Hey everyone,

As we all know, Darkplaces is the engine behind Nexuiz. This is a heavily modified Quake 1 engine that is (from what I can gather from other posts) not multithreaded so you don't get the massive gains from a dual core or the upcoming quad cores.

Quake 3's engine was released in 2005 (see here) and as far as I know is multithreaded.

Are there any plans on moving Nexuiz to the GPL'ed Quake 3 engine seeing that multi core processors are the future or will it be sticking with Darkplaces as Darkplaces may continue to evolve?

hi!

i asked the ioquake 3 team about their smp support, under what circumstances a user gains a speedup from the smp support. their answer was, that smp support will be dropped in the near future, as it brings a speedup in ioquake 3 only up to about 500mhz cpus.

on faster multiprocessor configurations ioquake 3 in smp mode will run even slower, as in single-cpu mode, because the synchronization between threads takes more time, than to simply run one single thread.

i think multithreading isn't that well developped in games, yet.

cheers - fuddl

what's with the people demanding to port darkplaces projects to inferior engines

You should see how many times "make it for source" is asked at Transfusion.

TehTux wrote:Are there any plans on moving Nexuiz to the GPL'ed Quake 3 engine seeing that multi core processors are the future or will it be sticking with Darkplaces as Darkplaces may continue to evolve?

Nexuiz won't switch to a quake 3 engine, that would mean a complete rewrite (and thererfore it wouldn't be Nexuiz any more imho). And as Fuddl stated, SMP support is definitely not worth it. Darkpleces is totally GPU bound on modern computers, even on my 1.66GHz dual core notebook it use reach 100% CPU time, so SMP support would indeed only slow things down.

Cheers for the replies! It will be interesting to watch how things take more of a multi threaded approach in the future, what with multi core Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 as well as our PCs