Doppler Effect: Free (GPL) single-player proof-of-concept

Hi there,

a few months ago I got somewhat interested in the question "is it possible to create an environment for mappers to create free (GPL) FPS single-player campaigns"?

The idea is that while there are plenty of commercial games that can be used by mappers to create new campaigns and mods, there doesn't appear something free (as in free speech), which means that it's difficult to create something stand-alone.

To get, e.g., mappers started, one needs

• A reliable game engine
  
• Basic game code and assets, so basic gameplay can be created
  
• Textures
  
• Support for a map editor (e.g., NetRadiant)
  

So I quickly slammed something together from exclusively free sources:

• I like the Darkplaces engine. It is actively maintained and offers some nice eye-candy features mappers can use.
  
• For basic game assets I took OpenQuartz, which used to be a project to create replacements for Quake's proprietary assets. The quality of the assets, though, is very questionable, although some things are useful to get things up and running.
  
• I lifted some of the texture packs from Xonotic, including shaders. Xonotic has the biggest selection of high-quality GPLed textures I know of.
  
• I created a gamepack for NetRadiant, which I consider is overall the best available map editor for Quake-based games.
  

The result I currently call "Doppler Effect" and is available at

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B11N4Vzr...sp=sharing


So, you may ask, is this of interest for you, given that this is a whopping 385 MB download?

If you expect gameplay: Currently there is no serious campaign, this proof-of-concept only contains like 5 minutes of gameplay, with only one tiny playable map. However, there are some baddies you can mess up, and you may be curious...

If you are a mapper and would like to experiment with creating single-player campaigns that can be bundled to be stand-alone: This indeed may interest you, as this package includes everything needed to get started. The maps would also most likely be easily portable to Xonotic once/if the single-player support is integrated.

I can also imagine this can be used for speed-mapping projects, where participants each select a theme ("The Hangar", "The Storage Area", "The Reactor Core", ...) and afterwards a nice wacky campaign is assembled from the entries.

Either way, have fun. I could imagine setting this up as a proper project if there is reasonable interest.

I tried it some time ago, fairly interesting, has anyone picked up on it?

Seems Interesting I've bookmarked. And will check out later

The idea is good, but why rely on the really old open-quartz stuff? Wouldn't using most of the Xonotic stuff be ok too?

Besides that, maybe it would make sense to talk to these guys, who are making a free SP game based on Darkplaces:
http://www.moddb.com/games/dead-morning
http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-mod-rel...rning.html

Had a quick spin on it, works well (cept perhaps for that font ; ) Looking at the source tree, it seem to be based off quake 1. Now while that certainly works, its not precisely (imo) the most up2date or friendly "platform" as far as modding go nor does it make use of csqc. I'm not 100% sure of your goal with this, but if it is to create a boilerplate / base for developing games it would be more attractive, imo, if coded from scratch or possibly taking Xonotic's code and stripping away everything unnecessary and adding NPC capabilities. Yes both ways are a bit of work, however unless it does offer something better then q1 or xonotic i don't see why anyone would use it as base. Don't take this the wrong way, im just trying to point out the flaws i see in it if i were to use it as a base for something. If its already what you set it out to be, just ignore me and carry on Also if you're still interested in developing this i could perhaps lend a hand with (at least some of) above mentioned coding.