Hi there, I'm new to Nexuiz. I've been fooling around with GTKRadiant for a few days and am at the stage where I can make a room, put some grass & a sandy beach in there, fancy water, and a little dock.

So what my idea is, is it do-able to create a Far Cry-like single player mode with the Nexuiz game? Are we just limited to fragging in little arenas or is it viable to design a bigger, outdoor environment with a story to follow e.g objectives etc.

Now obviously I'm not just going to jump onto the scene tomorrow and release something, but I figured it could be an interesting idea. I await your replies.

No it's not possible. Although you can create outdoor environments, without good knowledge of mapping and how the engine handles brushes and whatnot you probably will have a hard time creating a good one that doesn't slow down the computer.

However, you will not be able to create such massive outdoor environments as Far Cry. Nexuiz is a totally different engine (modified from the Quake engine). You will also not be able to have as stunning water, graphics and physics, with all the little details everywhere.
Though, if would be possible, I suppose, to create a single player mode with a story. But it would be in the same field as the Quake games and Half-Life. Where when you enter a shallow corridor it loads the next map, while too big maps won't be possible.

Indoor maps can be large and complex provided you make them optimisable (i.e. it is possible to avoid massive potentially viewable sets). Large outdoor maps are essentially limited to foghulled implementations such as ons-reborn and arahia.

Nexuiz does not use hardware occlusion culling, paged geometry and other modern optimisation techniques. It uses a Q3ish precomputed visibility system, and this is what excludes Far Cry style environments from Nexuiz. This has been a feature of many Quake-derived engines - remember how some of the large outdoor areas in Half-Life were split across two maps?

Thanks for the replies.

So by "Hardware occlusion culling" do you mean the gfx card draws things that you can't see? So more load on the GPU etc? In which case I'd have to get down and dirty with the code. (which I'm not prepared to do, since I'm rubbish at C and don't know C++)

Well thanks anyway, I guess I'm going to either find an engine that works with my idea, or learn C++ and implement it myself.

Later!

If you succeed be sure to let us know

spoons wrote: I guess I'm going to either find an engine that works with my idea, or learn C++ and implement it myself.

nearly everything which is possible in quake is possible with nexuiz

spoons wrote: I guess I'm going to either find an engine that works with my idea, or learn C++ and implement it myself.

everything which is possible with quake is possible with nexuiz

ai wrote:If you succeed be sure to let us know

If I succeed and make a full singleplayer campaign outdoors I guess it could be called Nexuiz: Episode One.

wait so what are you trying to create?

an outdoor single player campaign?
why does it need to be outdoors?


although making mission maps seems like fun, it would most likely be another thing that new mappers would think to be a solution to other problems, and raise the complexity of mapping to a new level, not to mention the amount of extra effort required to make a good single player map, which each person would play up to around 10 times, is easily outweighed by how much easier it is to make a good multiplayer map that people will be playing for months to come!

file 824 ph wrote:an outdoor single player campaign?

Yes.

file 824 ph wrote:why does it need to be outdoors?

I want it to be outdoors.

file 824 ph wrote:although making mission maps seems like fun, it would most likely be another thing that new mappers would think to be a solution to other problems, and raise the complexity of mapping to a new level, not to mention the amount of extra effort required to make a good single player map, which each person would play up to around 10 times, is easily outweighed by how much easier it is to make a good multiplayer map that people will be playing for months to come!

I'd rather work on something that's missing than something done time and time again. I don't care how many people are playing my map in x amount of months, I would much more enjoy trying to push the game into new areas than create a Yet Another Bunch Of Tunnels(tm) map.

DP (darkplaces - nexuiz engine) can do much more, than orig quake. It lacks some q2/q3 support, but it also has more advanced things than latter one. Check DP readme.

I don't know about outdoors with DP...
If you look at the first Onslaught map and all the fog and stuff... I don't know, but it seems to me that DP is not comparable in any way to Crytek's engines, which made outdoor levels actually run better than indoor levels This is not the case with DP afaik.
I think idTech4 is a better comparison and the only game with really massive outdoor levels, I can remember is ETQW, which didn't perform as good on my iMac as indoor games like D3 or Q4.
I don't say, I wouldn't want a few outdoor levels, just for diversification. But you can't expect the large scale of FarCry-maps with DP.
You should ask sev for ideas though, since he seems to be the guy for tropical adventures He's building a new map atm.

http://www.modwiki.net/wiki/Visportal technique is used in quake engines. Outdoors are visualised like:

These are created with the "textures/editor/visportal_distance_*" materials. These portals will fade to black or to an image specified in a custom distance-visportal you create when the player is x units away from the portal and will close when the player is y units away from the portal, whether or not the portal should be open according to the general visportal rules described above.

I think, that this is only used in idtech4.