Moderators: sparcdr, torhu, Tequila
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.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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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