Doom 3 engine release and game code

[qbism]

[revelator]

[Hexmare]

Hello all ,
well add another head to the collective of work on this engine. I have forked Reckless' repo on github and am currently going through the original code vs all of the updates trying to wrap my head around this engine and how it does things. After shaking the rust off my c++ hopefully I will be able to contribute to the effort. Cheers to all involved great work so far.

-Hex

[revelator]

Welcome to the battle heh maybe we should pester frika to make a Doom3 subsection

[Hexmare]

I know right ,
one thing that I have come across , especially with the whole ARB shader issue. ( No I am NOT opening that can of worms )

Since we have concerns of getting truly GPL safe ARB shaders , ( hence the whole interest in GLSL backend ) here are some things that I have come across.

it seems that a long while back ATI produced a tool to convert from hlsl/glsl to ARB.
http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/sh ... nt-shaders

digging through the link above , I found the actual download for ASHLI from ati which is the conversion tool .

http://developer.amd.com/Resources/arch ... fault.aspx

* grins *

Now I havent tested this yet on current systems ( given that this was last updated in 2005 ) but it could be * part * of the arb shader solution in the short term.


-Hex

[revelator]

Hehe nice find
Mh's shared path ARB/GLSL backend should also be able to get us around most issues with non gpl shaders (his version only does the interaction part atm but can probably be expanded upon and it looks really close to original Doom3 ARB shaders).

Hmm the tool supports from R300 ATI to NV40 Nvidia so ya its rather old but it might be a good starting point.

[revelator]

Found this which might also be usefull. A shader editor with realtime view like ahsli.

[Hexmare]

great find on that one,

yeah between the two we should be in like flint . I did run ashli here on my work notebook , which has a Nvidia gt330m series graphics card, and all ran well. I would assume that the shaders * should * work. Now its just a matter of taking the stock shaders , and replacing them with with ones generated from ashli and see what happens. hmmmm I wonder if I can smoke test a graphics card this way (jk).....


-Hex

[revelator]

ahsli also runs fine on my gtx 560 allthough newer extensions might prove problematic.
tried running mh's shader through shadermaker and it works fine so for newer extensions shadermaker might have an edge, both tools are usefull though.

[Hexmare]

Sweet. Once i get the kiddos in bed i will be futzing with some shaders

[revelator]

Bug report for MH.

The new Sys_Milliseconds breaks timedemo badly. Crashes :/

I suspect that Doom3 cannot handle high resolution timing without the adjustments from timeBeginPeriod/timeEndPeriod when doing timedemo.
It also causes micro stuttering im afraid cause after i reverted to the old function its been running somewhat more fluently.

edit sweet hell this was also what caused the ATI bug i just tried it on an old radeon and it runs like its paid for it.
something tells me we have to not assume that the same fixes that work for Quake will also work for Doom3

[revelator]

Hmm read up on timeBeginPeriod/timeEndPeriod and i was right, they do indeed set the resolution on timeGetTime and also on Sleep which are not normally high precision but with these they are and the value you pass them is actually correct.

Could probably optmize the old versions code some though.

[kempie]

Hopefully a simple quesion that doesn't divert this thread too much

Is there any Doom3 port that is directed at improved performance on more modest hardware (ATI laptop graphics) rather than adding additional bells and whistles?

Cheers, kempie

[revelator]

Most of the ports are actually going in that direction unless you mean for older cards ?.
One of the biggest problems with Doom3 today is that it performs rather lousy on modern gfx cards (still a lot of work going on on the cpu instead of on the gfx card).
Scary example Doom3 actually runs faster on my ass old radeon 100 (yes thats the first radeon with transform and lighting) than on my 2 560 gtx in sli go figure

[kempie]

Oh - that's great news and thanks for taking the time to answer. Do you have any suggestions for a good engine to just jump in and play? In case it makes any difference I have an AMD laptop running a Radeon 6480.

Cheers, kempie