[SUGGESTION] Porting to XreaL

Well, I know DarkPlaces is the main Nexuiz/Xonotic engine, but wouldn't be nice to port Xonotic to XreaL?

They're GPLv2(+), so I don't really see license compatibility issue.

http://xreal-project.net

Main features: Doom 3 models and anims (md5), soft shadow mapping, Ogg Theora (probably for video textures), Speex VOIP, IPv6, and more

Also, there are various performance fixes, etc. They also got their own radiant and compiler.

Pretty sure this has been brought up in other threads before. Ogre, Xreal etc.

And it just won't happen, too much of the code is QuakeC, which is unsupported in those engines, we can improve darkplaces or something of course

Even if the overall advantage favors XreaL (and this has yet to be determined), what
unknownnf is saying is true - porting the gamecode along is a vast task. Rebuilding models, maps and materials id probably also necessary. not to mention any sort of comparability with Nexuiz is totally lost. In short its not possible with the human resources available to us (feel free to prove me wrong ; )

what unknownnf is saying is true - porting the gamecode alone is a vast task.

Are there any "modern" game engines that run QC?

Non that i know of Spaceman, but i havent looked all that hard either. Feel free do to the research =)

feel free to bug the Xreal devs to add the QC vm into their engine

Besides their game project is dead anyway now it seems. They *need* games I would suppose, else their project dies.

If we want to port the game we have to use the best possible engine!
XreaL? Ogre? CryEngine 3^^

CryE are awfully heavy on the resources(not sure about CE3), which is not good. Ogre? I've heard of Ogre but never looked into it, I heard people its pretty good. XreaL? I dunno, haven't checked on it since last year, I heard they've switched to ET. Looks pretty good.

My suggestion is, instead of porting to another engine, its better if we could do a list of the features from each engine(i.e. XreaL, Ogre, CryE, etc.), and try to implement them into DP.

Do people not realize that propriertary engines are not even an OPTION for a free open source software game, even if porting the game to whatever other engine isn't exactly much more of an option either...?

IF the game is ported, then it must be to an engine that is GPL AND support Quake C. Even then the chances of it happening are pretty much non-existant because of how much a pain in the ass it would be.

This thread is dumb, the effort expended here could have been used making peace towers and electro spam writing up the place.
Please try to keep some cohesive direction to your ideas gentleladies and menmen.

This thread is dumb, the effort expended here could have been used making peace towers and electro spam writing up the place.
Please try to keep some cohesive direction to your ideas gentleladies and menmen.

^^ this.

Non that i know of Spaceman, but i havent looked all that hard either. Feel free do to the research =)

tZork, I did a quick Google search and found this on Wikipedia "The Quake engine was the only game engine to use QuakeC. Following engines used DLL game modules for customization written in C and C++ from idtech 4 on."

Wikipedia also has a list of derivative engines I wonder how many of them support QuakeC?

Unigine supports Linux game development with engine license giveaway.

Let's port Xonotic to the Doom engine, maybe my FPS will stop sucking then :)

But seriously, people who suggest an engine switch do not understand how it all works. It's not like "hey guys I found a new cool engine that is superiour to darkplaces in this and that way, let's port xonotic over it", then developers cast some black magic and the next version of Xonotic is based on AwesomeEngine. As tZork pointed out, porting the code (There are no better engines than darkplaces to support QC), rebuilding maps, textures and other content (which we have alot of) will take a huge amount of time. I cannot say how much as I'm not a game developer, but I'd guess years. And for sure it will pause the development for a long time. But let's assume devs are about to port Xonotic to the AwesomeEngine no matter what, even if it takes forever. But what about the community, which made a lot of maps and modifications for Nexuiz/Xonotic? All their work will be lost, maybe a little bit of it will be rebuilt for the new engine. And we have to suffer that much of damage just for some Doom 3 models and soft shadows? This is certainly not worth it, is it? I'm pretty sure the gameplay will be affected, as well. Talking from experience, many people are going to hate such a huge change for various reasons, we might end up with another fork and a community split. Do we really need all of that just to add some more, maybe alot more, features to the game? I don't think so, and I doubt anyone does.

I'a, not a develper, but I suppose it's better to improve DP than port the game to some other Engine. Porting looks like doing EVERYTHING right from the scratch on the different platform. It doeasn't seem to me like a good way to proceed.

I don't know but I suppose that Dark Places could do much much more thank it can now. And right now - it does a lot.
Only things I can think about as missing are:

• depth of field
• volumetric lights
• rigid (and non-rigid) body physics with joints and all that cool stuff,
• rag doll
• dynamic CSG (rather useless in our game - would break the fun from knowing the map)
• heat distortion from explosions and fire
• decals on players
• breaking glass & ice
• realistic body damage
• volumetric clouds / smoke simulation
• fluid simulation (water/lava/slime/blood)
• map-independent day&night cycle
• map-independent weather effects: rain, storm, snow, iceberg, wind, mist, sand storm etc...
• support for large open spaces with trees, grass, water etc.

One thing I missed badly in Nexuiz was trees and grass. I like to have some virtual space. A lot of it. I heard that the DP can't take large open spaces, but maybe it could be optimised, some special features should be developed to make such large terrians possible to make. I miss organic maps There are some but not much. The great majority are industral/space/decay sceneries.

grass shouldn't be hard
(as far as I know in XNA / DirectX it is possible to render an object one time and draw it many times without rendering it that ofter and if it's possible in DirectX it should be possible in OpenGL as well!)
You could render a little bit of grass and draw lots of grass on the screen if it works

I agree with the general consensus here...porting the game to any other engine is really a terrible idea, especially considering we are able to develop the current engine on our own.

I know the original suggestion of XReaL wouldn't make for as much work as a normal engine switchover due to the Quake engine basis, but I don't see how it is beneficial for the game considering you get about half the FPS in XReaL for about the same visual quality as DP.

All of the things Unfa listed are quite possible in OpenGL, and although adding them in is definitely going to take some work, it's a whole lot easier than porting to a different engine that's already got all that!

The problem in creating large open environments in DP is the lack of good LOD. Nothing scales well based on Z depth in the engine. That would have to be a written change to the engine. Anyone up for it?

Actually, on a related note, I wonder how Nexuiz Console is doing the move to CryEngine.

Are they redoing the game code from scratch? (difficult to believe)
Are they getting CryEngine to support QuakeC? (also difficult to believe)

But it has to be one of those two.

option 1 for sure. since they aren't bound to support legacy stuff, their "rewrite" only has to have the old Nexuiz features they want, thus making such thing much more realistic. They proly also have a few ppl working full time on it and a clear goal to work towards.

...so XreaL is in fact a quake-style engine that doesn't support quakec? That's kind of weird.

Only quake1 used QuakeC, the rest uses other ways to do game logic. iirc xreal is q3 derived.

...so XreaL is in fact a quake-style engine that doesn't support quakec? That's kind of weird.

You'd be surprised.