Building Relationships with Device Makers

[Anthony]

Thank you for the work everyone involved in the project has done. You have made something very cool.

 

I am a little obsessed with the oculus rift (I don't own a developers kit, because I'm not a developer and the allure of 1080p consumer model has me holding out). Does TDM use the vanilla doom 3 gpl engine or has it already branched off significantly from doom 3? Are there any thoughts about either switching to the gpl bfg edition or merging the code responsible for Oculus Rift support into TDM's engine? If this has been answered in another place just link me to the forum or wiki post.

 

I have a weird suggestion and I'd like to hear your opinions about it. Has anyone thought about contacting the Oculus Rift staff and asking if they could help code support for their device into TDM? TDM's tense stealth moments would be wonderful to experience with the Oculus Rift. I've watched videos of people playing games like Dreadhalls and there are moments in TDM that rival it. It doesn't hurt that Carmack is there now and that guy is a friend to open source world and that your game is based on an engine he is probably largely responsible for.

 

The benefit for the OR folks would be giving customers a full'ish free game to play on day one. The consumer version of the rift could even come with TDM and some of the best fan missions on a DVD. The benefits to TDM would be expanding the community by being bundled with a potentially disruptive and successful product. Since TDM is based on ID tech 4 there are probably not a huge amount of hurdles to support the rift.

 

Another company to potentially reach out to would be Sixense, the makers of the upcoming STEM system. A similar argument could be made that if they coded support for their device into TDM, then they could distribute TDM with their product.

 

I know TDM isn't cutting edge in terms of game engines or graphics, but device manufacturers might be interested in TDM as a playable and free example for what their products are capable of. Plus are a lot of gamers that care more about gameplay than graphics. A great deal of the work done by companies supporting projects like Linux is making the drivers to make their devices work with linux. It would be cool if the same became true of open source games.

 

I'm interested in hearing what you think and what challenges there would be.

Edited October 29, 2013 by Anthony

[nbohr1more]

I think this is a good idea. To some degree, some small changes were made to TDM per recommendations from ATI and nVidia developer relations. As for BFG? That is not currently on the roadmap other than borrowing a few ideas here or there. If the OR guys wanted to do us a favor and help improve the engine along with adding OR support I think we'd be a little daft to refuse given that Carmack is on their team... That's just my personal opinion, I can't speak for the coding group here.

[Serpentine]

NVidia and AMD dont work with opensource projects really. Only the big ones and only if there are specific ok'd development from management. Intel would be far more realistic.

 

BFG code might be used, but only in really small parts, on the whole it's a completely different beast and not exactly a nice one to deal with. But it might have a few take-away sections that we could use. I don't think that putting much hardware-specific stuff into the base is a good idea at all. Specially ones with closed SDK's and not open libs.

 

For now, work goes into the dhewm3/sdl2 port from my side. All of these other things are just distractions.

[nbohr1more]

I think, once the port is complete, we should encourage Occulus Rift to look into making a custom branch. They just need to build an executable they

don't need custom assets so why not? If Intel wants to do another silly Ray-Tracing demo and create a modified TDM that would be cool too.

 

There's nothing to stop them anyway, the code is GPL.

 

I personally would love to see what different coders and hardware vendors would do to tailor TDM to their platform\hardware.

Yes, ideally anything that ATI or Nvidia supplied should be ARB compliant so it can be evaluated for inclusion in the core but I would

be pretty psyched to see customized versions in a head to head on a benchmarking site.

 

Can you imagine the publicity?

 

(Though the publicity is a mixed blessing right now... I wish more news sites would mention our Moddb presence rather than just the main site

which can be killed by a light breeze... The Moddb traffic would actually help with general notability... It seems that a lot of these news sites would

rather not give more promotion to Moddb as it's seen as somewhat of a competitor to them. Hopefully we have a good run for MOTY this year.)