The future of source ports

[Ebisu]

It's pretty mindblowing how far we've come with this game. Quake source ports have turned into decent graphical engines as a whole, and in some cases have been able to support other games such as Quake 2, 3, and GoldSRC. What do you guys think we'll see in the future? Will support for games such as Doom 3 and Quake 4 ever be possible, or is it too different? What about other Quake related bsp engines such as Source? I'm just curious about what would be possible at this point. This community as a whole is filled with wonderful people that never cease to amaze me.

[golden_boy]

To my knowledge FTE has some very unfinished support for loading doom 3 maps. But it is pretty different. And you know, you can always just use the Doom 3 engine so I'm not sure what the value of that is.

FTE also supports custom GLSL which is nice in theory, but I think the engine really needs to provide some common GLSL shaders like SSAO and HDR and then people might hack them.

There is support for ragdolls, but physics engines are generally a weak spot of Quake engines.

The particle systems are pretty nice, CSQC allows for doing a lot of stuff you otherwise couldn't, and so forth. They're nice engines.

It's just that the engines tend to have bugs, they're not super actively maintained, and the tools are a mess. This last one is actually the biggest downside if you want to make new games with them. You're doomed to ancient map formats and lots of BSP and obscure, badly maintained tools like q3map2. It just isn't at a modern day level. I would say Darkplaces and FTE are about 10 years behind the times, regarding how games are generally made, unfortunately.

And that gap is getting harder and harder to close because some things just changed fundamentally. It's not possible to do a realistic large outdoor scenery with realistic dynamic sunlight, day/night cycle and proper shadows. For instance. Because Quake was never meant to do that and Darkplaces/FTE are still trying to be Quake engines at some level.

A different mindset would be required to turn them into fully fledged general purpose game engines. They would have to basically leave the Quake mindset behind, but it doesn't look like that will ever truly happen. It is a limit they cannot / will not break.

[Henry]

Ebisu, do you really think that having 1 engine for all id games that you mentioned is desirable?
That is not the case in my humble opinion. You have for all the games that you mentioned ports which are developed exactly for that game. And these ports are better supporting that game compared to an engine that tries to support many at once. That is of course no mystery as ports that support "only" 1 engine do not need internal hacks, workarounds and soultions to find a way to support many.
I only know FTEQW that supports several games. And the higher you get in the Quake# the more issues you will find fully "supporting" it. Did you already try to play different games with it? And compare it with other engines which are specialized to 1 game?

Of course that does not mean to talk bad about FTEQW, the opposite is the case as we all should bow down before Spike and his abilities and skills. But if you look deeper, you will see how difficult it must be for Spike to get them all under one hat and what sacrifices it costs. While people are constantly screaming for more features and new features that constantly breaking other existing things.


If you want to make a Quake-like game, use an advanced Quake engine.
If you do not want to make a Quake-like game, why should you use a Quake engine ?? Only because you think you know QuakeC ?
There are much better free engines for a non-Quake-like game. Do not be lazy and learn the corresponding language of that engine and your result will be 10 times better.
And in many cases these "other" engines will bring better result, even though you are doing a Quake like game. Because the team behind those engines are a lot larger and they have a nice modular system. Just look at Ziggurat to find a very good example.

And mention Doom3 or Rage here in this topic should be clear how far we are getting out of spec...

[golden_boy]

Doom 3 support is a long way away. So many things changed technically. Then Quake 4 changed even more things. Then ETQW added megatextures. It just gets progressively more difficult to support everything at the same time.

ETQW support would be cool, of course. But nah, maybe when Spike is 75

[Ebisu]

Honestly, I was just curious about what could be done with them. I'm not demanding that Spike locks himself in a dungeon and slaves over my demands or anything. I just thought it would be cool to think of the possibilities that this game could reach.

@Henry
Actually, it would be kind of cool, I'm not going to lie.
Maybe I'm just crazy!

[golden_boy]

You could implement most modern post processing effects via custom GLSL. Darkplaces already has HDR I think. The limit is in those places where your content moves too far away from Quake. Like there is no LOD or fog-of-war for instance.

[Spike]

doom3 support in FTE isn't going to happen. the only realistic way to implement the entire doom3 engine<->gamecode interface is to basically BE doom3.

quake3's gamecode was sandboxed. this keeps the interface simple and limited.
quake2 wasn't sandboxed, but its api kept many similarities to quakec, and it had no cgame - the interactions were thus limited to serverside only, and are thus much simpler.
halflife is surprisingly like quake, especially the older versions, which provides a certain level of bootstrapping. for the most part it has retained a distinction between engine and gamecode, and only the latest versions actually utilise any engine internals, and gamecode tends to not depend upon it because its new.

doom3?.. ahaha... no chance. its much easier to rewrite the gamecode than rewrite the entire engine.

lod can be done via csqc, the same place where you should omit other details like ragdoll or whatever - the 'whatever' bit being the key issue.
fte culls according to the far clip plane. it can determine the far clip plane based upon fog density. you've(gb) seen the terrain stuff and its potential size - withough a fog of war, it would be completely impractical.

there's a few ways to do hdr and they all suck, but at the end of the day its just a scaler for the bloom's filter. if you just want something lame, you can use getlight combined with the r_bloom_filter cvar.

[Adam]

fte culls according to the far clip plane. it can determine the far clip plane based upon fog density. you've(gb) seen the terrain stuff and its potential size - withough a fog of war, it would be completely impractical.

Is this something like what Soldier of Fortune's Ghoul engine could do, where it extended Quake 2's draw distance with a fog effect?

And leading on from that, can DP or FTE support any of the features from that engine?
From memory (Really! 15 yrs ago...), It had impact\location damage on the enemies as well as the fog and some other shiny bits & bobs.

I liked the first SoF, it was the mention of far clip planes and fog that reminded me of it.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1leRZfJko8[/ame]

Had some nice map design too, like the train map (which I copied...*cough* was heavily influenced by for a HL competition around that time)

[Mindf!3ldzX]

Incase no one knew, some SoF maps was ported to Q1. I have sofdm1 and sofdm3 bsp's, can't say where I got them (literally I do not know).

[Spike]

@adam
you mean the dismemberment?

presumably if you build your model so that you have two identical bones, you can connect those two bones with a joint in the ragdoll. when animating, those two bones will have the same animation information etc.
when your enemy dies and activates its ragdoll thing, your ragdoll would give each of these two bones its own body, and create a joint between the two to hold them tightly bound. after you shoot the corpse some more, you can just disable that joint and the two bones will suddenly be allowed to go their own separate ways - the leg will fall off.

This of course is assuming that you can get the ragdoll system to behave properly, which is hard because it depends upon ODE.
It would of course be nice if the engine directly supported updating the mesh to cope with parts being destroyed completely, as well as not having the cost of double bodies, but that doesn't mean it impossible with the current version of FTE.

regarding the fog, many engines have fog - even the original doom, in a way. never underestimate black fog for its atmospherics.

[Adam]

Oh, ok.

So the fog wasn't so much of a clever engine thing, just employed as a visual curtain to cover up the Daytona style pop in, created by the renderer not being able to render that much.
(That sentence could of been better.)

The gore was kinda location specific so, a clever hitbox thing?
Or was it all handled in how the models were put together?

With FTE being Q2 (fully?) compatiable could it run SoF maps or even the game as a mod?

Knowing little of the code side of things, I accept that this maybe a dumb question.