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Moderators: sparcdr, torhu, Tequila

why not switch to a diffrent q3 based engine

Postby ewomer » Sun May 10, 2009 4:38 am

why not switch to a different engine like xreal.

http://xreal-project.net/?p=266

the only draw back would be that you would have to recode the game and rebuild the the maps, but you would get a better fps and a graphics upgrade.

**nix the above , you would just copy/merge your game/cgame code with xreals, but there are some abi changes so you will have to look out for that.
but you will still need to rebuild all the maps.
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Postby Tequila » Sun May 10, 2009 2:56 pm

:D
Yes thanks for your suggestion, we still had that question in mind. The answer is short. The actual engine is sufficient to the needs and x-real is still in very active developement with an unstable status.

I finished few weeks ago the merge of 1.1 branch with ioQ3 sources and I can say it is not really finished. The game part is not well merged and few bugs has been introduced due to the huge differences. In the next weeks, we will continue to fix that bugs and after that stage we may be think of another deadline like merge with higher leveled engine... Then I can say the requested tasks are very huge for few contributors (If you have funds that can change the plan :P )

By the way, there are too few active coders this time so if you (or any one else) want to help you will be welcome as I'm feeling very alone :cry:

Another point, there's a lot of new features in the x-real engine that would require a complete game content improvement... That's another challenge you know, but if more and more people want such a way, we may enlarge our team to create a 1.2 branch with dedicated new content creators... Who knows ?
Maybe another dead line for the next year :roll:
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Postby ewomer » Sun May 10, 2009 3:39 pm

Sorry im not a coder. i actually built and played the 1.1 branch and it ran pretty good. the only problem i had was the frequent freezes which happend in both versions. Did you recode the entire ioq3 engine instead of making a mod? it is nice to have a native 64bit client.
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Postby sparcdr » Mon May 11, 2009 5:24 pm

Our content artists are more sporadic than our two active developers. The engine has to be able to support our current content and pipeline (Tools, eg: GtkRadiant) for the whole team to agree on such a change. Currently, only Ogre3D is an option as it can directly use BSP, but it still requires changes to packaging of the actual content to conform with requirements, otherwise most things do not have shaders, textures or sounds.

The menu would have to be redone, and server-side considerations would need to be made. We've discussed Irrlicht, Ogre3D, Source, ioq3 informally, but went with ioq3 due to our needs on source engine availability, licensing, stability concerns, and pipeline requirements. There's many other areas, in terms of network protocol design, shader formats, platform support, legacy computer support which has to be contended with in such a move. A good measure of our fanbase to this day appreciates this game for the simple fact that it maintains consistent support for machines that aren't current. There's already plenty of technology out there pushing consumers to replace their equipment, and we feel this is unnecessary in our case.

It's just not fathomable to change to a completely alien engine because of the content, which is essentially the most important part of our game versus others... we can adopt new tools and mindsets, but in the world of content artists, they are stubborn and skilled at the tools they've been using, and given the availability of Fistful of Frags for the Source engine, I don't see competition being a problem as neither are copies of each other, the gameplay is different in some contexts, and different crowds of people have different needs, so our fanbase is surely not going to just disperse overnight because something looks better.

We've been around since 2001 with the Quake crowd, changed management a few times albeit if you've tracked the former history as Western Quake 3. We look forward to experimenting with new engines, new tools, and on our own time retrofitting content despite being only developers and not artists, but anything more is just not manageable.
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Postby DeUgli » Mon May 11, 2009 6:07 pm

sparcdr wrote: A good measure of our fanbase to this day appreciates this game for the simple fact that it maintains consistent support for machines that aren't current. There's already plenty of technology out there pushing consumers to replace their equipment, and we feel this is unnecessary in our case.
Well said, sparcdr. Big fans of SG, like me, appreciate having a game that has challenging gameplay and runs well on older machines. In fact, if you suddenly got backing from some billionaire and brought the graphics up to date, I'd probably have to give up playing SG. I can't afford a new machine right now, and probably not for a few more years.
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Postby sparcdr » Mon May 11, 2009 6:50 pm

It's now a core principle and would be a transparent transference if that ever happened (It wouldn't with current content). Though in seriousness, it's a responsible goal to be specific on the minimal system requirements, and that's really up to the developers more than the artists since we work with the engine and know what it's capable of (Yes, I know they are too). With that said, I've noticed some inaccuracy on the internet about our game's requirements, and I'd like to clarify what I find to be reasonable.

Minimal:
1000MHz Pentium III, 1000MHz AMD Athlon (Thunderbird), 867MHz PowerPC G4 (7410)
256MB RAM [1]
32MB NVIDIA GeForce 2 [2] or ATI Radeon 8500 [3] [4]
400MB Uncompressed Hard Drive Space
Windows 2000 SP2 or higher with Visual C++ 2008 SP1 x86 runtime installed
Mac OS X 10.3.9

Recommended:
1500MHz Pentium IV, 1883MHz AMD Athlon XP 2500+, 1500MHz PowerPC G4 950FX+ (7445)
512MB RAM [1]
64MB NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX [2] or ATI Radeon 9200 [3] [4]
Windows XP SP2 or higher with Visual C++ 2008 SP1 x86 runtime installed
Linux: 2.6 kernel (Ubuntu 8.10+, Debian 4+, OpenSUSE 11.0+, Slackware 11.0+, others, preferrably compiled from source) with libsdl 1.2, libspeex, and openal libraries installed.
Mac OS X 10.4.11, 10.5.6 or higher

[1] Memory requirements are dependent on map size and platform mainly, and are artificially limited by a q3 cvar known as com_hungmegs.

