Engine migration

[melk]

So, what is the proper channel to nag Apple about fixing their OpenGL drivers?

[DeVsh]

im really not?! sure! I think it was for redendring but now i got info that it is responsible for why there are no turrets and vehicles in Nex and why there are no facial expressions (ofcourse its kin of models fault they would have to be modified as well). Can someone explain to me like to a dump ass what is an engine!

[ai]

im really not?! sure! I think it was for redendring but now i got info that it is responsible for why there are no turrets and vehicles in Nex and why there are no facial expressions (ofcourse its kin of models fault they would have to be modified as well). Can someone explain to me like to a dump ass what is an engine!

I understood approximately 5% of that. Something about what an engine is? Well, in simples terms, it's the thing that cars, boats, planes have. You know, the thing that makes a lot of noise. Land rovers has them too, hate those things. It's basically what makes those things go, tick, breath, and live.

[DeVsh]

the game (graphic) engine if you would like to explain!

[ai]

Well, how can one explain something like that that's easily understood. In it's most basic terms, it is the "world". You have all the rules there, physics and how things mix with each other. It's very complicated making an engine if you don't know programming and the like. I think wiki knows more than me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine

[DeVsh]

in thought it was only for redendering. well why do we wanna change the engine we could stick to this one and modify it so some things are possible. And for more demanding heave modifications (turrets etc.)

[Irritant]

I vote stick with darkplaces, focusing on improving it.

Darkplaces is a very well written, very advanced engine in it's current state. You're not going to find many feasible replacements out there. It's very good at doing alot of things. Is it perfect? Not quite, but it's still one of the best opensourced engines out there.

A couple of areas that could use attention -

Better scripted shader support(I think currently it's limited to 1 stage, which really limits what you can do).

Better particle system(realtime scaling needs to be implemented here, or if it's there, Nex needs to use it).

Keep working on the netcode. It's much better than it was, but still doesn't feel quite right.

Reflective water If not, at least UT2k4 style faked reflective water(easily done with an envmap shader).

[divVerent]

Turrets do not need special engine support

[iSuck]

Well, I played the Bioshock demo, Gears of War, and a few other Unreal engine demos on my friends 360. I was really impressed at the quality, I thought it was a funny thing that video games, even in interactive and open-ended possibility, surpass the graphical ability of most animation studios non-realtime animation.

Unfortunately, no matter how hard anyone works on the Darkplaces engine, it would only support that kind of quality on a serious gaming rig. The normal maps on the players are incredible, I hope Nex will support normal-mapped player models in the future, and that mappers use more spec-mapping in their textures.

I was also wondering about the status of the "making that lazy second core do something" project. The PS3 has EIGHT, 3ghz processors, all doing a different peice of the render. If we got just two cores working to render together, instead of stranding that one half of the dual-core alone, we might make a dent in the completion of realism in Nexuiz.

[KadaverJack]

I was also wondering about the status of the "making that lazy second core do something" project. The PS3 has EIGHT, 3ghz processors, all doing a different peice of the render.

It's acutally only one full blown cpu with eight co-processors (of which two are disabled in the ps3 afaik)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_%28microprocessor%29

If we got just two cores working to render together, instead of stranding that one half of the dual-core alone, we might make a dent in the completion of realism in Nexuiz.

The cpu doesn't render, that's done entirely by the graphics card. So multi-core support wouldn't help directly with rendering speed, because on any modern multi-core cpu, Nexuiz doesn't even use 100% of one core. The bottle-neck is usally the gpu.