ZylonBane on 8/12/2005 at 16:22
Quote Posted by sparhawk
You mean, just as it is beyond some amateur developers to create a professional game?
No.
Do you have the slightest comprehension of how quirky and hackish Dark is? For something like this to be useful, it would have to reproduce every weirdness of the Dark Engine down to the tiniest jot and tittle. Otherwise it would break a great deal of existing FMs, and probably some OMs too.
Reverse-engineering isn't easy. Remember the old Atari 2600 game system? Emulators for that simplistic little thing are STILL being refined.
kamyk on 8/12/2005 at 16:29
As I said before, please do release it. If you can get all the nuances, and full compatibility into a windows interface that is easier to use, I would nominate you for sainthood.
Mortal Monkey on 8/12/2005 at 16:44
It won't be done. Not because it can't be done, but because the creator will get stuck and/or bored somewhere along the way.
sparhawk on 8/12/2005 at 19:24
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
For something like this to be useful, it would have to reproduce every weirdness of the Dark Engine down to the tiniest jot and tittle. Otherwise it would break a great deal of existing FMs, and probably some OMs too.
Yeah. That could become a problem. :)
Quote:
Reverse-engineering isn't easy. Remember the old Atari 2600 game system? Emulators for that simplistic little thing are STILL being refined.
I know that reverse engineering isn't easy. I was doing this a great deal of my life, though I have stopped mostly some years ago, because it gets boring after some time. :)
ZylonBane on 8/12/2005 at 20:00
Then you should know that's it's virtually impossible to reverse-engineer the precise behavior of multiple systems that run simultaneously and interact in upredictable ways, or systems that sometimes behave in a non-deterministic fashion.
It's impossible. Even with the source code it would be an incredible challenge, since so many missions depend on these emergent timing quirks.
sparhawk on 8/12/2005 at 20:07
I don't think there are multiple systems. This would only come into play if there were multiple threads running at the same time. I doubt that the darkengine was written this way. Games usually aren't exactly because of this indermination.
It could be a challenge to reproduce certain bugs, that may sometimes be relevant, though. :) Even though they are charming, I know that we wont reproduce them in TDM, but I guess people will find other exploits in our engine. :)
ZylonBane on 8/12/2005 at 20:46
Quote Posted by sparhawk
I don't think there are multiple systems.
Uhhh... of course there are. There's the player input system, the AI system, the animation system, the lighting system, the physics system, the sound propagation system, the object management system, and lord-only-knows what other little things, all running
effectively simultaneously.
Assidragon on 8/12/2005 at 23:34
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Uhhh... of course there are. There's the player input system, the AI system, the animation system, the lighting system, the physics system, the sound propagation system, the object management system, and lord-only-knows what other little things, all running
effectively simultaneously.
Heh? All the systems you mention update one by one after each other, each time a bit before the rendering of a frame starts (unless Thief has a seperate thread for all the systems, which I find unlikely). The fact you are unable to tell that at a reasonable update rate doesn't mean they are actually running at once.
The only things that can run simultaneously or
effectively simultaneously are multiple threads; and even newer games don't employ that so heavily - for physics sometimes, and for background loading.
ZylonBane on 9/12/2005 at 00:30
Identical Thief missions can and will behave differently depending on the CPU speed of the system that's running them.
Undeniable, incontrovertible, end of debate.
Assidragon on 9/12/2005 at 00:44
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Identical Thief missions can and will behave differently depending on the CPU speed of the system that's running them.
Undeniable, incontrovertible, end of debate.
And that proves Thief has many multiple threads how...? Sound/physics/particle/lighting systems will have to wait for the renderer to finish even if they are multithreaded anyway (particle and lightning ones for obvious reasons; sound/physics engines cannot access the world data while the renderer is working, so they have to wait until the renderer removes the locking mutex); also why would anyone in their sane minds making these systems for thief multithreaded is beyond me. The control system being multithreaded won't get bothered by different CPU speeds. The AI system could possibly freeroam, but given the fact everything else will have to wait for the renderer to finish means it'll also have to wait too. Sloppy programming/weird bugs != multithreading.