[2] Bundled Windows driver is usually not good enough for running OpenGL games properly on Windows Vista if at all supported by either Microsoft or NVIDIA.

[3] ATI Radeon 7500 is mostly supported on desktops and 8500 or higher on both desktops and notebooks supported when using ATI's driver and not a bundled one. However, IBM Thinkpad T30s equipped with Radeon 7500 must have 32MB VRAM and be using the IBM/Lenovo driver but should work.

[4] AGP or PCI-E strongly suggested, but PCI is supported.

Anything higher is generally overkill for our default settings. Please don't misconstrue this as representing a fact that these configurations have been tested by any members of the team, rather they are reasonable expectations from general user experience with the Quake III engine with some adjustment for our slightly increased requirements over Team Arena namely due to map complexity and design considerations.

My three systems are:
Sun Ultra 20 M2
2.6GHz AMD Opteron 1218 (Dual Core)
8GB PC2-5300 DDR2
512MB XFX GeForce 9800 GT
750GB 7200RPM SATA 3GB/s (250GB, 500GB)
Windows 7 RC (7100) x64

Apple MacBook Pro 3,1
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 T7700 (Dual Core)
2GB PC2-5300 DDR2
256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT
160GB 5400RPM SATA 3GB/s
Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6 and Windows XP SP3

SGI Octane 2
400MHz MIPS R12000SC
2GB SDRAM
128MB V8 VPro Framebuffer
73GB 10KRPM UltraSCSI
IRIX 6.5.26M

The third is not in use officially, but is now yet another platform (Albeit obscure and paltry at first glance, but not necessarily so slow as to think due to real-world application and RISC architecture) for porting to. (Quake I/II/III were originally supported on this platform, and OpenGL, Maya, Photoshop/Illustrator started their roots on these systems) Unofficially until the port is released requirements are 400MHz MIPS R12000SC, 256MB RAM, 32MB V6 VPRO minimal (Octane or Octane 2), 600MHz MIPS R14000SCA, 512MB RAM, 64MB V8 VPro recommended (Octane 2, Fuel, Tezro).

Anyways, keeping support going for 4-8 year old systems is still part of our goals, but we also look to experiment and improve the game for modern users as well, that's why it's so hard given our team size to tackle many of the issues.
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Postby ewomer » Wed May 13, 2009 2:30 am

taken from the xreal faq.

Q: I’m looking for an engine for our game project. What can XreaL offer?

A: XreaL provides a complete tool chain for game content creation. You will get:

* the Quake 3 Arena engine with a state of the art renderer similar to Quake 4 including advanced HDR light mapping
* a customized XreaLRadiant level editor for Q3A/Doom 3 style hybrid mapping
* a customized XMap2 map compiler based off Q3Map2
* new Blender3D scripts like a MD5 import/export suite


Q: What GFX card do I need to play XreaL?

A: You need a GFX card that features a DirectX 9 GPU with Shader Model 3.0 support and your OpenGL driver needs to support the OpenGL Shader Language. Every card newer than the Geforce 6600 GT and the ATI Radeon X1300 should be compatible. You should also use the very latest drivers from your card manufacturers website.


Features list
Features

XreaL is based on a heavily modified IOQuake 3 engine. Some of the new features compared to vanilla id Tech 3 are listed here:

* access to the OpenGL driver through a new interface designed like OpenGL ES 2.0 with additional support for OpenGL 3.1
* clever usage of vertex buffer objects (VBO) to speed up rendering of everything
* avoids geometry processing at render time using the CPU (worst bottleneck with the Q3A engine)
* renders up to 500 000 - 700 000 polygons at 50-60 fps on current hardware
* GPU accelerated skeletal animation system that outperforms all current CPU based implementations
* Doom 3 .MD5mesh/.MD5anim skeletal model and animation support
* Unreal Actor X .PSK/.PSA skeletal model and animation support
* true HDR directional light mapping with adaptive tone mapping
* advanced projective and omni-directional soft shadow mapping methods like VSM and ESM
* optional deferred shading
* relief mapping that can be enabled by materials
* optional uniform lighting and shadowing model like in Doom 3 including globe mapping
* supports almost all Quake 3 and Doom 3 material shader keywords
* TGA, PNG, JPG and DDS format support for textures
* usage of frame buffer objects (FBO) to perform offscreen rendering effects
* improved TrueType font support that does not require external tools
* off-server data downloads (http redirection) via HTTP and FTP with cURL
* OpenAL sound rendering allowing for surround (5.1 and 7.1) speaker layouts and generally improved sound
quality. Especially on the Windows Vista Operating System.
* Ogg Vorbis audio decoding for positional sounds and music streams
* Ogg Theora video playback for MPEG-4/DiVX class video decoding
* VOIP support using Speex
* IPV6 Networking. We’re ready to frag on the net of the future!
* SDL backend for the OpenGL context, window management, and input. This also improves portability.
* improved console command auto-completion
* persistent console command history
* colored terminal output on POSIX operating systems
* multiuser support on Windows systems (user-specific game data is stored in their respective Application Data folders)
* numerous security fixes
* replaced Gladiator bot by the Quake2 ACEBot with waypoints navigation
* customized XreaLRadiant level editor based on DarkRadiant
* advanced XMap2 map compiler based on the popular Q3Map2 compiler by Randy ydnar Reddig



