Game Engine

Is it too much dreaming to ask if it wouldn't be better to use a different engine than DarkPlaces for Xonotic?

I find DarkPlaces to be a rag blanket, too patched up and slow, difficult to maintain. Not to mention those problems with the developers.

Personally, i think the Cube 2 engine is simply amazing! It is way faster than DP, and a lot more stunning, with fantastic eye-candy like dynamic grass that looks very real and great water effects. Runs like a hot knife on butter compared to DP (Nexuiz) when similar eye-candy is on.

I understand there is great difference between the two, specially since the maps are made on the fly in cube 2 (which I find fantastic) with the cube shaping based modelling, instead of being quake like bsp's, but since you're starting all over or sort of, I ask why not.

I'd be glad to help with art or code.

We are NOT starting over. That is completely false. Sure a lot of stuff is being redone, but not starting over. Darkplaces is just fine for our needs, and sure it has its faults, but I'm sure there are limitations in the Cube 2 engine as well. Another reason we won't change engines is because the team is familiar with the engine. We would have to restudy mostly everything to work with Cube 2.

A convincing read on QuakeC vs *. LINK FIXED

I know, not necessarily DP related, but interesting all the same .

Changing the game engine requires the absolutely rewritten code and IIRC all those graphics etc. must be converted to the file which Cube engine understands, so all the graphics should be remade.

And I don't like the feel of Cube engine. It feels too rigid and unprofessional. :/

Graphics are not the problem if I understand correctly (changing the file format of a file is a trivial process), but rewriting so much code is serious shit, and as dib said, it's totally unfamiliar.

I see. Thank you for the insight on this matter. I was under the impression you would be ditching all Nexuiz stuff and modelling over based on it. Anyway, I look forward for the launch.

Cheers!

I need help with new game engine of Blender. I am a relatively new user and I decided to use the game engine I followed a tutorial, but when I press P to play, I get a gray screen, not all gray, only 3D display port.

Interesting topic to stumble over. I agree, the Xonotic/Nexuiz feel and style are firmly rooted in DP, though do remember, physics can always be modified. The biggest issue it the engine in Saurbrauten. It's got some awesome features, mostly offset mapping and raytraced reflections as well as cubemapping and some decent lighting/shadowing. The amazing part is how it maintains 60+ FPS on an 8600GT with all those features on at 1600x1200 O_O! Problem is how it does it, with a lot of optimizations and some seriously different realtime/prerendered lighting setups. In Nexuiz to create a map, one first designs the map in netradiant, creates the shaders, adds lighting, textures, and compiles. You can then create realtime lights ingame. On the otherhand, Cube requires you to create ingame polys in a very unintuitive way, then texture those polys in a not so usable manner, then finally add some prerendered and realtime lights. It then calculates the lighting based on an error threshold. Why is this important? In essence, the "prerendered" lighting is still treated as realtime, just a very slow realtime. There would be no easy or even hard method to convert Nexuiz maps to Cube maps because of how it handles geometry. If one were starting a game, I say with a few modifications, go for it, but changing Xonotic over would become a multi year project. I wouldn't say DP is slow, I've seen much slower, much MUCH slower. DP is rather decent, if there aren't too many realtime light's added.

A convincing read on QuakeC vs *. I know, not necessarily DP related, but interesting all the same .

Wrong link?

Wrong link?

Ah, I must fix that :p

Must have chopped off part of the URL

(in the mean time I've removed the link)

Edit: Finally found it again here, sorry about that.