Domarius on 16/12/2005 at 00:00
Ah I wasn't clear, let me re-phrase myself;
They (the features ZylonBane listed) don't have to be reproduced in exactly the same way as the DarkEngine did, which is what would be hard - as long as they produce pretty much the same results then pretty much every FM will work with it.
As for helping - belive me I'd love to, but I'm dedicated to the DarkMod till its officially released :) It's definetly more important to me, as much as I am dying to see something like opensourceDarkEngine released - the idea of co-op on some of those old fantastic missions is very cool. You have my moral support though, for what it's worth.
oDDity on 16/12/2005 at 11:04
So they're planning on making all the textures and models in higher resolution as well are they? That's certainly ambitious for coders.
I don't think the Thief community is big enough to spread over 3 engines.
sparhawk on 16/12/2005 at 12:37
Quote Posted by Domarius
@ZylonBane - Wow that's an impressive list, but they are arent' really difficult,
just require a decent amount of man hours. Which is EXACTLY the crucial point to any open source community project.
Quote:
* to replay the existing HUGE amount of FMs and the OMs with much nicer graphics and realtime shadows.
Question is, if FMs/OMs will really work if the shadows suddenly are differntly handled. It's not clear from the start wether you can simply plug in dynamic lights and shadows and everything else works as before. Maybe the maps were designed with the knowledge in mind that the light is NOT really dynamic.
Quote:
* And - hopefully co-op play, on any mission you want. Even if DarkMod implements co-op, which you KNOW isn't in the near future, someone would have to re-create Calendras Legacy etc and all the other cool FMs in Doom 3 if I wanted to play them co-op with my brothers.
Actually if this project persists, it might be much easier to write a converter for TDM as well.
OrbWeaver on 16/12/2005 at 13:12
Quote Posted by sparhawk
Actually if this project persists, it might be much easier to write a converter for TDM as well.
This would be a much more achievable target in my opinion. Trying to re-implement the entire Dark Engine is a massive amount of work, whereas developing some tools that facilitate conversion of legacy content to a more up-to-date engine (with assistance from the FM authors) would be a lot easier.
Karlfox on 16/12/2005 at 13:19
Quote Posted by sparhawk
Question is, if FMs/OMs will really work if the shadows suddenly are differntly handled. It's not clear from the start wether you can simply plug in dynamic lights and shadows and everything else works as before. Maybe the maps were designed with the knowledge in mind that the light is NOT really dynamic.
I'd guess that many improvements would be coded into the engine as it evolves, but that any of these could be turned off (a revert to Dark Engine "defaults") for OMs or current FMs in which the improvements prove troublesome. As you say, dynamic lighting might not simply "plug in" to existing missions and work nicely. But it would be a nice feature to add to the engine nevertheless - new FMs would surely be created to take advantage of this ability (perhaps more the realm of T3ed and TDM) and existing FMs could doubtless be tweaked. Consider the case of an emulator - not all of the supported features need be used in playing any given game; instead, the inclusion of said features permit the playing of other games (specifically written/tweaked to take advantage of..). We'd just be dealing with the original system (Dark Engine in T1/2), the emulator (OpenDarkEngine), and game modules (OMs, existing FMs, future FMs).
Morpheus on 16/12/2005 at 20:07
I think the best reason for this, as someone said, would be to "future-proof" Thief 1/Thief 2 content. One day operating systems probably won't run Dark engine games anymore, and converting them to the Dark Mod would likely make them look worse unless the missions were remade completely. Having an open source Dark engine would hopefully overcome this. Of course, we might have emulators like DOSBox that could let you play the original anyway.
Domarius on 17/12/2005 at 06:37
Quote Posted by sparhawk
Which is EXACTLY the crucial point to any open source community project.
Yes it is - what are you trying to say?
A map converter for TDM sounds good - but it would rule out the whole low-spec thing, and there would have to be some standard - a sword guard in T2 equals a grunt guard in TDM, etc. and having high poly AI walk around in low poly maps would look wierd. So we'd want to allow it to use the original assets... and then we're backpeddling to the openDarkEngine idea.
sparhawk on 17/12/2005 at 09:49
Quote Posted by Domarius
Yes it is - what are you trying to say?
Saying 'JUST requires a decent amount of man hours' seems to me quite a offhand remark. As if this were one of the less important points, while in fact it is the major point IMO.
kamyk on 17/12/2005 at 17:22
I just read through this thread, and I don't really have any interest in entering the debate, but I did notice something that doesn't seem to make sense.
If I understand correctly, one of the points being made is that this would be to preserve playability of the OMs and FMs on future operating systems? Another thing being discussed(?) is maintaining compatibility with lower spec systems? Why?
Anyone here try to install WindowsXP on a P600? Lag, lag, crawl. Why does compatibility with low end systems matter?
Lower end systems can already play the OMs and FMs with the original engines, and would not be able to support newer OSs anyway...
Mortal Monkey on 17/12/2005 at 19:06
Great, version 0.0.2 got rid of the standards error. Now I only get a linker error:
Code:
D:\DOCUME~1\MORTAL~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\cc6fcaaa.o(.text+0x2c00) In function `main':
[Linker error] undefined reference to `_imp___ZN3irr12createDeviceENS_5video13E_DRIVER_TYPEERKNS_4core11dimension2dIiEEjbbbPNS_14IEventReceiverEPKc'
I suspect it has something to do with my OS (WinXP SP2) and the way it handles oGL and/or them video drivers.
Any suggestions other than switching to Linux? I never got the internets to work in Mandrake.
