Better engine (do not link to NOTTODO)

[00Hugo00]

Hi,

It's would be cool if we make a new engine (not based on Xreal, because fromhell hates this, i don't know why)

-per pixel lighting (possible, but hard, no link to NOTTODO please)

-shadow mapping (would be a bit easier, or less buggy nexuiz-like stencil shadows (for better stencil shadows on stairs eg.)

-water reflection and refraction (a bit easy)

-water caustics (easy)

-md5, md2 and obj support (for importing SnoutX10K XD, fromhell hates this) [it [[could]] do also ragdolls with md5, if fromhell isn't angry today :-s ]

-easy gametype coding, like in warsow

-Race mode integrated to OA (with support of nexuiz races if possible and CPM)

-Clan Arena

-A lot of variables to configure physics, game settings, etc (like customizing fall, drown damage, friction)

-better particle system

-Translations (why not menus.cfg like in sauerbraten)

-Very hard to do, cube 2-like editor

-Realtime world lights and shadows

-Bots with waypoints (AAS = Ambulances Are Small, so...)

-more maps

-coop edit (like cube 2-like editor, or normal, very hard to do)

-masks on models (specular, glow and envmap)

-warsow-like jump animations

-higher detailed models (delete limit of 1000 vertices, add one 0 = 10000 vertices)

-optional dashes, walljumps, double jumps and wallrides.

-Hard to do, ogz map support.

-optional limited stamina mode

-Auto updating of game (hard to do)

-3d explosions like in sauerbraten (sorry fromhell)

That's the long list for a new OA.

(No NOTTODO links)

[fromhell]

(DO NOT LINK) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/NOTTODO oops

-per pixel lighting (possible, but hard, no link to NOTTODO please)

Sort of done in that one ioUrt engine, but it only works with world rendering afaik. I'd only allow it if it were optional only.

-shadow mapping (would be a bit easier, or less buggy nexuiz-like stencil shadows (for better stencil shadows on stairs eg.)

Darkplaces just implemented this

-water reflection and refraction (a bit easy)

Easier said than done. You'd have to restructure the renderer quite a bit to get a surface to reflect off another with good sorting.

-water caustics (easy)

Tacking on special effects to existing maps is a risk of creative liberty for the mapper. I wouldn't want this.

-md5

MD5 has no normals, would look very ugly in the renderer

md2

MD2 is a crappy format not worth supporting. Going from MD3 to MD2 is more losses than gains, like the one big important one: VERTEX PRECISION

obj support

Not a game format. Obj is designed for rendering.

-easy gametype coding, like in warsow

LUA/Python scripting?

-Race mode integrated to OA (with support of nexuiz races if possible and CPM)

Could be done (!!) but then I would need to model a grappling hook.

-Clan Arena

ew

-A lot of variables to configure physics, game settings, etc (like customizing fall, drown damage, friction)

That cfg mod down there?

-better particle system

In the works. I know Harekiet has the Q3MME engine to bug for engine-side eyecandy stuff

-Translations (why not menus.cfg like in sauerbraten)

Strings are hardcoded, Missionpack has slight translation support, and we can't have proper translations without Utf-8 anyway

-Very hard to do, cube 2-like editor

Brushes say no.

-Realtime world lights and shadows

Redundant suggestion

-Bots with waypoints (AAS = Ambulances Are Small, so...)

Going from AAS to waypoints is also backwards like MD3 to MD2. AAS is pretty much the future. Even Valve has AAS in their overrated bot-based games.

-more maps

But remember, quantity != quality, and I don't like big file sizes.

-coop edit (like cube 2-like editor, or normal, very hard to do)

Maybe supporting ENT files?

-masks on models (specular, glow and envmap)

Meet .shader. .shader is your friend. Meet his buddies

alphaGen specular
rgbGen identity
blendFunc additive
tcGen environment

-warsow-like jump animations

I'm not making stiff animations.

-higher detailed models (delete limit of 1000 vertices, add one 0 = 10000 vertices)

That would lead to a high memory usage and long load times for everyone. Stupid idea, and i've tried that already. If anything i'd want to LOWER the amount of polys and surfaces player models use.

-optional dashes, walljumps, double jumps and wallrides.

and spray tagging and jpop music and wrong game

-Hard to do, ogz map support.

A zipped ogg file!?

-optional limited stamina mode

Stamina is annoying. See: Gore: Ultimate Soldier, FireArms for Half-Life

-Auto updating of game (hard to do)

That'll make those tinfoil hat wearers cry.

-3d explosions like in sauerbraten (sorry fromhell)

I'm actually TRYING to have 3d explosions in the form of particle effects exploding out. Also remember Q3 used to have 3D explosions in its VERY EARLY days.

