Question on Darkplaces vs. ioquake3

[Mizu Kitsune]

The engine has not much to do with that.

In fact, vehicle physics are in Nexuiz svn, but at the moment only one vehicle.

The question remains however if vehicles would even be of any use in a fast paced game like Nexuiz.

And what about tris limits? How many tris can I "fill" in a map to avoid slow motions on , let's say, a dual core modern pc?Another question: I saw on http://svn.icculus.org/twilight/trunk/phystest/ a piece of code about ragdoll, I compiled it and.. it's amazing!Is it just a test or one day we could see players swept away from a shotgun blast?

that's old code that was a test for the original dpmod and alien infestation mod. lordhavoc just stoped working on it but now is working on twig.

[toneddu2000]

that's old code that was a test for the original dpmod and alien infestation mod. lordhavoc just stoped working on it but now is working on twig.

Thanks Mizu Kitsune!! I hope coders can embed something similar in the future . I took a look at http://urre.quakedev.com/ and my jaw felt on table!! This would be great in conjuction to vehicles and ragdoll!

[Mizu Kitsune]

np. cant wait to see the finished twig or even what is current, integrated into nexuiz/zymotic.

[SeanHeron]

Sorry for the late reply - but many thanks to the plenty insightful answers!

I'd not thought about id Tech 4 being release - and I guess you're right, it's probably just a matter of time.
Interesting as well to here you think Darkplaces (and ioquake3 to a lesser extent) are pretty much on par with the commercial engines!

Two things were mentioned I didn't quite get though - one regarding the ioquake advantages for Trem: dedicated server and Bots I don't see as very relevant (there are no Bots I know of, and dedicated server load, well...). Player prediction though - does that have to do with showing players to one another, and therefore aiming ? (I read a discussion on the Trem forum about people leading their shots, but it perhaps no longer being necessary with a certain mode enabled).

The other thing is on porting - I had assumed that the greatest amount of effort in Nexuiz was the models/ animations and levels (what I would have regarded as content). I had kindof assumed they would still be usable. But I guess the graphical weapon effects and such are not portable. Is that what you referred to when saying it would mean "rewriting stuff from scratch" ? (For Trem I would guess that a good bit of work is in making the gameplay work, with buildings, evolutions, buying equipment and such).

Of course, if it looks prettier with the current engine, then I fully agree with you there's no point in switching.

(My original thought behind asking had been whether a combined effort might go towards making a better product then either effort separately. I'm a regular player of some Spring engine games - that is RTSs - and I often ponder how we ended with about 3 different engines in that segment...)

P.S.
Thumbs up if vehicles were included in future versions, by the way !

Edit: P.P.S
Trem apparenty has http download (since only very recently) . Can't say if they did that just for themselves, or whether its ioquake3 side (or even whether I got mixed up and misunderstood things :/...)

[divVerent]

Sorry for the late reply - but many thanks to the plenty insightful answers!

I'd not thought about id Tech 4 being release - and I guess you're right, it's probably just a matter of time.
Interesting as well to here you think Darkplaces (and ioquake3 to a lesser extent) are pretty much on par with the commercial engines!

Two things were mentioned I didn't quite get though - one regarding the ioquake advantages for Trem: dedicated server and Bots I don't see as very relevant (there are no Bots I know of, and dedicated server load, well...). Player prediction though - does that have to do with showing players to one another, and therefore aiming ? (I read a discussion on the Trem forum about people leading their shots, but it perhaps no longer being necessary with a certain mode enabled).

No, this is about predicting your OWN location in case of lag.

The other thing is on porting - I had assumed that the greatest amount of effort in Nexuiz was the models/ animations and levels (what I would have regarded as content).
[...] (For Trem I would guess that a good bit of work is in making the gameplay work, with buildings, evolutions, buying equipment and such).

No, converting data files is usually quite easy, especially as very similar formats are used between Q3A and Nexuiz. The real work lies in all the CODE. It would take over a year to rewrite all that in another engine. Sorry, but this comment quite insulted me, as you apparently think all my work is worthless and anyone could do it in some weeks.

Making the gameplay work is actually the highest amount of work in Nexuiz development, followed by models, and only then the maps. Especially the support for many game types, and many map entities to allow maps to be more dynamic, and the bot code, are huge amounts of code. The menu system also was very much work, and really is much more advanced than Q3A's. You can ask the Urban Terror guys how much work their menu for the Q3A engine was - they'll tell you the same

If you like numbers: according to sloccount, an industry standard "retroactive cost estimate":

The engine has 117737 total source lines. According to the COCOMO model, developing it would take 15 developers 2 years. Given that half of the design and about 10% of code is by id software, make this about 1.5 years for 12 devs.

