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Unreal Engine 3 ?


Gwoosh

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Please think of this topic as a total off-topic.

 

Have you ever consider starting a "next-gen" Dark game on Unreal Engine 3?

As many of you know it is completely FREE for non-commercial use. It has beautiful, full-featured developement kit http://udk.com/ and tons of documentation and video tutorials. And the engine capabilities...

I know it would be better to support and develop TDM, but you all know that Doom3 engine is quite old and its power is not so big, has many imperfections and limitations (that do not exist for UE3)... and it costs $ :) You know what i mean.

 

After years of hard work of TDM community, The Dark Mod is amazing. But please imagine this dark world on U3!

 

Please share your oppinions on that.

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UE3 is a lovely engine and all the rest, its fast and whatever else.

 

  • Mapping is pretty crap for starting out, it's hard to get into and a mess to package. If you enjoy modeling, it's great... but our community isnt made out of modelers and its hard enough to find interested parties.
  • It's not cross platform (unless commercial).
  • It leverages proprietary formats and workflow.
  • UI work is horrible, horrible stuff and very limited.
  • We'd still have the same limitations of using an engine we cant modify.
  • Just doesn't qualify very well for making a toolkit.

 

In short, its fast but annoying to work with unless you're in the industry. It doesn't remove any limitations besides requiring doom3 and not-amazing performance.

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"Jumping Jesus on a Pogo Stick. Everybody knows the burrow owl lives. In a hole. In the ground. Why the hell do you think they call it a burrow owl, anyway?"

 

 

*takes a deep breath*

 

Hi Gwoosh,

 

This is one of our favorite topics, and we can't get enough of it. So I'm very excited to see it brought up again. ;)

 

All kidding'n'ribbing aside...the simple answer is a big "N..O". :)

 

The more convoluted answer is....

 

The doom 3 engine cost us nothing more than the price of the game. I paid $30 for it. The highest cost in mod development is the personal time put into it. It doesn't matter if the engine is completely free, or you pay a few bucks to get the game and SDK...the end cost is your time. We have invested a lot of 'time' in the Dark Mod and in idtech 4.

 

We like idtech 4, and it will also be open source in another year or two. There is no logical reason to switch. The UDK doesn't offer us a lot that we haven't already been able to achieve. The Doom 3 modding community has also come up with graphic mods that bring Doom 3 up to modern standards, just look at JC Denton and Sikkpin's HDR mods for some excellent examples. Having said that...graphics don't make a game and we choose not to be slaves to the whole 'cutting edge graphics' race.

 

If the unreal UDK had been available 5 years ago then maybe we would have used it...but it wasn't. So, we have idtech4 and there is nothing wrong with it. It is one of the most flexible modding platforms out there. Every game engine has imperfections and limitations. Don't be fooled by the hype of 'the next best thing'. :)

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/you know, this is all about I LOVE TDM but I don't like Doom3 engine much/

 

To be clear, do you really mean that you dislike Doom 3? Doom 3 the game and the engine 'idtech 4'...while obviously related to each other, are different things. It's just a game built on the engine, like Dark Mod, and it's a great engine.

 

A little history for you.

 

The early doom / quake engines inspired the original Thief engine. True story, once told by the guy who designed most of the original Thief engine.

 

The first time we fired up a test map with some Thief like buildings...it felt like Thief. The engine feels like a cousin to the Dark Engine to me.

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Engine switches are what happen to games like Duke Nukem Forever. TDM is not Duke Nukem Forever: it has actually been released within a reasonable time frame with a complete feature set and working, user-friendly SDK, and it is now being supported with a growing number of fan missions. In other words, it is not a dead project like games that switch engines willy-nilly.

 

Otherwise, what the others said. :)

Edited by Melan

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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Intel continues to use Id Tech 4 (Doom 3... see the latest Ray Tracing Wolfenstein Demo from Intel) to prototype new Graphic hardware concepts like it's Larabee hardware project...

 

Why?

 

Because it is the only engine that has a fully dynamic real-time lighting solution.

 

For a game that is this dependent on lighting, the Doom 3 engine is a perfect fit.

 

Doom 3 is still ahead of it's time...

Edited by nbohr1more

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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Thanks, great conclusion to me. I understand all that! This is why I almost did't write this topic... :)

 

But thinking about UE3 I'm focused not on graphics but beautiful physics, water etc.

Thease are things I guess almost out of reach in Doom3 environment.

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The Physics in Doom 3 can be replaced even before it goes Open Source. If Tels doesn't get around to trying this before Doom 3 goes Open Source, I'm sure the Open Source community will step in like they did for OGRE, Irrlicht, and Xreal...

