Porting Xonotic to idTech 4

Its just a visual bug. Your fps is probably way higher than 10

I'm sure theres a fix to your problem. You should ask Mario

I have a mobile i5 (2011 Sandy Bridge) system that is really slow by today's standards and Xonotic still easily runs at 40-60fps at medium to high settings (at 1366x768). Either your system is seriously messed up or you are trying to run it a 4K or something insane like that.

Just throwing in my two cents here as a long time old school (when they were released) doom / quake player and plain just lover of all things game (board, computer, PnP, ect).

Moving to a new engine for what compelling reason? (larger community, easier to modify, affords you more flexibility) What are the top 3 reasons for you and the community?

Right now there is no "must have unique" game play that occurs in Xonotic beyond what is afforded by the weapon systems (well maybe not the speed run game option). This is both good and bad. Good because you come for the readily apparent (former FPS skills are transferable) but bad because lots of us have been there and done that. So what am I talking about? (wrote a long bunch of sentences here but deleted them because it was too broad) I am talking about compelling game play that is not a been there done that affair. A FPS game that can attract / have roles for the casual but also makes the hardcore audience become addicted. There have been a few games that have done this, TRIBES I&II, Team Fortress I&II and I would say Natural Selection I&II (strange how they are all I&II).

The second part of the above is building a community around that game, which in the case of these types of games can run from stat trackers, leagues, map building, VOIP in game, game play tutorials for those starting out to advanced ones, ect, ect.

Where does Xonotic fit in to the current FPS game players sphere of games to play when he is offered the choice? Why would he / she choose it over another FPS game?

I will reply to your statements ScuNioN as someone in quite the opposite position as you(have not been gaming nearly as long and have not been here to see the games come and go).

Moving to a new engine for what compelling reason? (larger community, easier to modify, affords you more flexibility) What are the top 3 reasons for you and the community?

I think this is the most valid part of your comment, and the part I agree with most. Having a reason to do something that will take a significant amount of time is important, so knowing those reasons would be interesting.

I am talking about compelling game play that is not a been there done that affair. A FPS game that can attract / have roles for the casual but also makes the hardcore audience become addicted. There have been a few games that have done this, TRIBES I&II, Team Fortress I&II and I would say Natural Selection I&II (strange how they are all I&II).

The problem when it comes to "compelling game play" is that everything is now subjective. The bad thing about games like Team Fortress, Tribes, Natural Selection, is that many people love it or hate it. This can be said about many games, but I personally like the idea of a refined version of something that has been around a long while, than a brand new product that many people may or may not like.

The second part of the above is building a community around that game, which in the case of these types of games can run from stat trackers, leagues, map building, VOIP in game, game play tutorials for those starting out to advanced ones, ect, ect.

The community of xonotic is great from what I can see. There are stat trackers, map building, game tutorials. It is one of the things that brings me into the game the most, is being able to play with all these people who are great fun to play with.

Where does Xonotic fit in to the current FPS game players sphere of games to play when he is offered the choice? Why would he / she choose it over another FPS game?

I think this is a great question as well, but again changes for everyone who plays the game. for me I choose it because its a great FPS game, I enjoy the gameplay the most out of all the games I have played. The multitude of servers are great, the community is awesome. The game is being updated and I can see changes happen as time goes on.

The deeper question of how to get the majority of people who play the game to choose it over another FPS is by far the bigger question, and I have no idea how to even start with that because I Am not a developer. BUT if the developers of the game decide to port to a new engine, I would like to assume they are deciding to do this because they believe it will benefit the game.

Long dead thread huh... I was bored, surfed the Net, stumbled upon this thread

Basically, if you want to switch engine, switch to UE4. It has source code open (not GPL, but who cares), it's free, it runs on Win/Mac/Linux (and I believe you can deploy Mac binaries on Windows), it has all features you need and more.

