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Advanced Open Source Engine Based On Quake 3
An anonymous reader writes
"Phoronix is running a news story about the XreaL project, which its lead developer claims is the most advanced open-source game engine. XreaL is based upon the vintage Quake 3 engine, but it has been rewritten over the course of many months such that it no longer resembles the original id Software engine. The XreaL engine has its renderer written entirely in GLSL with compliance toward the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification in mind, but it supports the new OpenGL 3.0/3.1 specification and is able to take advantage of its new features. XreaL has also added an HDR pipeline to its engine and on modern hardware is actually GPU — not CPU — bottlenecked. XreaL can also load game content from Unreal Tournament 3. This engine, which is described to be as powerful as what can be found in Doom 3 or Call of Duty 4, is written entirely with free software. The XreaL project has created plug-ins for Maya to broaden their game development capabilities."
I've messed around with this thing over the past few years since I have a lot of interest in any new developments in the Q3 engine. My feeling is that it's klunky and not very optimised. Running on the same system that I am able to play such games as Timeshift or Bioshock completely fluidly, XreaL offers pretty poor performance. The last build I tried a few months ago also didn't look all that great, especially for shadows.
XreaL gets a lot of appreciation for what they are trying to do, but it's more of a tech demo. It isn't nearly at the point of being ready for use in games.
The topic is the XreaL engine. Not games.
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The question is, is the engine good enough to be used by commercial industry and would they want to given the fact that companies are a bunch of copyright nazi's?
If you look at the FAQ, you will find that they use the GPL. Not the LGPL. Which means the commercial game companies would have to hand out the source code for the entire game. Not gonna happen.
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The reason is that doing a complete set of artwork for a game is hard, and extremely time consuming. Most people, if they have the time, skills, and interest, will join a mod project, rather than develop something completely new from the ground up. Most of those mod projects subsequently amount to nothing due to poor interpersonal communications, inability to meet deadlines, real life getting in the way, etc.
So for a FOSS game artist, you're asking that a person be talented, dedicated, able to meet deadlines, not interested in the mod scene, technically adept (probably), good at working with others, and willing to work for free.
Then you have to find the same thing in a half dozen other people, some on sound, some on levels, environment, character models, etc.
Making a video game is a tremendous undertaking these days. Anyone capable of making a good game for free probably shouldn't sell themselves for that little.
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One of the things these people have to do is take a page from Valve and Epic and look closely how the two created modding tools for their engine.
Well, Unreal Editor doesn't really allow you to make an entirely new game out of the Unreal engine, but it's an incredible mapping tool, much better than Hammer for the Source Engine.
But, Valve has other tools as well, such as Faceposer to help in lip syncing your models. As well, the event based choreography of NPCs and physics seems to me to be unparalleled. NPC see's enemy, fire an event, which triggers the NPC to freeze, since the enemy was MEDUSA ALL ALONG! It's very intuitive programming.
So this engine needs to have an infrastructure in place to make modding as intuitive, as well as tools that make use of that infrastructure.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
The screenshots on the Phornix page are all of modified Quake 3 levels, which still use static lightmaps. So yeah, of course it still looks like Quake 3 - it's using Quake 3 levels, and full-blown dynamic lighting is mostly incompatible with lightmaps.
Have a look at the screenshots from the Xreal website:
http://xreal.sourceforge.net/xrealwiki/ScreenShots
The top screenshots are from a Quake 4 level. Quake 4 levels don't have lightmaps - all of the lighting in that level is being done in real time. It's using more modern techniques than the actual Quake 4 engine, so it actually looks quite a bit better than Quake 4.
Also, pretty much every feature in Xreal can be turned on and off. You can run without any kind of dynamic lighting, with static lighting but dynamic shadows, with full dynamic lighting, and in any case with self shadowing turned on or off, and half a dozen different techniques for actually drawing the shadows.