mapping tool, much better than Hammer for the Source Engine.
But, Valve has other tools as well, such as Faceposer to help in lip syncing your models. As well, the event based choreography of NPCs and physics seems to me to be unparalleled. NPC see's enemy, fire an event, which triggers the NPC to freeze, since the enemy was MEDUSA ALL ALONG! It's very intuitive programming.
So this engine needs to have an infrastructure in place to make modding as intuitive, as well as tools that make use of that infrastructure.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, hello, give a little credit to ID and their modding support. Don't forget Team Fortress and how Robin Walker got hired at Valve.
Sombody wants to show this guy OverDose... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Not trying to start a "who is better than who" war here but OverDose has probably the best tech out there, plus its based on Q2 code, not Q3.
Quake 2 was (IMHO anyway) the weakest product id have released. That's not to say that it was bad necessarily, by any means, but there really wasn't a lot about it that I was able to like, in comparison with id's other games.
I thought XreaL looked good, and the single main reason why, was because of what the blog had about being able to render a scene at 145 FPS, when
Re: (Score:2)
Some thoughts (Score:1, Funny)
1. Not all FOSS games are crap. Certainly, some are, but I just played Urban Terror last night, and I've found it to be a lot of fun. I'm hoping this engine will produce something at lesat as good.
2. Artists and programmers??? In the same room??? Are you crazy??? The universe will explode!!! Seriously, I've found some good artwork in Urban Terror, and I'm sure if the gameplay is good that someone will do the same for this platform/engine/thingy. Great idea to support Unreal Tournament art/mods/what
AI (Score:2)
It is a little of topic. But what I see as lacking on many open source FPSs is nice AI. Besides playing online, it happens that I like to play in single player mode, and some nice SMART Ai would come in handy for that.
Looks Pretty Dated to Me (Score:2)
I'm not seeing anything that looks 21st century here. This is circa 1999 all the way...
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone have any idea of when they fully broke with the old codebase? I thought the new voip stuff was pretty nice, mumble.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, sometimes the game engine tech people are not the right people to create impressive artwork and levels to show off the capabilities. By 'hyping' what they've done, mmaybe they'll attract the interest of artists and level designers who will create something more impressive with it, so that they can *further* hype it. At some point, you just put it out there and see what other people do with it. It sounds like they are at that point.