While I enjoyed working with id Tech 4 (art side), it's more involved than working with DP. Everything is animation driven and motion based on root bone linear motion in models. If you want to make something outside what engine offers, you need to know C++ and know engine's inner workings (gameplay logic at least). The worst part is rudimentary multiplayer capacity (I am talking about Storm Engine 2, our Doom 3 BFG derivative as it's modern, more robust than vanilla Doom 3 engine).

DP is pretty much dead, so while in some ways it's easier to work with, it's a dead end. So if you can live with what DP offers and not strive for more features, in a way it's better for Xonotic to keep using it. LH still provides fixes and makes sure it runs on current OS/hardware, while almost none of Doom 3 forks gets such support.

So yeah, if you want to switch - go with UE4. If you don't want to use UE4 due to GPL-shit politics, then you are better off not switching engines at all.

(GPL, but who cares)

* Halogene raises hand

So yeah, if you want to switch - go with UE4. If you don't want to use UE4 due to GPL-shit politics, then you are better off not switching engines at all.

Due to a lot of assets being released for Xonotic under GPL (as it currently is GPL) we would have to go for dual licensing if we would want to re-use any of the existing assets. I think dual licensing is an approach that has been rejected each of the many times it was suggested.

If we don't want to re-use any assets then it's not "moving" or "porting" at all :o)

Apparently there's the intention to port to the Daemon engine

http://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php...ght=daemon

It has source code open (not GPL, but who cares)

I definitely care. UE4 isn't truly open-source software: The source code is made available to some people on Github, whom Epic Games chooses to give access to if they feel like it. AFAIK others aren't allowed to share the code themselves, and really it's just proprietary software dressed as FOSS to look nice.

If Xonotic was to move to a completely different engine, my list would be: idTech 4 (already discussed), Tesseract (awesome graphics and realtime map editing), GoDot (game engine aiming to be a FOSS UE4 though currently unusable for quality 3D). If one was to use idTech 4, I'd definitely opt for The Dark Mod's fork of the engine, which is modernized and actively receiving improvements.

...GoDot (game engine aiming to be a FOSS UE4 though currently unusable for quality 3D)...

I'm not sure about this, but I think it's not aiming to be competition for Unity or UE4, and while the 3D support if quite rudimentary, the 2D is easy to work with from what I've heard.

Well then, let's make a 2d version of Xonotic in GoDot. It will remove some randomness due to the excessive dimension, and let pure player skull shine through.

Another problem with engines like EU4 is that it will be more demanding, and require more resources, and I believe one of the goals is to keep it running on older hardware.

As far as assets go, why was dual-license rejected? Someone scared assets will be used in other projects? If that's the case, those people need to wake up and take a long hard look at the assets, then go to UE4's marketplace and see what Epic released for free, suitable for commercial use (if using UE4). No one wants to use your assets folks, sorry :/

As for GPL, well, you get what you get by praying to Stallman.

While I respect GPL, I no longer see a purpose of it. A product needs to be made, in efficient manner. None of the GPL engine offers tools to do the job in such manner. None of GPL engine has features (all around) that UE4 / CryEngine have. Back in the days GPL to be was all about having code available and not paying for tools upfront. Now that UE4 offers tools/engine for free, with 100% access to the full source, I don't see relevance of GPL.

Reading these forums I see that some people care for end-users who plays Xonotic and some don't give a damn about using by sticking with GPL ideology.

So if Xonotic team really cared about people who play Xonotic (and future users), then Xonotic team would have made their choice to depart from DP/etc. a while ago.

Anyhow, my point is this - don't switch to id Tech 4, ever.

Another problem with engines like EU4 is that it will be more demanding, and require more resources, and I believe one of the goals is to keep it running on older hardware.

That may or may not be totally true - as using UT4 as an example, I think it's sluggish performance has more to do with it's overkill fidelity than it does the engine. For example, Toxikk runs splendidly in comparison, using lower fidelity assets. For an arena FPS, IMO anything over than 1024x1024x32 textures is overkill. Player models over 8k polys is overkill. Makes for purty screenshots at 4k res, but it doesn't make the game experience any better really. At some point fidelity is lost on the human eye, especially in a fast paced FPS game.

