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"One Year Later, Open-Source Doom 3 Is Moving Slowly"


Ladro

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I posted to their forum about it, but they must have some kind of spambot check because I can't see it up yet.

 

@SH, TDM now runs on the open source version of the engine, and we've already been playing with engine modifications. So it's helpful for us for people to know open-source id4 development isn't dead. It's helpful for id to know that they didn't waste their time making Doom3 open source.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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maybe if they had done a general search for 'open source doom 3 mods pc' they would have got a better list than what they seem to think is out there.

 

From their report it only looks like they've only checked www.github.com for new codebases relevant to the doom 3 source, and nothing else. I can find stuff about the dark mod open source, and hexen open source, plus a whole load of other stuff that dont post their codebase to github.com

Edited by stumpy
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maybe if they had done a general search for 'open source doom 3 mods pc' they would have got a better list than what they seem to think is out there.

 

From their report it only looks like they've only checked www.github.com for new codebases relevant to the doom 3 source, and nothing else. I can find stuff about the dark mod open source, and hexen open source, plus a whole load of other stuff that dont post their codebase to github.com

 

What did you expect, it's MoronixPhoronix! Almost everything I read from them seems to miss obvious things, or contains only half etc.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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What did you expect, it's MoronixPhoronix! Almost everything I read from them seems to miss obvious things, or contains only half etc.

 

I agree :-(

But I sent a message to Phoronix.

 

Maybe he can use TDM in his Test suite, what do you think?

 

Someone on the crew can make some official TDM request to him, maybe he accept (there is not a lot of 3D game like TDM on the *nix universe)

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There is *no* other game like TDM that runs natively on Unix-like systems.

 

While it is sad that not many people have done things with the Doom 3 code, I kind of expected it. Quake engines were massivly successful during their closed life. Doom 3 tech, not so much. Less people were following/building upon Doom 3 than Source or Unreal, and thus there are less people using it now that it is open source. Lots of the modders have switched to Source.

Edited by lost_soul

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Urban Terror or Tremulous would have been nice on tech 4. The aliens could actually be scary thanks to the lighting, just like in the movies. IMO the nicest bits in tech 4 are the usable surfaces, ragdolls, and console commands. None of the Quake-based projects have ragdolls that I know of.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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I think he's referring to either the removal of "Carmack's Reverse" or the lack of ARB shaders in the GPL release (which BFG purportedly will rectify).

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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That. The OS engine's real time shadow code ~ already a major bottleneck ~ has to compute 3 times as many polygons to achieve the same results as the original version. The other major issue is that the Tech 4 shader implementation predates common shader languages and is beyond mortal understanding and thus a barrier for hobbyists and OS projects.

 

At least that's what I heard from someone who seemed sensible at the time.

 

No idea how things will shake out for TDM becuase I'm guessing we're already wedded to the old forward renderer - but for any new projects the OS BFG engine might (assuming those are issues it addresses) become a viable choice in a way that OS Tech 4 wasn't.

Edited by jay pettitt
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That. The OS engine's real time shadow code ~ already a major bottleneck ~ has to compute 3 times as many polygons to achieve the same results as the original version.

 

That's no problem, it was fixed almost immediately by the modding community. Carmack's reverse, or variations of it are back in. TDM already uses it.

 

We may be able to backport some stuff into TDM, but switching to BFG wouldn't do us much good since real time shadows were removed from BFG...or at least D3 BFG doesn't use them.

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It might be a problem if there were a patent on that.

 

BFG has real time shadows aplenty, just not from the flash-light. If there aren't fresh spanners in the works and if they are indeed things that BFG addresses then freedom from potential law suits and a shader implementation that's usable might make BFG a viable choice for new projects, if not TDM, in a way the original OS Tech 4 release hasn't been.

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It might be a problem if there were a patent on that.

 

Wich wouldn't be valid in Europe, at least.

