[SUGGESTION] Should we move Engines?

We should move engines and the reason why is because new engines has so many new features and It'll be also easier for mappers, and darkplaces is pretty much unlearnable and pretty dead now.

I think we should move to:

Frostbite 3

CryEngine 3

Source 2

Unity 5

Unreal Engine 4

While you are correct that maintaining, extending the game would be easier, as well as mapping, modding etc, I imagine it will be hell to migrate from one engine to the other.
1) The map count will be 0. Must remap everything using new tools
2) Total rewrite of the game
3) You have to understand that the game on such engines will demand a lot of resources, and many people won't be able to play it.

Its just not worth it in my opinion. Netradiant is not that terrible, there is some information on it, etc. Its quite learnable, just not as intuitive and user friendly for beginners. So doing that amount of work just because you are lazy to learn things, is pretty insane

This has already been discussed here:
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=5261

A port to the Daemon engine is ongoing. See this post from four days ago:
http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php...9#pid76229

When suggesting engine ports for Xonotic, please consider the following:

1) Does the engine provide a GPL compatible licensing scheme? Xonotic is fully GPL, a thing we shouldn't / can't change.
2) Can the engine be used for free (as in beer)? Who would be paying licensing costs in a OSS project?
3) Is the engine capable of running on Windows, MacOS and Linux? Dropping an OS is not an option.
4) Can you yourself contribute to the port in a significant way? Porting to another engine means a hell of a lot of work that requires people's spare time to be dedicated to the process. Requesting such huge amount of work to be spent while not offering to contribute comes across either non serious or inappropriate to say the least.

yeah lets just move xonotic to a whole new engine with like 3 part-time developers who can actually code. sounds legit

Was that sarcasm?

---

Sehr gut!

When suggesting engine ports for Xonotic, please consider the following:

1) Does the engine provide a GPL compatible licensing scheme? Xonotic is fully GPL, a thing we shouldn't / can't change.
2) Can the engine be used for free (as in beer)? Who would be paying licensing costs in a OSS project?
3) Is the engine capable of running on Windows, MacOS and Linux? Dropping an OS is not an option.
4) Can you yourself contribute to the port in a significant way? Porting to another engine means a hell of a lot of work that requires people's spare time to be dedicated to the process. Requesting such huge amount of work to be spent while not offering to contribute comes across either non serious or inappropriate to say the least.

Points 1, 2 and 3 are easily solvable by making our own new modern engine.

As for point 4, Beagle can rob a bank to fund the above development. If he gets attested, it doesn't matter, as long as he transfers the money, that will be his contribution to xonotic

[...] also easier for mappers, [...]

Sorry, I strongly disagree. NetRadiant might seem old and grumpy but it's actually the most efficient map editor I've worked with. I have some experience with Source's editor Hammer, which is awfully terrible, and Unreal Engine 3, which is easy to learn but has very demanding specs and brush work is no fun with it. NetRadiant just gets the job done.

Speaking of Unreal Engine 4, it is a nice engine if you have the latest high-end computer (meaning something like an Intel i7 and a GTX980ti) which unfortunately most people don't. I own an i5 and a GTX960 which I'd call decent, but the new Unreal Tournament (using UE4) is only playable at low settings. Now think of something more average and then people can't even properly play the game.

As sev put it, we are moving to the Daemon engine. The main reasons being, it supports our old maps and assets, and our current engine is dead in terms of development progress.

Daemon is quake 3 based, which is as new as we can get without rewriting from scratch.
(correct me if I'm wrong)

Awesome then. Since we barely have developers and not many help to rewrite this, I guess this will be fascinating.

Are there any comments from divVerent, Samual and other main developers on this? They contributed a lot to Darkplaces and considering to switch the engine would mean "throwing away" so much effort.

(Using the Daemon engine seems fine to me as long as it ensures backwards compatibility... )

Very true, if we did use a engine that didn't support our assets, than they did this all for nothing. And by the way if we move engines than what about the cvar and alias commands would they all be gone and we would have to figure out everything again? I'm highly skilled with darkplaces commands and don't want to relearn everything.

Setting aside the advantages it brings to development, there is also gameplay/input/compatibility issues to consider. Movement and aiming could end up feeling different (even if the numeric values are identical) and if you can barely run Xonotic on darkplaces engine, you might not be able to run it in Daemon. A fine example of this is CPMA (promode in Quake 3) and Reflex (original engine). Input, netcode and performance between the two games feel different even when they follow the original values religiously. The fear of learning new commands in engines that developers have, is the same for players with the way the game behaves within the environment that you're used to have it in.

Does the option to disable openGL effects exist in Daemon? If not then the average FPS for Daemon's Xonotic will be 30 for me.
Will the netcode be different also? Can NA players play in EU cups anymore?
What will become of recorded demo files and historic matches? Can those transfer over to Daemon as well?

When you switch engines, your gameplay and playerbase will change at most certainty.

RIP my knowledge of darkplaces

When you switch engines, your gameplay and playerbase will change at most certainty.

Coming from somebody who makes videos of him being virtuosic in various games, this comment bears some serious weight.

