Engine migration

[Ares]

The biggest problem is the player models, the weapons look fine.

Other than that the r_shadow_bumpscale_bumpmap should be higher (~15-20 IMO) by default, 32 is a little high, but 4 is way low.

[Blµb]

about values like 16 or 32 being unrealistic....

there's always this question... what do you want?
should it be realistic? or should it LOOK nice?

I'm for the latter, and 32 definitely looks better, i'd go with 24 as default too...
If you think it's unrealistic, then go activate newtonian physics before making things LOOK bad hrhr

[melk]

Speaking as someone who does not have the skills to contribute to the Nexuiz project, let me just say this:

Why are people worried about the engine when we can't even get someone to redo the player models (I don't care what they look like really, I'm talking about polycount and it's affect on overall performance.) Or even a menu system that doesn't suck for that matter...

I'm not saying this is a fault of any of the current developers who contribute - kudos on all the great work to make such an awesome game. It seems just to be a lack of time and physical number of people actively working on it. Hopefully the number of active devs will grow and things will improve.

I'm not even pushing the game very hard right now due to GPU limitation so I have a lot of room to grow into with the existing engine.

[superppl]

The Darkplaces engine is not the quake 1 engine, and is not limited by quake 1 engine limits.
The Doom 3 was ultimately based off of the quake 1 engine, even though it doesn't share any similar code. The quake 3 engine is based off of the quake 2 engine, which is based off of the quake 1 engine.

The problem is not so much the engine as it is the content. The textures could use some work and models do need some work. Take a look at Call of Duty 2, that game is using the quake 3 engine.

What I'm trying to say is: Darkplaces is an awesome engine that can compete with many commercial engines.

[iSuck]

Ok.

I think there are two things that I would really like to see:

Primarily new player models.
I mean no offense to the original developers, but the models are really last generation. There have been myriad threads asking about player models. I would happily contribute, but I still have conversion problems from .blend to .zym. Could someone help me with that? maybe a link? I learned about normal mapping (without actually adding a separate normal image) in blender, so I really want to help with this. I also think that different races need different gibs, my robot should leak oil, not bleed. And I'm pretty sure the Quark doesn't have a stomach.-agian, I'm willing to make the models for this too.

The other thing is equality between Operating Systems.
I said in my earlier post that I played on a windows computer, and it pwnt. On the same settings on my mac, I played it, it lagged a lot, and it didn't look nearly as good with bloom, HDR, antiostroic filter, etc. In fact, on a mac, HDR and Antiostropic filters actually decreasd the quality, and make a grid of translucent spots all over the screen. I think I should just get a second computer.

[KadaverJack]

The other thing is equality between Operating Systems.
I said in my earlier post that I played on a windows computer, and it pwnt. On the same settings on my mac, I played it, it lagged a lot, and it didn't look nearly as good with bloom, HDR, antiostroic filter, etc. In fact, on a mac, HDR and Antiostropic filters actually decreasd the quality, and make a grid of translucent spots all over the screen. I think I should just get a second computer.

There's nothing we can do about that, the OpenGL drivers on osx are horrible... They advertise features that don't work and GLSL seems to be broken beyond usability, so most of the fancy effects will either not work at all (like deluxe mapping) or are slower because they have to be done in software (like bloom or hdr).

[divVerent]

MAYBE Apple will fix their drivers in the next release if just enough people complain. I see no other way to get somehow working GL drivers.

Of course, it may be possible to work around Apple's bugs by doing some things differently - but no single Nexuiz/DarkPlaces developer has a Mac that can do GLSL (I am the only one who has a Mac at all, and it can't do GLSL because it's just a Radeon 9200). Currently there are no single OS X specific parts of the OpenGL code, it's using the very same OpenGL routines on all operating systems, which is fine on Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD, but fails on OS X.

We really need a developer that knows much about OpenGL and GLSL on OS X. If there is anyone here, try looking at the source (I especially wonder why Bloom/HDR are so broken, as they do not even USE GLSL) and finding the problems. If you find any, or if you have questions, or if you just want to talk to the engine developers, join #darkplaces on irc.anynet.org and talk to LordHavoc or the others, but don't expect too much of them - LordHavoc is the one who knows the engine best, but it may still be worth asking in the channel if he is not around. If you have a patch that fixes some or all of these issues, just upload it somewhere and post its URL in #darkplaces, and someone with commit rights will find it and have a look at it (but I think I'll then make a Nexuiz build with this patch and post it on this forum first).

Thanks in advance, if any Mac/OpenGL developer reads this.

[melk]

[url=http://www.realtech-vr.com/glview/]OpenGL Extensions Viewer[\url]

I just found this tool for Windows and OSX.

What I find interesting is that under OSX I have two options available for the renderer, the Intel GMA 950 OpenGL Engine - which the utility reports as supporting only a fraction of the OGL Extensions, 48/55 total.

But using the Apple Software Renderer 100% of the extensions are supported, with the exception of the 2.1 extensions.



Also, I understand the desire and simplicity to keep the same (standard) OpenGL codebase across 3 OS's but Apple does have their own specific extensions (13 in all) that are available to use. Here is Apple's Developer page for OpenGL http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/

I understand you are the only Mac dev for Nexuiz, and don't even have a Intel Mac / GLSL capable machine to work with which means there is practically nothing happening for the Mac side right now.

Oh well. I still have a lot of fun playing Nexuiz and know that there is a lot of optimization that can happen for the Mac in the future.

[/url]

[KadaverJack]

What I find interesting is that under OSX I have two options available for the renderer, the Intel GMA 950 OpenGL Engine - which the utility reports as supporting only a fraction of the OGL Extensions, 48/55 total.

The GMA950 is a very low end GPU, it's designed to be cheap and energy efficient, not to support as many OpenGL extensions as possible.

But using the Apple Software Renderer 100% of the extensions are supported, with the exception of the 2.1 extensions.

Well, since it's a software renderer they can implement any extension they want to...

[divVerent]

I don't think these Apple specific extensions will help us much. Also, the main problem is not that OS X doesn't support some extensions - the main problem is that it claims to support them, but Nexuiz then tries to use them and it ends up in some broken way (see the all-black menu when we used GL_ARB_texture_non_power_of_two, which the OS X drivers claim to support).

In the future, we may have some use for GL_APPLE_float_pixels to make higher quality bloom/HDR, and GL_ARB_imaging for the same reason. But first, the bugs need to get fixed.