Game code has 70748 total source lines. According to the COCOMO model, developing it would take 11 developers 1.6 years. As all the design and code is entirely by Alientrap (nothing in there is from Quake, as Quake is MUCH simpler), this model should actually fit.

And in the last case, the numbers actually fit - 17.5 person-years can very well be right, given that Nexuiz has been developed for over five years now, although with a lower number of developers.

[SeanHeron]

Sorry, certainly no offense meant :/ ! I was just stating what I as an unknowing user had assumed - I really don't have much of a clue to be honest.
I must admit that when writing I was thinking "hmm, all the different game modes" - and I'd completely forgotten Bots. And the Menu of course is kick ass, and makes a lot of the polish of the game of course! I guess I kinda glossed over that as it's not something you use while your actually fragging... .
In any case, I'll quite readily believe that there is a large amount of effort put into the code - I simply didn't realise (or was just coming to realise) that when I wrote the last post.

In no way did I mean to diminish your work! (Didn't realise alot of it was yours in fact...), please assume ignorance, not malice!

--
Thanks for clarification on prediction (though I didn't quite get it - it doesn't really matter).

I guess the conclusive answer to my general question then is that there's not going to be a "unification" of the open source FPS engines anytime soon (which I guess is just as valid as with the RTS engines - don't see it happening there either). A shame in some ways I guess, but there is certainly value to diversity as well!

[Irritant]

Speaking of idtech 4, I wonder if the shadow code will also be included, or will it be removed from the sources? As many know, "Carmack's Reverse" was patented by Creative Labs in 1999(which is a joke, IMO). Even though Carmack independently discovered the algorithm on his own, id had to work out a deal with CL in order to retain it's shadow code.

LordHavoc, as well as I have done in CRX have been able to avoid the patent(at least in our estimations) by changing the algorithm sufficiently enough.

So I wonder, will the release of this code finally end the ridiculous patent by CL, or will the code be altered/removed?

[xplinux557]

I personally LOVE Darkplaces and ioquake3 a lot, and I've got Nexuiz (uses Darkplaces) and OpenArena (uses ioquake3) on my laptop (it's got a real shitty graphics card: an Intel 965GMA Chipset, BTW) I've tried both games and they're both great. But I've noticed that the engines' focus on completely different functionalities:

Darkplaces:
Naturally, DP focuses on graphics: advanced rendering, extreme OpenGL-driven effects, etc. The ioquake3 engine will probably NEVER be able to support these cool effects that we all know and love on DP. But its eyecandy-oriented design heavily impacts the FPS in-game. This impact is most visible on lower-end machines (such as my lappy, which typically gets around 12-30 FPS in Nexuiz). Also, the physics are a bit less realistic that iq3.

ioquake3:
This engine is just the opposite of Darkplaces, in a way. It's designed so that it can give you decent and not-too-impressive graphical effects, and replaces it with extremely high FPS. For example, whenever I run DP with everything set to its lowest setting, except for Realtime Dynamic Lighting, I get 9-26 FPS on my shitty i965GMA. But with ioquake3 I can enable RDL and get 75-95 FPS (and with RDL off, I can get over 100 FPS! Amazing, huh?) It's gives you Damn Small Nexuiz-type speed, but with OK-ish graphics and textures. Unfortunately, if you've experienced DP's graphics before, you'll probably get sick of iq3's low-medium graphics eventually and immediately start up Nexuiz (OA has rather low-poly weapon models, no reflections, HDR, gloss mapping, or decals and particles cannot be customized).

I guess that you can't have awesome graphics and consistent FPS on lower-end hardware. I like DP and iq3 both. Which do you like?

Trem apparenty has http download (since only very recently) . Can't say if they did that just for themselves, or whether its ioquake3 side (or even whether I got mixed up and misunderstood things :/...)

BTW @SeanHeron, ioquake3 has had HTTP Downloading for a long, long time.

[Flying Steel]

Also, the physics are a bit less realistic that iq3.

I wonder though if this is because of engine limitations or game design preferences?

[FruitieX]

Also, the physics are a bit less realistic that iq3.

I wonder though if this is because of engine limitations or game design preferences?

Do you mean player physics? Then that's game design preference, as you can easily change to VQ3 physics for example by using the following console command:

Code: Select all

exec physicsQ3.cfg


I have to say that I myself prefer VQ3/CPM/Nexrun physics over the Nexuiz ones, and hope there will be more servers that run these physics sets (or at least give the players an option to vcall them)