motorsep

Again, it all depends what you want to get out of it. If you want to be indie and make/publish your own games, there is no market pressure. There was a time when going with UDK guaranteed news coverage. Those times are pretty much gone. So as long as you have good looking screenshots/videos showing off decent visuals and good gameplay, engine doesn't matter. Let me outline downsides of vanilla idTech 4: - Old methods of handling geometry (can't have scenes with million+ of triangles; DarkPlaces engine can handle those easily) - CPU bound on pretty much every aspect (whether I have GF8800 or GF Titan, fps will solely depend on my CPU) - No multi-threading (with engine heavily relying on CPU, not having threading is horrible waste of resources; sound engine seems to be running on its own thread, but that doesn't save the day) - Bad networking design (well, almost every single game from idSoftware had crappy network performance). While this one is subjective thing, competitive multiplayer using idTech 4 is pretty much no-go. However, casual MP is ok with pings lower than 150 ms - No free master server (can't even get one from idSoftware) Multi-threading is not an easy task at all (proper scalable threading). Only handful of people in game dev business can tackle this issue. That's why using Doom 3 BFG engine is a way to go as it has threading from Rage, which is state of art currently. The rest is solvable. Even using ARB shaders. GPU skeletal, cascaded shadow maps (or even GPU assisted stencil shadows), HDR deferred lighting would free CPU to deal with AI and utilize power of modern GPUs. It would be of help threading collisions and physics, but with freed CPU resources it should be alright. Geometry handling isn't hard to fix either. So with that you will get significant performance boost. Networking can be ported from Doom 3 BFG (it's mostly in the game code anyway). So with all that being said, how is idTech 4 is not a competitive engine? I didn't mention what kind of non-FPS games can be made with stock idTech 4. You can make point and click adventure / horror / quest game. You can make coop first person adventure. Doesn't have to be a shooting game. Just exploration. What I think is that people simply prefer easy way of modding. Source and UDK provide that kind of easy way. Not only it's easier to mod with those engine, Valve even allow you to make money with modding and has a centralized way of sharing mods. idSoftware never wanted to do such thing.

What kind of hardware do you have? It wasn't laggy on AMD Phenom x3 2.2Ghz, 4Gb Ram and GF8800GT 512Mb.

Let me tell you what other haven't told you (or maybe they did, but I am too lazy today to read over whole thread, sorry ) The only downside of using GPL engine is that you won't be able to port your game directly to consoles, or Win8 App Store (or any app store that doesn't allow GPL apps). In case of idTech4, you can port your game directly if Bethesda will like your game and will be willing to publish it. Then you can almost drag and drop game code into Doom 3 BFG engine (assuming it's your code and not code of one of the existing mods for Doom 3). So in case of idTech 4, from business perspective, there are no downsides. From technology perspective, it all depends what is your game is about. You can make Doom 3 remake, accepting limitations of that kind of game, with stock idTech 4. Nothing, absolutely nothing, prevents anyone from make Doom 3-like game with improved gameplay. Original game sold pretty well and is still selling. So if you make it right, you have a good chance of making worthy game. Not to mention that you don't have to code anything extra in C++ (you would have to recode DoomScript stuff). Ask yourself, what is modern engine? Is it an engine that allows you to press a button "make a game" and your awesome game will magically appear? No, not at all. Modern engines simply utilize modern programming methods, they are more or less optimized for modern and future hardware. That's about it. Since idTech 4 is open-source, it means you can find a programmer which can implement certain features to modernize idTech 4. Or better get Doom 3 BFG, make it moddable and most of your "idTech 4 is not modern" issues will disappear. Even stock (ok, not entirely stock, but slightly modified) idTech 4 can handle pretty large outdoors. Those outdoor areas are not too large to be suitable for long vehicular trips, but for on-foot / slow kind of vehicle action those outdoors are damn large. What makes me say that? That's because I tried it and it works. Let me put it this way - it's more about art assets and gameplay to a good game than what engine it uses. Any engine requires manual optimization of level. There is no magic buttons to do work for you. Some engines are slightly better at it than others, but you still need to be careful of what you do. If you are going to work alone, absolutely alone (no one to share future profits with) and you don't care for Mac/Linux, go with UDK. Even with their royalty share, you will be well off. Don't go with Unity, because unlike UDK / idTech 4, Unity doesn't come with game code. And most of the code snippets available are not high quality smart and optimized code. Unity is good for mobile platforms if you know how to code solid game code. As for low adoption rate, it is simply because UDK / Unity is used in every studio around the world. Most people want to work at some established studios instead of going on their own. So why a person who wants to go in that career direction will deal with idTEch 4 when no one in the industry uses it? That's the only reason for low adoption rate.

What's your workflow to have it show animated model? I am sure it's quirky and since there is no documentation about it, I must have been doing something wrong.

Is it just me, or md5 animation viewer doesn't work? Darkradiant 1.7.2 Windows 7 64bit

I don't know if anyone here investigated BFG Edition, but I have and I can tell you that it's not moddable. The workflow of authoring mods / new content is totally different and tools that you need for that are missing. It's _much_ faster than original Doom 3 at rendering many enemies with dlights (read Imps), so potentially one could have Doom like feel to it, with crowds of enemies. Oh, and the way resources get packaged, you get massive duplication of content. That's why BFG takes ~8Gb on HDD. Oh, and old menu code is not there, so you would need to buy Adobe Flash or get Flex SDK to author swf menus. Not to mention there is no documentation whatsoever on that subject (how to interface SWF with scripts in the game). While BFG is very interesting engine, optimized and fast (thanks to multi-threading), BFG in its current state is no use for modding.

Thanks! What about MD5 animation viewer bug? I have been, but only posting here got me some response

I am not sure if anyone reads git repo issues report, but here I have 2 issues that are definitely too major to be ignored (unless I am doing something wrong): md5 animation viewer shows nothing: https://github.com/orbweaver/DarkRadiant/issues/6 func_door model gets misplaces and dislocated: https://github.com/orbweaver/DarkRadiant/issues/7 Can someone fix at least func_door issue? (when loading Doom 3 maps, I can't even revert func_door to the worldspawn) DR 1.7.2 64bit, Windows 7 Pro 64bit Thanks.

Correct, Steel Storm: Burning Retribution is top-down shooter built upon DarkPlaces engine. Steel Storm 2 takes place in the same universe, with the same lore, but in first person perspective.

info_player_start is identical to Doom 3 one, just inherits different classname. Does DR have hardcoded classnames for Doom 3 ?

The project is Steel Storm 2, which is a spinoff from Steel Storm: Burning Retribution

DarkRadiant segfaults when I place info_player_start for my custom game based on Doom 3 engine and choose entity class for it (or if I try creating an entity). Bug report http://bugs.angua.at/view.php?id=3188

Unfortunatelly to get particle/gui/AF/sound/light editors working in Doom 3 one needs commercial MSVC compiler as the express one doesn't support MCF. I am wondering if DarkRadiant comes with all these editors? I don't see anything about that in the DarkMod wiki. Thanks.