Engine migration

[iSuck]

I've been following the Unreal 3 developement closely (like a real gamer ) and i thought about the possibilities for Nexuiz.

First I thought: I hope they release Unreal engine 2 in open source, so we can advance Nexuiz into a better weapon system. then I realized we have a strong foundation already, and it would be really hard.

Now I'm thinking: where is nexuiz going? If we remain on the Darkplaces engine, playing the quake 1 engine to its limits, we need a to move in to a new building, we could keep upgrading Nex on the quake 1 format, or we could move on to a more efficient rendering and gaming engine.

What would we have to do to migrate to another engine (commercial OR open source)?

If we really can keep upgrading Nex, is it worth it? What I'm asking is if we could be getting current Nexuiz capability with less work by migrating to another engine.

I don't mean to say Nex isn't a great game, I just think we might improve with the help of a new engine. I do realize that there is probably a lot of work involved in migrating, I'm only asking for more educated opinions.

[tChr]

Now I'm thinking: where is nexuiz going? If we remain on the Darkplaces engine, playing the quake 1 engine to its limits, we need a to move in to a new building, we could keep upgrading Nex on the quake 1 format, or we could move on to a more efficient rendering and gaming engine.

That is kinda like telling your sysadmin at work that he shuld change from windows XP platform, cause its running DOS format.

What would we have to do to migrate to another engine (commercial OR open source)?

wtf? commercial? wont and cant happen. The game and content is allready GPL. I also think noone would bother to put work into it if that happened.

[divVerent]

Well... WHICH engine would you change to?

I can tell you - this was considered about a million times, and we found out every single time that there is just no better engine to change TO.

And why should they open source the unreal engine 2? They haven't open sourced unreal engine 1...

[TVR]

You'll have to remember that Darkplaces isn't just the most advanced open-source engine, but it is constantly evolving, compare stereo screenshots of the original Quake, and Nexuiz if necessary.

It has been said and said before, that Nexuiz blows away even UT2k4 in terms of visuals.

[torus]

In some respects.

[leileilol]

and it doesn't license seperate middleware to do it's hyped stuff either (COUGH*SOURCE*COUGH)

[Blµb]

you wouldn't need open source unreal engine 2 since the modding possibilities of unreal engines are extreme...
Look at deathball for examle, or that tennis mod, or w/e
and I've been modding ut2k3 for some time

But it would be a rewrite, not a migration...
and I'm against it... I like the darkplaces engine
I wouldn't mind if it wouldn't support quake1 anymore though...

[Ed]

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Just for every time this topic comes up again .

The darkplaces engine can do some fantastic stuff and with the right artwork will look as good as any other engine. All we need is features added incrementally, this is why I voted for improvement, the engine isn't standing still as it is anyway.

[divVerent]

you wouldn't need open source unreal engine 2 since the modding possibilities of unreal engines are extreme...
Look at deathball for examle, or that tennis mod, or w/e
and I've been modding ut2k3 for some time

But it would be a rewrite, not a migration...
and I'm against it... I like the darkplaces engine
I wouldn't mind if it wouldn't support quake1 anymore though...

It would also mean redoing all content from scratch, because we do not have a license of it other than the GPL, which certainly does not allow using it in a project using a non-free engine.

It simply won't be Nexuiz any more. It will be something else. Why not make something else... right, why not do it. However, it would never replace Nexuiz. It would just be a new project...

[iSuck]

I completely take back anything I said about darkplaces possibly being too limited. That was just my computer. I played nex on a desktop with a 3.5g processor (compared to my 2.0g laptop) and it was so much better than I thought it really was.

The only thing that was improvable was the quality of the models. We REALLY need to make new ones. That is the next step, looking at the capability of nexuiz in full quality is really inspirational to open source gaming, right up until you use chase_active, or play a close up fight. (I would be willing to help, I just learned normal mapping, and I only need a zym exporter for blender...)

Sorry for bringing this up, my computer is the problem for me, I need to mooch one of those fancy computers from school off of the tech guy. (they have full fledged 4ghz cpus with 1.5gig ram, it's crazy, and that's not even including the pile of shiny new nvidia gpus sitting in the back room, uninstalled)