http://xreal-project.net/?page_id=3/new ... 3-vs-xreal

the shader language is based off of q3's also
http://xreal.sourceforge.net/xrealwiki/ShaderManual

The xrealradiant level is based off of darkradiant so its like a q3/doom3 hybrid level editor.


i dont know the ram or CPU requirements but i suggest you download and install the engine and see for your self.
http://xreal-project.net/?page_id=7
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Postby Tequila » Wed May 13, 2009 9:34 am

ewomer wrote:taken from the xreal faq.
Q: What GFX card do I need to play XreaL?

A: You need a GFX card that features a DirectX 9 GPU with Shader Model 3.0 support and your OpenGL driver needs to support the OpenGL Shader Language. Every card newer than the Geforce 6600 GT and the ATI Radeon X1300 should be compatible. You should also use the very latest drivers from your card manufacturers website.


Many SG players are using older cards and we don't want hurt them (many are also good players :) ).

Also the "you need a GFX card that..." sentence sounds like a requirement and I don't like that. Do they mean Xreal engine need such good card or it can just only benefit of such good card to have better rendering ?

In the features list, many are just copied from ioQ3 engine features list and so, that ones we will have with the Smokin' Guns v1.1 engine. Most important we won't have are rendering related.

Btw thanks for your interest ;)
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Postby ewomer » Wed May 13, 2009 5:53 pm

Tequila wrote:
ewomer wrote:taken from the xreal faq.
Q: What GFX card do I need to play XreaL?

A: You need a GFX card that features a DirectX 9 GPU with Shader Model 3.0 support and your OpenGL driver needs to support the OpenGL Shader Language. Every card newer than the Geforce 6600 GT and the ATI Radeon X1300 should be compatible. You should also use the very latest drivers from your card manufacturers website.


Many SG players are using older cards and we don't want hurt them (many are also good players :) ).

Also the "you need a GFX card that..." sentence sounds like a requirement and I don't like that. Do they mean Xreal engine need such good card or it can just only benefit of such good card to have better rendering ?

In the features list, many are just copied from ioQ3 engine features list and so, that ones we will have with the Smokin' Guns v1.1 engine. Most important we won't have are rendering related.

Btw thanks for your interest ;)


Yes that is a requirement, the point of xreal is to have an idtech 3 engine
to be more like an idtech4, if you can play doom3 or quake 4 you will
have no problem running xreal, all you have to do is download xreal from
svn and trying it your self. one benifit xreal has over ioquake3 is faster rps.

Yes of course most of the features are copied from ioquake3, Xreal is based off of ioquake3.
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Postby Picard » Thu May 14, 2009 6:28 pm

sparcdr wrote:
Minimal:
1000MHz Pentium III, 1000MHz AMD Athlon (Thunderbird), 867MHz PowerPC G4 (7410)
256MB RAM [1]
32MB NVIDIA GeForce 2 [2] or ATI Radeon 8500 [3] [4]
400MB Uncompressed Hard Drive Space
Windows 2000 SP2 or higher with Visual C++ 2008 SP1 x86 runtime installed
Mac OS X 10.3.9



I find that the minimum mac I got SG to work well on is a 700Mhz G4 eMac with a 32Mb Graphics card.
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Postby sparcdr » Thu May 14, 2009 11:19 pm

Picard: What kind of FPS with default settings (At native resolution of your system configured in q3config/default.cfg)? If you get more than 25FPS we'll take your word on that.
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Postby Redwing » Fri May 15, 2009 1:44 am

Please don't do this. My computer can't handle that. I'm running 1.0 low res low detail as it is :cry:
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Postby ReD NeCKersoN » Fri May 15, 2009 1:55 am

Redwing wrote:Please don't do this. My computer can't handle that. I'm running 1.0 low res low detail as it is :cry:

We don't even have the resources to move to a different engine right now anyway. Even if it did happen at some point (which would be cool) the IoQ3 version that's being worked on now would likely live on & evolve for as long as there are interested contributors.
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Postby sparcdr » Fri May 15, 2009 2:52 am

We won't for a good year or ten... all depends but certainly not in 2009.
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Postby Redwing » Sat May 16, 2009 1:39 am

Ah, well by then I'll have a laptop for college which could probably manage.
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