[schlorri]

-Clan Arena

Well, look at the elimination-gametype. i have a damagecounter for elimination somewhere on my hdd(like cpma). The only annoying thing is: no weaponchange before the round started.

-optional dashes, walljumps, double jumps and wallrides.
...
-optional limited stamina mode

This is not warsow and stamina? why...this will destroy the gameplay!

But i like the idea to improve gfx!
Suggestion: svg support -> great 2d icons and small size(but you have to keep the old tga's...mod-support). You will need a svg2pixbuffer function AND it will look awesome!

[fromhell]

Suggestion: svg support -> great 2d icons and small size(but you have to keep the old tga's...mod-support). You will need a svg2pixbuffer function AND it will look awesome!

Sounds like a lot of video memory and CPu eaten for nothing.

[schlorri]

The pixbuffer has the same size( ~ ) and you have less to read. I dont think it will waste much cpu... and 2d icons will look MUCH better.

Edit: sure there should be a cvar to dis/enable this feature...so ppl with new computers can enjoy nice 2d-icons

[Falkland]

-Bots with waypoints (AAS = Ambulances Are Small, so...)

[...] AAS is pretty much the future. Even Valve has AAS in their overrated bot-based games.

Uhm ... brainworks went on the opposite direction by adding some sound and visual support and XReal uses ace-bots :/

[Neon_Knight]

I thought that Elimination and Clan Arena were the same... weren't these?

[sago007]

@Neon_Knight
I created elimination to match how my friends was explaining RocketArena (that I could not run myself because of some 64 bit problem and therefore had to code it myself). I called it Elimination because it reminded me of SoF2. I think ClanArena is taken from RocketArena.


I must agree that bot nodes have its strengths over AAS.

I have created maps both for Unreal Tournament and OpenArena.

In OpenArena bot support should be as easy as typing bspc mapname, but in reality you have to trick the bots into doing what you really want them to do. Trying to tell a bot to not do something completly stupid by placing botclips and donotenter brushes is not that easy. Sometimes you just have to give up some ideas because the bots cannot work with them.

In Unreal Tournament you have to tell it what to do but at least they did.

Using AAS is like LaTeX. You don't have to worry about setup because LaTeX does it for you and then in the end you set and try with as mane exclamation marks as possible to tell it that it has placed your illustration in the wrong place.

With enough work AAS is properly better... but is the world ready for AAS?

[yinmir]

well, this stuff all seems like kind of pointless, if you want to edit like cube, play cube, if you want quake-like+fancy effects, play xreal, mapping for oa and quake isnt that difficult, i take no credit of making anything fancy myself, but im lazy. if you search around there are tons of maps made for quake that work great in oa, and the maps that come with oa are still fun to play in there own right.

[00Hugo00]

fromhell: ogz is cube2 map format, i think answer is no.

[0kelvin]

openarena

[misantropia]

-Translations (why not menus.cfg like in sauerbraten)

Strings are hardcoded, Missionpack has slight translation support, and we can't have proper translations without Utf-8 anyway

Strings are hard-coded, yes, but most of the messages the user sees are sent to functions like CG_Printf(). It should be fairly trivial to intercept and translate them there, WordPress style. I don't see the issue with UTF-8; it's a run-length encoding, valid UTF-8 is valid ASCII, the only thing you need is a little more smarts when rendering the glyphs.

[misantropia]

Come to think of it, you don't play the game for the deep story line so who cares about i18n?

[davidd]

PhysX, Nvidia made it a free physics engine that can run on software mode. Or some other physics engine, like Bullet, Newton or something from AMD/ATI. But adding a third party physics engine can't be done without breaking compatibility, unless done per map.

Static water reflection can be done with cube maps. Real reflections need render to target or something, would need shader model 2.0 at least (like Far Cry water?).

Cascade shadow mapping is trillion times better than ages old stencil, but... that needs GF6 or X1800 GPUs at least.

Scripting. Well, seems that most open source games go Python or LUA. Sometimes they go java or C#. No idea about the performance : easy of use ratio of each one. In a few cases they go own, internal, scripting engine.

I see two ways of improving lighting in OA. One is adding precomputed global illumination and static directional lightmaps (I think that is the name of lightmaps that also encode normals). That would make light compiling stage 20x heavier and would need lightmaps with very high resolutions. The other would be going total dynamic, ambient occlusion, global illumination and color bleeding everywhere, which would mean no more light compiling stage but very high min requirements. Maybe there is a third way: going doom 3 style, drop lightmaps and have both world and models use the same realtime lighting, at the expense of having to have normal maps and specular maps for every surface.

