General > Discussion

Game Engine

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TerraAnt:
Doctor J brought up a good point. I've been seeing a number of posts dealing with problems of Quake 2 engine. I do realize that migrating to another engine would put the project back quite a bit (possibly more than a bit), but might be worth it at the end. I found the websites for those game engines that were mentioned in another post, and their gallery shots look amazing. Some of these engines are used by commercial game developers, Disney included, and by a lot of gaming fans developing their own stuff. Here are their links, for those who'd be interested in checking them out. They all have either gallery or screen shots links, and a lot of info on their features.

Crystal Space: http://www.crystalspace3d.org
IrrLicht: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net
Panda3D: http://panda3d.org
Ogre3D: http://www.ogre3d.org

Some of the more interesting examples of features I found on Crystal Space (didn't have time to go through the others yet):
- support for multiplatforms, including Linux, Windows and OSX
- 2D and 3D graphics modules
- OpenGL renderer
- wide variety of shaders
- bone based animations
- real physics and collision detection
- 2D and 3D sound rendering
- importing support for a wide range of file formats of 3D meshes, texture maps and sound

The point is that moving to another engine might get rid of the problems and limitations of Quake 2 that people gripe about and coders get stuck on, and it might enable destructible environments, something that few people mentioned already. Personally, I'm just happy I found UFOAI, and I'm very interested in how this project develops in the future.
As for the issue that Mattn brought up (considering the lack of artists), I know there are a lot of websites offering free 3D models and textures to the public. Could that be used as a possible source of material for the game (with respective artist's permission, of course)?

TerraAnt

Mattn:
believe me, we all know these engines - but there won't be any engine switch before we reached version 10.0 ;)

BTAxis:
But if you can re-implement UFO:AI on another engine to the extent that it's equivalent to current trunk, you know the patch tracker.

Silures:
Maybe a bit of sci-fi here but instead of changing engines, would it be possible to use two? What I mean is, a modified existing or custom engine being written just to run the destructable features and changed lighting, overlaid on the maps. The only information the Q2 engine would need from it that I can think of is changes in where objects can pass and changed lighting values.

Silly idea perhaps but I see no other option that may be acceptable. :P

JerryLove:
I suspect it all comes down to resources and inertia.

To change engines, I think three things would need to be shown.

1) That the new engine offers desireable features (where everyone is focused, but remember there's "desierable to the player" and "desireable to the developer".

2) That the resources exist to migrate to the new engine.

3) That the migration won't cause the project in general to stall.

Personally, and given the result, I think we might have done better to have used a far simpler engine (say one similar to Fallout Tactics), and been able to devote more time to (easier to create) graphics.

In my more pleasent of dreams: Nival offers the SilentStorm engine over, which is not only awseome (the house falls down if you destroy enough wall), but already a squad-based tactical shooter with working AI that would mostly only need new graphic resources, maps, and the global view/controls added.

I've not looked at the code here (perhaps I should stop saying "we", since I've done nothing but play and make a few posts), but I'm hoping it's reasonable modular (OO); in which case I would recommend to someone who wanted to change engines that they develop a proof of concept.

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