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."

Comments

great

[Turiko]

hopefully this will lead to more modern-looking open-source games. That's the reason the regular gamer won't play open-source. Unless there's somethign else i nthe game you can't find anywhere else :P.

Humility would be a virtue

[kripkenstein]

YAFPS

Not only YAFPS, but also the screenshots are poorer than other FOSS FPSes. For example, they lack basics such as dynamic shadows.

It seems the article authors got excited from the claim that the engine is written in GLSL and is OpenGL 3.0-focused. That, and the engine developer is not exactly humble, with claims like "definitely the most advanced open-source game engine".

Instead of dissing other engines - which offer greatly superior visuals, to boot, just look at screenshots - he should let his achievements speak for themselves. They don't, thus far.

Re:Humility would be a virtue

[zwei2stein]

Bad art direction makes good engine look unimpressive.

And good art will make feature lacking engines look awesome.

Re:Humility would be a virtue

[TheRaven64]

This will probably be modded down, but it's worth highlighting. Diablo II looked great for its era, and was basically a 2D engine. Duke Nukem 3D was really 2.5D, but unless the monsters got really close it often looked much better than Quake (for one thing, duke3D could happily run at 800x600 on machines that struggled to do more than 400x300 with Quake).