OBJ? There is a industry standard called Collada.

Models with 10k - 100k tri? Need a whole new LOD system and possible, software tesselation. Or go OpenGL 4 and add hardware tesselation.

nice summary, you have my respect, well done for a person with only 2 posts on this forum.

[Cacatoes]

2 posts and 86 cakes

[davidd]

-Auto updating of game (hard to do)

That'll make those tinfoil hat wearers cry.

If it was truely auto, than yes, i would be opposed to it as well. But if some menu option "check for oa updates" or something similar was in the main menu, a lot more people would decide to update when they get "invalid gamefolder" messages (a message that could be improved by adding a suggestion to update)

[Gig]

Also I thought that DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Elimination]Elimination was the same as Clan Arena (but I wonder why it has a different name)... What are the differences? Splash damage or something similar?

Anyway, I would like to ask a thing (if this feature already exists, please tell me how to activate it... otherwise, is it possible to put it in the next 0.8.6?): if you want, to make the HUD show you the ammo for every weapon you have in your inventory, for example on a column on the left or right edge of the screen... or on a line on the top or lower border...

I remember some Q3 mod did it...

[Falkland]

[...]
Anyway, I would like to ask a thing (if this feature already exists, please tell me how to activate it... otherwise, is it possible to put it in the next 0.8.6?): if you want, to make the HUD show you the ammo for every weapon you have in your inventory, for example on a column on the left or right edge of the screen... or on a line on the top or lower border...

I remember some Q3 mod did it...

It's already available in OA085 . just set cg_weaponBarStyle to 2 and the OSP style weapon bar will appear on the left of the screen.

But it's not customizable like CPMA HUD.

[Gig]

Very good! Thank you very much.

So, it would be good to put a setting in the option menu, to cycle the various styles (they are many): now, if one does not know the existence of the variable, cannot get benefit from it.

And another thing: is there a parameter to show it ever, instead of only when you switch weapons? It would be very useful...

[sago007]

So, it would be good to put a setting in the option menu, to cycle the various styles (they are many): now, if one does not know the existence of the variable, cannot get benefit from it.

I agree. I normally would not add a client side function without adding it to the gui. But the current gui is annoying to maintain and one does not want to put too much work into it.

And another thing: is there a parameter to show it ever, instead of only when you switch weapons? It would be very useful...

It exists! And THAT is in the menu, somewhere below the colors. It is called cg_alwaysShowWeaponBar and is currently a boolean.

Also I thought that Elimination was the same as Clan Arena (but I wonder why it has a different name)... What are the differences? Splash damage or something similar?

I didn't know that there was something called Clan Arena. A fiend explained Rocket arena to me but I wasn't able to get it running, so I decided to program it myself based on my friends description. It reminded me of Elimination from Soldier of Fortune II witch I considered the more generic name for the game type, the objective considered.

[Falkland]

And another thing: is there a parameter to show it ever, instead of only when you switch weapons? It would be very useful...

Yes , it already exists : cg_alwaysWeaponBar "1"

EDIT : too quick to post , sago gave already the answer in his post.

[Gig]

Okay, I found it in the menù. But I also found a problem:

- If you enable \cg_alwaysWeaponBar 1, you will no more see the name of the item you just picked up. Trying to understand why, I see that if it is not enabled, when you pick up something, it is written for 2 or 3 seconds, but if you switch weapon, it disappears immediately (I think it is because otherwise, if you have many weapons, they could hide the text or vice-versa -just \devmap and then \give all to try-). But without text isn't nice, we should find a solution.

The original Quake 3 does the same thing (it deletes the text of the item just picked up before its time if you change weapon). But the famous "OSP" mod does not: it uses a vertical weapon bar and the text for items (smaller than usual) does not disappear if you switch weapon.

I'm not sure how to fix when using an horizontal weapon bar (maybe using smaller text/icons and using two different lines?), but at least when using a vertical weapon bar, that text should appear (pick up text and weapon icons does not interfere in that case)...

- Another thing, talking of text: I just noticed that OpenArena does not write the name of the weapon you are selecting when you are switching them (Q3A does)... is this expected or is a bug?

- PS: Anyway, I hope you fill find the time to add "cg_weaponBarStyle" to the menu in a next release. :-)

----------------------
@Sago:
Didn't you know Clan Arena? It is avaiable with the OSP mod, and with the Rocket Arena mod. I was in a Q3 Clan that played OSP Clan Arena years ago, and I played much less (just 1 or 2 times) with Rocket Arena. As you can see here, also there that game mode was called Clan Arena, I don't understand why your friend didn't tell you its name... Anyway, it is not important, here the name is "Elimination" but in practice it is the same thing.