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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Well, the physics might be more limited than UDK, IDK. But we can have moveables with physics which is something Thief didn't have, so even if it's not the best it is quite a step up from the game we wanted to see continue. Water might not be perfect either but we can do alot with overlays and whatnot for looks, it's swimmable (unlike the T3 water - Unreal), so again, maybe not the best out there.

 

But certianly not worth even another years work to port (if that's all it took) just to get slightly better water/physics.

 

And Serp said UDK is great for modeling, maybe so but mostly that's a modeling program issue anyway, and we can use Max, Maya, Lightwave and Blender... And I really doubt UDK is any better than Doom3 for modeling.

 

I also don't think UDK is Linux ready, Doom3 is...

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

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If we're just dreaming for fun, since it's not going to happen on our watch, why not shoot for a next gen engine like id5, and build off Rage or Doom4? Some things could transfer from id4 to id5, the graphics will be amazing, it's apparently easy to build with, and there's hope it might go open source someday too. But it's just something to hypothetically think about for fun, since everybody is more than content with what we have now.

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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The thing you must realize about Unreal engine 3, Source engine, and whatever other engine is currently popular is that they will likely never be open sourced. Even if you can use them to create free games like TDM, you are still at the mercy of the original engine coders to fix bugs down the line. That means in nine years when we all have 40-core CPUs and a TB of RAM, if a low-level engine issue shows up with the new hardware, we would end up in the exact situation we are now with that other game series. The community would be unable to make a proper fix, and the engine vendor will no longer care. They already made their money from that old engine and have long-sense buried it, in favor of some new one.

 

The other thing to consider is the expandability of the Doom 3 engine when it goes open source (hopefully next year). People can add all of the new graphical effects they want to the game. It could be ported to run on virtually anything. TDM is already a current-gen game in my opinion. TDM looks far better than Doom 3. The characters in D3 had claw hands, and many of the textures were blurry/muddy.

Edited by lost_soul

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

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Please share your oppinions on that.

 

From: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitFAQ.html

 

A: The UDK currently only supports PC: Windows.

 

End of thread.

"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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I've been wandering for a while now; how flexible will it be when ID tech 4 finally goes open source? will there be a big struggle to bypass everything that's already in place without sacrificing what's already working? or will it be something that just escalates and continues to get better indefinitely?

 

Forgive me, I have no idea how an engine can turn out when it becomes open source, apart from quake which has turned out -ok- in some projects, but still a bit sluggish. I just had the impression that the timely map loading and speed and compatibility were a result of a messy engine :)

 

Also, people like Denton seem to have made doom 3 look really good, but as far as I know, I can't play with it because I have an ATI card.

Will that still be a problem in the future? In about 2 weeks I'll be running 2 x 5850s in crossfire, that's 2gb of video ram, I'd really love to put that to use specifically when doom 3 is left in the hands of the community.

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One of the great possibilities is that the Open Source community will see the potential of a fully dynamic unified light system and appreciate it as much as Intel does for their tech demos.

 

Right now TDM seems to be the primary driver of SDK changes and Editor improvement. If the folks who went whole-hog with Quake 3 (Xreal, etc) decide to put the same efforts into Doom 3, then the TDM team won't have to shoulder all that burden to improve the graphics themselves but instead can pick and choose from what the community has contributed to the engine.

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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It's possible some huge improvements could be coded and then would require a separate "branch", so that any missions made with the new features would require users to have that version of the Dark Mod. It's possible some changes would be extremely awesome but would break old missions, so what I mean overall is that there would then be two different versions of TDM, the "original" one, with a few upgrades and tweaks that DON'T break any old missions, and a separate version with drastic new features that break old missions but open up amazing possibilities.

 

That's one way it could go. There are major downsides to branching like that, but it MIGHT be worth it if the upgrades/improvements are drastic enough.

 

Or there could come a time when the team integrates some major drastic improvements and "evolves" TDM into a newer beast that can't play older missions, and the older TDM would only be maintained simply as a way to play the older missions but no longer as the main offering.

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I disagree, I think the Doom III engine is excellent. You can make most anything you might want to with it, and the results look great (some of the buildings created look incredible). Thief fans can create any kind of level they want when working on their Thief fan missions with the Doom III engine, it's very flexible, with superb lighting and shadows.

 

Not to mention that it's almost laughable to suggest using a different engine at this point. It took, what, around 4 years for the mod to be ready to the point that it could be released so Thief fans could start making their own Thief missions? It took a huge amount of effort to get all the various features in the mod and working properly. And now that the mod is finally out (but certainly not finished yet, more features, improvements and such are to come) and Thief fan missions can be made, you want the team to start over making the mod again with a new engine? Are you kidding me?? haha :) No chance at all, that would be crazy. Now is the time to keep improving the mod and adding in those good ideas that are on the wish list, making it the ultimate tool for making Thief fan missions. :)

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