The source code is made available to some people on Github, whom Epic Games chooses to give access to if they feel like it.

It's a plain lie. You register with Epic as a developer and get license automatically, with GitHub access. Fork it and start messing with the code. You can't make it public or re-release, but you can add contributors to your fork, as long as they are registered developers.

Note that you don't really need to use code at all. Blueprint rules. Entire Xonotic game can be re-created in BP only.

If Xonotic was to move to a completely different engine, my list would be: idTech 4 (already discussed), Tesseract (awesome graphics and realtime map editing), GoDot (game engine aiming to be a FOSS UE4 though currently unusable for quality 3D).

Yeah, and with that move Xonotic will never make it to the release. It took what, a decade to get to v0.8 using DP ? You will get to 0.1 in 5 years, if that using id Tech 4 or Tesseract. Godot isn't as good for 3D as you might imagine.

If one was to use idTech 4, I'd definitely opt for The Dark Mod's fork of the engine, which is modernized and actively receiving improvements.

Lol, you have no clue what you are talking about. The Dark Mod is ancient, still using vanilla Doom 3 code. It's slow and lacks multiplayer entirely.

---

That may or may not be totally true - as using UT4 as an example, I think it's sluggish performance has more to do with it's overkill fidelity than it does the engine. For example, Toxikk runs splendidly in comparison, using lower fidelity assets. For an arena FPS, IMO anything over than 1024x1024x32 textures is overkill. Player models over 8k polys is overkill. Makes for purty screenshots at 4k res, but it doesn't make the game experience any better really. At some point fidelity is lost on the human eye, especially in a fast paced FPS game.

Sluggish is relative term, depending on what PC you have



Doesn't look sluggish to me.

Btw, before anyone says "but Xonotic has portals":



P.S. Why everything I quote and my new posts gets jammed into one post ?!

The source code is made available to some people on Github, whom Epic Games chooses to give access to if they feel like it.

It's a plain lie. You register with Epic as a developer and get license automatically, with GitHub access. Fork it and start messing with the code. You can't make it public or re-release, but you can add contributors to your fork, as long as they are registered developers.

I think these 2 statements are just worded differently. I don't see the lie since it is still Epic Games that decides who can see the code.

Note that you don't really need to use code at all. Blueprint rules. Entire Xonotic game can be re-created in BP only.

Blender Game Engine has logic bricks, let's recreate Xonotic in BGE . Seriously things like that will create an unmantainable mess if used exclusively.

You will get to 0.1 in 5 years, if that using id Tech 4 or Tesseract

It will even take more time if you want to recreate Xonotic in UE with these Blueprint rules.

Sluggish is relative term, depending on what PC you have

New minimum system requirements:
2x Xeon E5-4669 v4
2x Titan X
128GB RAM
Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?

Now on a more serious note:
A good engine will not guarantee that a game will be good. I've seen shitty games that are using good engines and good games that are using shitty engines. Good looking games are just hiding the bad looking parts. You just need to look where you are not supposed to look to find them.
Better let the devs handle it. If you still want to recreate Xonotic in UE, it's probably better to do it yourself (but make sure to comply with the license)

@Freddy

Do you mind working with UE4 first, before dicking around about what you don't know?

"A product has to be made". Really? It has to? Even if that means throwing away everything that you hold dear?

We might as well sell our name and domain to some 3rd party then so they can make Xonotic for Ps4. After all, a product has to be made...

We might as well sell our name and domain to some 3rd party then so they can make Xonotic for Ps4. After all, a product has to be made...

Sounds familiar... oh right: http://www.nexuiz.com/


On a more serious note, the Daemon port is only happening because their engine is very similar to DarkPlaces, and their developer team is happy to help make their engine accommodate Xonotic (and possibly other games).
We lack the manpower to do anything crazy, like remake the game in a more modern engine.
Also, submitting changes to DarkPlaces requires that they remain compatible with original Quake 1 game play, which, as you can imagine, is a bit of a show stopper for anything major.

