openDarkEngine - TTLG Forums

*Zaccheus* on 16/9/2007 at 16:23

Quote Posted by OrbWeaver

Are you referring to debugging symbols?

Yes.

Quote Posted by OrbWeaver

Those will most likely have been removed from the executables for the final release. Even if they were still there, all they give you is the internal names of some variables and functions, which is a far cry from source code.

For release code you can generate a separate symbol file which is not shipped but archived. These symbol files are useful for diagnosing crashes reported by customers. If these were created at all, they might still be archived somewhere even if the source code was lost.

Quote Posted by OrbWeaver

However disassembled machine code (even with symbol names) is only really useful for certain small-scale hacks, like figuring out the internal IDs and codes used for operations or their arguments, and is nowhere near as useful as having the actual source.

Nowhere near as useful, I agree, but it would give some useful insight into how the code works - assuming permission for reverse engineering is given.

OrbWeaver on 16/9/2007 at 16:43

Oh I see what you mean, you are thinking that Eidos might have saved the separate debugging files but not the source code, and might provide these files to the community? It seems a rather small probability to me, but I guess it is possible.

RavynousHunter on 18/9/2007 at 08:33

Ive just gotten into reversing myself, starting with the old Diablo games. Still trying to make sense of all this ASM gibberish... God, im gonna need an x86 ASM book, anyone got one they would be willin to UPS me? :cheeky:

If i can learn to make sense of all this jargon, I might be of some use to this project finally... As my compilers always end up too jumpy and bitchy for me to work on the code side...

Out of Sync on 18/9/2007 at 08:57

awesome work Volca.
i hope the project will be in a playable state soon :)

DaNtAn on 20/9/2007 at 16:18

SiO2

Well done m8! keep it up you are one of the few to talk and do! Respect!

PS:
Igonre all the "Will it be like Dark-Places engine? Will it be all sparky like Doom3?"
and etc. questions. Focus on your work get it done to your taste then listen to
others ;) Because the more you will concentrate on others the less you'll do...
:thumb:

SiO2 on 21/9/2007 at 08:52

Quote Posted by DaNtAn

Thanks. Not bad advise. ;)

I've been taking a look at some Thief1 and Thief2 levels in OPDE. It took a while to get a working build and to figure out what resources were needed and where they needed to be. The project is in a pre-alpha stage so it's not unexpected.

I'll be spending some time running levels and crunching numbers before I start coding. I need numbers like how many textures are loaded, how much vidmem they take, total vertex count for a level, portal count, max/min visible portals, etc. These numbers will indicate the best way of approaching rendering a level that can be made with Dromed. The DX9 renderer works well so I'll be running the engine though PIX to gather renderering statistics. PIX is the Direct3D interactive 3D debugger that comes with the Debug install of the DirectX SDK.

Great job by Volca.

Volca on 21/9/2007 at 09:47

Quote Posted by SiO2

Yep, the resource management system is probably next on the list. Currently, it's a bit messy I'm afraid. :erg:

I want to make everything simple, clean and reliable as a primary goal for the 0.2.1 (now) -> 0.3.0 (end of year?)

Quote Posted by SiO2

I'll be spending some time running levels and crunching numbers before I start coding. I need numbers like how many textures are loaded, how much vidmem they take, total vertex count for a level, portal count, max/min visible portals, etc. These numbers will indicate the best way of approaching rendering a level that can be made with Dromed. The DX9 renderer works well so I'll be running the engine though PIX to gather renderering statistics. PIX is the Direct3D interactive 3D debugger that comes with the Debug install of the DirectX SDK.

You're THE MAN I've been searching for since the beginning of the project :)

Quote Posted by SiO2

Great job by Volca.

Thanks! :thumb:

DaNtAn on 24/9/2007 at 15:09

You can't realy find the SDK for 8.1/7.0 or 9.0a can't you?
You realy have to dig into google. :erg:

What is the SDK that your using SiO2? :weird: 10? hope not otherwise all
will be limited to "Vista" stuff, hey one more thing, I bet you saw
alot of guys here that use Linux/Unix or even Mac OS X, I guess that
if it's on (Sourceforge) you might want use OpenGL and FMOD (or
OpenAL ) source dlls (after analyzing all the statistics by PIX).

Keep it up you both! :)

SiO2 on 24/9/2007 at 16:38

Using the latest DirectX SDK doesn't limit you to just developing DX10. That would just be plain stupid and make people hate DX10 even more than most people seem to now. Anyway, I was a beta tester for DirectX from DX5 to DX9 so I have every DXSDK from DX5.0 up to DX9 on CD's sent to me by Microsoft.

I'm not after API-specific quantitative data - the use of PIX is just to get general statistics.

The final renderer API is down to Volca. My own investigations will target DX9 (and maybe DX10) and will probably result in a separate renderer to the current codebase. Volca can then decide what to do with it (modify current/replace with mine/ignore/etc).

OpenAL is a sound library. Sound is outside the remit of a 3D renderer, so it's up to Volca as to which sound API to use. Coincidentally, I'm currently using OpenAL in my own game engine (separate to OPDE) and have found it fairly easy to use. Also, OpenAL is the only way of getting 3D HW sound in Vista since DirectSound is software-based only on Vista (thanks, MS).

242 on 24/9/2007 at 18:31

Quote Posted by Iain

Is there any possibility that OpDE can do normal/specular mapping like Q2E/DarkPlaces-Quake/Quake4engine,...etc. ?

Why there shouldn't be? Once engine is fully functional nothing stops from adorning it with bells and whistles like that.