Albert on 8/5/2010 at 16:32
Jeezus, I know I sound like a hypocrite. I'm trying to incite movement here. I'm a tad bit too busy to make a demonstration, and not talented enough.
MaxDZ8 on 10/5/2010 at 07:44
Quote Posted by Albert
Oh, and Volca, what I meant was that you need more than just a downloadable demo that requires the game resources. You need to create a neat video demonstration of what OPDE is capable of, up to this point.
(Or something or other...)
While creating a video takes limited time and resources, I don't agree on the need. What ODE should be able to do is pretty well defined: be a accurate replication of Dark, up to the point of running Thief, and maybe other Dark-powered games. The roadmap is rather clear to me. I am not well aware what ODE does right now but I am not sure how a video showing those features would attract more workforce.
Quote Posted by AntiMatter_16
I think the real problem with getting more people working on this project, is most people that are capable of doing this sort of thing aren't motivated to reverse engineer something as complicated as an old game engine, unless they really love the game. It's a huge commitment and undertaking, and I most certainly appreciate and applaud the efforts of Volca and others that have been working on it. Sadly,
this thing called "real life" tends to cut down on the time they have to work on this...dark...project... but I have faith it will get finished.
I have to agree with this. Real world can be a real pain.
There's however an additional issue with that. Volca himself repeatedly pointed out that some quirks of the data format and representation hardly make any sense in a post-2000 world. Working with old data, which is going to be suboptimal anyway is likely a put-off as well. Even in the case the format is completely understood and correctly executed, people will still have to own the real game, will still have to mess up with the files... it probably would be far easier to have a few talented artists redo every game completely, which would possibly allow free redistribution.
This is the core of the problem. Code-only solutions either take massive amounts of work OR do not cut the issue completely. Or both things.
Incidentally, another project I'm looking at seems to have slowed down pretty much.
I think dealing with this kind of legacy is a serious de-motivator.
Scrooge on 14/5/2010 at 16:23
The Penumbra Ouverture source code has been released. This game has excellent physics, and the developpers stress on that particular point worth of mention when they released the code. I wonder if one could use the physics part of this engine into OPDE ?
Albert on 14/5/2010 at 16:46
Quote Posted by Scrooge
The Penumbra Ouverture source code has been released. This game has excellent physics, and the developpers stress on that particular point worth of mention when they released the code. I wonder if one could use the physics part of this engine into OPDE ?
I'm no expert, but I'm certain from what I know, that it is virtually impossible to combine source code from two completely different game engines. One is a pure 3D engine, which is not very well documented. The other, is well documented but it never even started life as a 3D engine.
New Horizon on 14/5/2010 at 17:29
Quote Posted by Albert
I'm no expert, but I'm certain from what I know, that it is virtually impossible to combine source code from two completely different game engines. One is a pure 3D engine, which is not very well documented. The other, is well documented but it never even started life as a 3D engine.
Impossible to integrate another physics engine? Not really. It can be done with quite a bit of work and probably if the engines are both written in the same coding language.
*Zaccheus* on 16/5/2010 at 09:41
I thought the point of OPDE was to re-create Thief's physics ?
Beleg Cúthalion on 16/5/2010 at 18:46
You mean... including bodies halfway sunk into the floor et cetera? :p
New Horizon on 16/5/2010 at 18:49
Quote Posted by *Zaccheus*
I thought the point of OPDE was to re-create Thief's physics ?
More likely to be 'compatible' with Thief's physics, while still introducing fixes / improvements.
*Zaccheus* on 17/5/2010 at 08:17
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
You mean... including bodies halfway sunk into the floor et cetera? :p
:laff:
I'm thinking of crate stacking etc.
Volca on 17/5/2010 at 13:54
Quote Posted by John5zimzum
Can I compile it on Linux?
Sure, I do it myself. You'll need a few things to be able to, see the docs for nearly up-to-date info about that :)
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
You mean... including bodies halfway sunk into the floor et cetera? :p
Quote Posted by *Zaccheus*
:laff:
I'm thinking of crate stacking etc.
:laff: that one is called binding pose you know - it's the default pose (the one the cal file is in, initially). Introducing a proper pose will mean a "Puppet" service for skeletal animation - quite low priority for now, to say the truth (It still needs AI to control it anyway, and AI needs a LOT of things, it's like one of the topmost services in terms of dependencies)
As was said before, the thing we're dealing with is full of solutions made for the hardware of that time. The baked Worldrep for example is cut to very high detail, up to a few polygons per cell. There is no easy (yet bulletproof) way I know of that would enable us to jump over that and render with different approach - we still need to minimize the list of lights that affect the scene for example, some things use tweqs that might be further affected by that (don't animate tweq while offscreen for example).
Other parts of the engine are like that as well - seriously interconnected, so there is no easy way to switch to a radically different yet similar approach, because the functionality could diverge a lot later. The only solution thus is to follow the original engine very closely. This does not mean we won't be able to upgrade the visuals f.ex. though, it only means we have to take special care.
Oh well, I don't want to sound like a crybaby, since it was I who put the burden on my back in the first place. It is more to show a little where the problem with this lies. I still hope to attract some more developers after the sim part of the engine gets some basic functionality (interactivity) - frobbing, physics, scripting.