There is also another advantage of using unreal or unity. All young people joining this project and helping us will gain skills that have huge value on the market. Working on some obscure open source engine is some advantage but over a year of experience in unreal 4/unity will land you a job.

Creating assets for darkplaces always was hard but these days it's a nightmare, support for proper 3D applications ended 5 years ago. I'm put off every time I think about making something for xonotic because I know I will have to fight with exporters for hours.

First of all, the reason idTech 4 is slow is mostly because it uses realtime lighting exclusively. Please, make a Xonotic / Darkplaces map with as many dynamic lights as a TDM map, and post some FPS comparison screenshots... pretty sure you'll find that DP is a lot slower.

That said, I actually love the idea of blueprints! I for one find coding straining, and more of a necessary effort to create a game. Engines that offer an approach based on nodes are a lot easier to work with... which is why I'm among those requesting visual scripting for the Godot engine, and also following the Octaforge fork of Tesseract (which will allow you to setup in-game logics with modules). Again, let me know when a truly FOSS engine pops up that has both visual scripting, good performance, and top notch visuals.

Creating assets for darkplaces always was hard but these days it's a nightmare, support for proper 3D applications ended 5 years ago. I'm put off every time I think about making something for xonotic because I know I will have to fight with exporters for hours.

I'm unable to test, but there are SMD exporters for up to 3DS Max 2016:
http://dev.wallworm.com/topic/57/dmx_smd...orter.html
https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1476356

Blender's tools also appear fairly up to date: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki...urce_Tools


As for iD Tech 4 and pretty much any other engine... It's really too late to drop everything we've done and start from scratch.

@Freddy

Do you mind working with UE4 first, before dicking around about what you don't know?

Do you mind helping the Xonotic project first, before suggesting to put many years of work in the trash? I've seen many ppl dicking around about what is wrong with Xonotic, but most of them don't even try to help.

I never said that UE is shit. It probably is way easier to use than DP. I guess Morphed is right and there are better tools for UE. But these do not automagically guarantee that you can create a perfect game in a few weeks, especially if you only have a small dev team.

Do you mind helping the Xonotic project first, before suggesting to put many years of work in the trash? I've seen many ppl dicking around about what is wrong with Xonotic, but most of them don't even try to help.

Do you mind following context of this thread?

This thread started as suggesting to switch to id Tech 4. I said it's a bad idea, and if there is a strong desire to switch, might as well switch to UE4.

As a matter of fact, I said that might as well stay with DP, because no matter what engine you will be switching to, it will be years of work lost. Might as well put work, if that ever happens, into sane engine to avoid issues that will (and they will) arise from switching to any other engine.

I never said that UE is shit. It probably is way easier to use than DP. I guess Morphed is right and there are better tools for UE. But these do not automagically guarantee that you can create a perfect game in a few weeks, especially if you only have a small dev team.

No, there is no guarantee. However, there are many many benefits in switching to UE4. Imagine div0 drops out of the project (and/or another lead programmer). With DP engine and without div0 (or another lead programmer) , Xonotic team is screwed. It's very, very hard to find QuakeC coder, and even harder to find someone with knowledge of inner DP workings. With UE4, not only you don't need such advanced programmers, but you have a massive pool of people to choose from.

I've been there, twice. One time with DP, one time with id Tech 4. One of the reasons I switched to UE4 is that I no longer have to rely on someone to code. I do it myself with BP scripting. If I have issues, I can always find help (in the form of community or contracts). Something I could never do with DP or id Tech 4. I get sense of nostalgia and comfort. I've been there. It took me a few years and several thousands of dollars wasted on id Tech 4 to finally snap out of it and realize that I can do more, faster, with UE4.