Unlike the change from Nexuiz to Xonotic, this will be done very smoothly, with both Daemon and DarkPlaces supporting the same game code.
It will include full support for scripts and most cvars we're familiar with, and hopefully as few differences as possible (we're not doing this so much for the features or to change things, but due to DarkPlaces being dead development wise).

The engines are similar enough that we may even be able to make ports of the original code straight in Daemon for things like sensitivity handling and netcode.
Demos are one thing I can't confirm yet, but at the very least, there will be a demo converter if native support isn't possible.

... (we're not doing this so much for the features or to change things, but due to DarkPlaces being dead development wise). ...

I just looked it up. Even though it's not the primary motivation to move, there are many exciting side effects:

• in-game IRC support
  
• VoIP
  
• better bot AI
  
• voice say system (for team comm)
  

... (we're not doing this so much for the features or to change things, but due to DarkPlaces being dead development wise). ...

I just looked it up. Even though it's not the primary motivation to move, there are many exciting side effects:

• in-game IRC support
  
• VoIP
  
• better bot AI
  
• voice say system (for team comm)
  

For what it's worth, I think you would be better served sticking to DP and spending that effort/energy that you'd use in porting to Daemon to update/upgrade DP, or port those features you like over to DP. You're losing a lot of rendering features moving to Daemon.

Our team isn't large enough to maintain a fork of the engine, and any new upstream feature needs to be reviewed by one of the original engine developers and also remain fully Quake 1 compatible. This is a very slow process.

While we may not have anyone willing or capable to touch DP, we do have some interested in the port to Daemon, which is actually active in development.
Their team is happy to help Daemon support any missing features, provided we port everything required for Xonotic.

I really agree with Mario. It's wise to make use of Daemon's active development team, which is larger. Besides, porting is much easier than touching the engine itself, for most people.

- Are there any differences to physics, as in ragdolls, collision with walls and shit?
- Does it have better support for mission packs/singleplayer modes? Or is it just assets that are missing in first place in Xonotic?
- Will there be any differences to available mapping tools? Would it be possible to make TrenchBroom compatible along the way for example?

- Are there any differences to physics, as in ragdolls, collision with walls and shit?

Daemon doesn't have ragdolls, or any external physics engine that I am aware of. The only Quake based engine with ragdolls is CRX. It would be pretty easy to port since CRX like DP, uses ODE. I once offered to assist, around 2011. I think there may have been some debate about doing it cient vs server side. CRX does it client side, and while tricky, it works very well that way, and there is no horrendous network overhead doing it that way.

I guess my question would be is what features are you hoping to gain by switching engines? Objectively, DP is still quite far ahead of Daemon in rendering tech, at least in terms of what it can do. I know that Eihrul has from time to time contributed a few things when he wasn't working on Sauerbraten and Tesseract, such as shadowmapping, and some other fixes/enhancements. I don't recall if GPU animation was ever implemented, but that's been done for IQM in a few other engines and it's not terribly difficult.

I do have other ideas/suggestions, but I don't want them construed as being anything other than constructive, so if anyone ever wants to PM me here or on my forum, feel free. I have supported Xonotic since the beginning and would like to see it and the other free arena games make a resurgence.

I personally don't think ragdolls have any value besides looking cool in frag movies. I was only curious.

... (we're not doing this so much for the features or to change things, but due to DarkPlaces being dead development wise). ...

I just looked it up. Even though it's not the primary motivation to move, there are many exciting side effects:

• in-game IRC support
  
• VoIP
  
• better bot AI
  
• voice say system (for team comm)
  

For what it's worth, I think you would be better served sticking to DP and spending that effort/energy that you'd use in porting to Daemon to update/upgrade DP, or port those features you like over to DP. You're losing a lot of rendering features moving to Daemon.

What rendering features would we be losing?

We're not porting to Daemon for the features (initially, anyway), anything they have extra is just a bonus. In the future, we hope to extend Daemon further, but the port is what's important now.

As for missing rendering features, as many as possible will be either ported or rewritten in Daemon by both teams.
They're in the process of rewriting their rendering engine, so it's a good time to start making requests for them.

Collision and physics will be pretty much exactly the same as DP if all goes well.
Daemon's netcode is very similar to DP's already, and most of our physics are done in the game code, so very little will need porting to their engine to get what we have in DP working there.
Their engine has some potentially useful features, such as hitboxes in different shapes than simple boxes, but we may not make use of those for a while.

The mapping tools will mostly remain the same. Our branch of NetRadiant has been receiving numerous fixes and updates, as the Unvanquished team is interested in using it as well.

Daemon has nothing single player related that I know of, but that's a good thing. It should be done entirely in the game code, not the engine.
DarkPlaces has way too much legacy code to support Quake 1, a lot of useless stuff slowing it down. Daemon is free of this overhead, performance can only get better as it is improved actively by both teams.

To be clear: Such port would be based around adding QuakeC to Daemon and running (more or less) the current game code on it. As such the difference the end user will experience (aside from potential performance gain or loss, render features etc) should be minimal. This approach also mean that any potential engine boons such as better bot AI etcetera will NOT apply, at least not initially. As far as map editors, nothing will change afaik. There may be new possibilities (down the road), but radically changing anything would break every old map and is thus a big no-no.