 

Anyway, I don't see us "switching" to BFG, because we'd had to remove a ton of changes that TDM has done over the stock idTech4 engine over the years. What we might realistically do is check out some of the changes in the BFG engine, and then backport them to our engine.

 

 

Edit: TDM is actually it's own engine already. All the enhancements like the massive AI work, the under-the-hood fixes, SEED, the GUI and screenshot fixes, the internationalization work, the renderer fixes by Serpentine, etc. make it already quite distinct. Which brings me to the point, would it be possible for someone to add TDM as engine to Moddb? http://www.moddb.com/engines/add

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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In my opinion it deserves to be. It would be a much better engine to start with for most kinds of games you'd want to make than the id4 base. I mean just looking at the sourcecode folder, there's like 5 times as many files doing a lot of interesting stuff. And it's all open source. I don't know how many people out there would get that point though.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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In my opinion it deserves to be. It would be a much better engine to start with for most kinds of games you'd want to make than the id4 base. I mean just looking at the sourcecode folder, there's like 5 times as many files doing a lot of interesting stuff. And it's all open source. I don't know how many people out there would get that point though.

 

I know at least one project which would immidiately choose "TDM" as their engine on moddb ;)

 

And in addition, when TDM Is stand-alone, TDM itself might change its status from "mod" to "game" and use "TDM" as it's engine, too.

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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Wich wouldn't be valid in Europe, at least.

 

So what are we saying. Please don't play The Dark Mod in the United States?

 

If Id has gone to the trouble to take out the patented Z buffer check and you've gone and put it back in again, then personally I think it'd wrong to try and redistribute the code under the banner of Id Tech 4.

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I think TDM is safe to distribute a compiled version with Carmack's Reverse as a mod but distributing the source code is more problematic and when TDM goes standalone? More problematic still. If someone replaces the shadow method with shadow maps that would avert this issue. Alternately, a deferred renderer would also change the impact of shadows no matter the method used (meaning you could forget about Carmack's Reverse yet perform better than with it in place).

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Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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If Id has gone to the trouble to take out the patented Z buffer check and you've gone and put it back in again, then personally I think it'd wrong to try and redistribute the code under the banner of Id Tech 4.

 

Like I said, 'variations' of it are back in that do the same thing and without the performance hit...not the patented version. Pretty sure we use one that uses the video card directly.

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You did indeed. I'm just not I'm as confident as you are that 'variations' of a patent counts for squat. It's not as though the patent is for specific code that you could rewrite or tweak. I fear you'd need a fundamentally different approach to calculating TDM's shadow volume geometry to avoid the patent's evil gaze.

Edited by jay pettitt
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http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIzNTA

 

it doesn't sound like they're planning any engine innovations atop id Tech 4

 

You've got to be kidding :rolleyes:

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Hey - Sorry I've been dead for so long; Life got real busy and family required stupid amounts of time.

 

Over the past two weeks I've been merging in a bunch of changes and working to replace the TDM build systems to cmake.

 

Most of the work has been in merging TDM with dhewm3, which is a very clean and easy D3 GPL release (mad props to dhewg for awsm). I have yet to get around to converting the TDM game code to cmake. But so far the engine, libs and such are all happy. I've also excluded the SDL parts of dhewm3, as I think it's a bit messy and annoying on some distros. This gives us 64bit(in the engine, this still needs to be wrangled into game code), many more OS compatibility(i.e FreeBSD for meeee :3), OpenAL/EFX for everyone, GCC/Clang/MSVC/ICC compilers all happy. Also makes it dead simple to get things building and maintained.

 

Also a good foundation to merge in other things from other branches, avoiding the incredible mess of the previous build systems and such. I haven't looked closely at Dante, but it might be a good place to dig around for ideas, otherwise I'm gonna start hacking about with some more mapper-centric helper stuff.

 

Anyway, over the next few days I'll talk to the team about the way forward with that - as atm it's just a pile of stuff lying about on my home boxes.

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