Anyhow, I am not here to call for engine switch. I am here to tell cautionary tale that switching from DP (and established framework) to any other open source engine is a very bad idea. Might as well finish ver. 1.0 with DP and then start on Xonotic 2 using UE4.

OK, motosep, I missunderstood your intention. Sry for that.

Imagine div0 drops out of the project (and/or another lead programmer). With DP engine and without div0 (or another lead programmer) , Xonotic team is screwed. It's very, very hard to find QuakeC coder, and even harder to find someone with knowledge of inner DP workings.

If you rely on a proprietary engine, you will have a similar problem. Imagine Epic Games decides to change the license so that everyone needs to pay to use it in their project. Games like Xonotic would be screwed.

If you rely on a proprietary engine, you will have a similar problem. Imagine Epic Games decides to change the license so that everyone needs to pay to use it in their project. Games like Xonotic would be screwed.

Well, they'll shoot themselves in the foot if they do. It's highly unlikely to happen, especially for free games. Business is business. In GPL world is very common for projects get frozen / ditched and there are no obligations before devs/users.

Worst case scenario is you will retain last license version. UDK licenses still use UDK (it's probably still available for download). And UDK was free for free games. I don't see anything changing with UE4 when it comes to free projects.

There is also Source engine, license for which would never be changed as long as Valve around.

Either way, nowadays the risk of using UE4/Source are much lower than using open source engines. When I started in game dev in 2008, it wasn't the case. So I chose DP. Now it is the case.

When switching engines, compatibility with current assets is clearly needed, as otherwise this is not "porting", but
"starting from scratch". As far as I can tell, this rules out anything not derived from the Quake family of engines.

If I were to be asked, for Xonotic, I'd strongly advise against using an engine with anything but a free (GPL, MIT, BSD etc.) license. Back when I was still actively involved, a lot of contributors cared deeply about the "free-as-in-freedom"-part of this project - and I don't have the impression this changed much. At least for some code contributors, this was not only about creating a game, but also about at least having the freedom to tinker with everything. Also note that Darkplaces (while always having rough edges, not having all desirable features and having a bumpy art pipeline) could always somehow be persuaded to run the game (although I remember that, e.g., divVerent had to invest quite some time to accomplish this - but at least it was possible) - which is the case since at least 2004 (when I joined Nexuiz). I think that at least preserving the "compiles and (mostly) runs" quality could be preserved as long as needed, given that in worst case one could fork from a reasonably stable version and keep that on life-support. I don't expect such longevity from a commercial engine and I also don't expect the team behind any of the commercial versions to care for any particular small project such as Xonotic.

Also note that I think that I'd seriously miss NetRadiant. While newer engines have a more impressive art pipeline in which one can create better looking maps, I still love the chunky look of brush-based geometry and the simplicity in which one can slap together new layouts. I think traditional Quake map editors are reasonably easy to get started with (of course, mastering them is not easy, but what is), without being, e.g., as severely limited as the new Doom's included map editor. Also NetRadiant is free and available on all relevant platforms. I don't know if both are true for, e.g., CryEngine or the Unreal engine. I'd certainly hate a situation where some of the platforms were second-class citizens.

I very much like the idea of working with other game projects to leverage and develop a Quake-based engine, be it Daemon or the CRX engine or whatever comparable engine. The more projects pool their resources to develop a common engine, the more unlikely it seems that the engine falls into disrepair. As far as I can tell from git logs, the current approach seems to be to create a quakec-VM for Daemon (?), which should allow for retaining basically all gamecode and keeping the game intact, while keeping the road open to, e.g., porting the gamecode to C at a later time (if considered worthwhile). It also seems that the Daemon engine indeed sees much developer activity and that the team is really interested to have other games use Daemon. I'm very curious to see the result of this transition!

(Btw, I don't dispute that the UDK may still be a proper choice for other projects, given the features. Throwing away more than a decade of code and assets for the benefit of switching to a more modern (but non-libre) engine looks much too risky for Xonotic IMO, though.)