Darkradiant development

[New Horizon]

Noticed some interesting thigns going on in there. Good work Greebo and Orbweaver.

[New Horizon]

By the way, I haven't been able to get dark radiant to compile in quite some time. Are the wiki instructions out of date?

[OrbWeaver]

By the way, I haven't been able to get dark radiant to compile in quite some time. Are the wiki instructions out of date?

 

Is that on Linux or Windows? I believe all of the MSVC project files and dependancy libraries have been updated for MSVC 2010 now, so if you are unable to build in Windows you might need to update to the latest versions.

[New Horizon]

I'm on Windows 7. I'm using Visual Studio 2010....the non-express edition. I'll post the pile of errors I'm getting when I get home from work. Thanks Orb.

 

Basically I did a fresh checkout from SVN a few weeks ago and haven't been able to compile since. I waited awhile because I thought perhaps there were some missing files that needed to be added to SVN. Since it's still happening I figure it's something on my end.

[greebo]

Probably out of date w32deps/w64deps folders, be sure to update them as well?

 

On a related note: I was thinking about giving up the internal DarkRadiant Development forum - do we need it anymore? It's pretty much deserted except for the Itches & Glitches thread, so we might as well shut it down and/or move threads to the public area.

 

Is there anything we want to keep in private, past or future threads that are posted in the internal forum?

[OrbWeaver]

On a related note: I was thinking about giving up the internal DarkRadiant Development forum - do we need it anymore? It's pretty much deserted except for the Itches & Glitches thread, so we might as well shut it down and/or move threads to the public area.

Is there anything we want to keep in private, past or future threads that are posted in the internal forum?

 

Sounds sensible to me, the mod is released after all and DarkRadiant was public from the beginning anyway. I can't think of anything specific that should be kept private.

[Serpentine]

Yeah, seems good to me.

 

Are you implementing dmap as an easily shared lib between our engine and DR? Would be quite a pain to need to port patches to something quite different. Might also be a good idea to allow other compiler type tools, seeing as people do use DR with other games.

[greebo]

Yes, it would be a pain to merge patches, but that's just the way it is. There is no such thing as easy sharing when it comes to DarkRadiant and Doom 3, the fundamental classes and types are largely incompatible, and the coding styles are so terribly different. Carmack is a C programmer at heart (assuming that it was him who wrote the proc compiler), there is memset, pointers-to-pointer, C-style variable declaration of locals and shared global statics everywhere, it makes you cringe if you approach it from a C++ programmer's view. It's not evil code per se, it's doing its job well, and it's most likely as fast as it can get, but it's not nice code either.

 

It is (theoretically) possible to use the DR compiler plugin from the engine in the future, with some conisderable effort, although I don't see much benefit in doing so. But I can't really make this a goal of mine, since I'll be happy if I stand through that port in the first place (it's quite some task, and there are some tricky constructs to wrap your head around). DR is where mappers spend most of their time, and they need it to create TDM maps anyway, so the compiler will be right there at their hands. If I manage to port the code we'll have a portable, 64 bit-compatible dmap compiler available that is wide open for refactoring, modularisation and optimisation (multithreading for instance).

 

This is all speaking for TDM-centric use, of course. People can still use the D3 compiler when using the editor for other games, there's nothing stopping them so far. DR will still be able to produce D3-compatible map files. And I doubt anybody will use the TheDarkMod.exe as engine for anything else, since it will be specialised over time (it already starts to drift off-shore with your latest code removal efforts, for instance).

[Serpentine]

Heh, thanks for the detail

 

It's completely understandable then - I had not looked much at the proc stuff, but I hear what you're talking about And you preempted my question about moving the ported code back to the engine, so it's all good

 

As for moving away from d3, it was assured since we were not going to be looking at and of the more portable/updated ports, if we try to keep close to d3 itself you're not going to be picking up much in the way of interesting work imho. Even then, I've made sure not to change any interfaces or such which would break porting of fixes or features. Having a messy base and unclear path helps very little in the long run, simplifying logic, assumptions and general bit rot cleanup; increases robustness and decreases the barrier of entry to fixing many things.

[OrbWeaver]

As for moving away from d3, it was assured since we were not going to be looking at and of the more portable/updated ports, if we try to keep close to d3 itself you're not going to be picking up much in the way of interesting work imho. Even then, I've made sure not to change any interfaces or such which would break porting of fixes or features. Having a messy base and unclear path helps very little in the long run, simplifying logic, assumptions and general bit rot cleanup; increases robustness and decreases the barrier of entry to fixing many things.

 

I don't think there was any suggestion that the legacy code removal shouldn't be done, it just makes it less likely that someone else will base their game-specific code on our version. Similarly we don't maintain non D3-related code in DarkRadiant, which means that it is really only useful for other projects that are based on D3.

[HMart]

Please don't go away from doom3 code base i love DarkRadient and i'm using it to make levels for the Blade of Doom mod (Severance mod) and i would be sad if the new updates wouldn't work anymore, i don't know if we will ever go away from being a mod.