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Arx Fatalis Updated, Released Under GPL
Kevin Fishburne writes "According to WtF Dragon at Ultima Aiera, 'The long and short: Arkane Studios have released what is probably going to be the final patch for their Ultima Underworld-inspired game (which, indeed, they tried to license as the third entry in that series), Arx Fatalis. They have also released the source code for the game. That's right, the complete source of Arx Fatalis is available for download.' The readme notes that the original game installation is required in order to play the compiled game, as the data files are certainly still copyrighted. Linux is in need of a good FPS dungeon crawler, though the code will need a hell of a lot of cleanup as it's a VC8/9 project and uses DirectX (ugh...)."
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25782
I liked that game - but the really, REALLY disliked the amount of time it took to properly shape out letters with the mouse input. There just seemed to be no consistency with the way it judged the curves of input - I can understand the games with subtle puzzles on learning input mechanisms, but even with practice it came out more as random than a skill to build up.
If anyone can fix the input mechanisms for those spells using the source code, you'd be helping the game immensely.
Oh, and of course, remaking Ulima I & II would be a nice follow up... seems that's always been in the works for FPS modders, but it never seems to get completed. They're beautiful games that deserve the chance to appeal to modern gamers with a modern interface.
Ryan Fenton
After recently building a new PC, I've been searching for some games to play. Since almost all of the PC games coming out these days have malware in them, this classic and now open source game looks like a good, clean alternative. This game came out in 2002, so it should also be just before the point when PC games became nothing but sloppy console ports. I think *that* happened circa 2003.
Arx Fatalis looks like a nice game, but Arkane studios only released the source code. I wonder how much work it will require to replace all the graphics.
Here is a video with sample game play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2MM8bn1Tew
This game is awesome. This is great news.
, I could google it or look it up on Wikipedia, but to be honest, I don't enough to do so.
you apparantly don't even ' ' enough to bother to write ' ' in your post.
- Anonymous Melvin
http://www.opengl.org/documentation/current_version/
Graphics cards are now sold with OpenGL 4.0 support. It's not stuck at 2.0, like you're suggesting with Direct3D 9.
If you want to play FPS/RPGs, really, get a windows partition or a console. Not trying to flamebait or something, just being rational. The game is 8 years old, with the software engineering maturity of a random sample company that this fact implies. Data files being copyrighted. DX-based being ultra-fun to port. Nope, I can't see serious effort thrown into this. It only gets funnier with feature requests, improvements & bug fixes. The first post here is a request FFS, imagine the port's forums.
For research:
You have source code for Quake3. I bet it's coded far better than arx fatalis, and it's already there.
I think Fishburne meant to say that the "data files" are under different licenses (probably far more restrictively licensed) than the Arx Fatalis code. Since Arx Fatalis is licensed than it too must be copyrighted. So you may run, share, and modify the GPL'd Arx Fatalis program, but you don't have these freedoms with the "data files".
Digital Citizen
Yes, why should DX be considered awful? Many game devs choose it because it is a generally well documented API which evolves quickly and with hardware.
If there is one thing Microsoft has been doing well in the last decade is game libraries: between DX >= 7 and XNA it feels like there are alternatives but not opponents...
My book: Friendly F#, fun with game development and XNA; my game: Galaxy Wars by VSTeam; my gamedev language: Casanova.
Sources/DANAE/ARX_Script.cpp is 13719 lines in size, most of which handles script parsing and evaluation simultaneously, in a uselessly convoluted way. It deserves a proper rewrite from scratch.
I do like how they used names from Greek mythology to refer to certain components of the source code: Athena handles audio, Eerie handles some graphics, Mercury handles user input, Hermes is probably there for communication or saving/loading, Minos is only there for pathfinding and Danae gets everything else.
But then I bought it on XBOX because, seriously, those spells really aren't easy to cast, especially not with a touchpad. At least with the xbox controlle,r you just had to follow key-sequences.
I'm happy when people release source, but why do people think it is some sort of magical potion to create new software? This is especially true on Slashdot. I completely understand if you want to mod the existing source to patch the game, add on content or features, but for a new game, application, whatever, it's normally useless.
I do professional software development and I've worked for game companies as well as straight up businesses. I find that even the best written source that I authored is rarely useful for new projects. It's good to have a point of reference if you are inexperienced, doing something unfamiliar, or need something simple. I might say, "Hey I need to implement an A* algorithm, how do I do that again?" Anything remotely complex though in any real, decently designed piece of software ends up depending so much on the approach, tasks, framework, and environment it is developed. Even for simple algorithms like A*, it can depend highly on what graph library you use for example. It's nice to have if you've built an engine and you're releasing new software on the same engine.
In the real world though, often what happens is even when you write great code, technology advanced and the way you do things has to change. For instance I worked on PS3 projects and I might as well have flushed most of the significant game code I ever written down the toilet unless I wanted things to run like garbage. The same thing tends to happen when new versions of frameworks like OpenGL or DirectX come out. Especially in game programming, code becomes obsolete very quickly, usually as you write each line. What is valuable normally is the personal knowledge you gain from writing the old code, but that's much harder to gain from someone else's code at face value. Moreover, in game programming in particular, each game has such specialized concerns that huge chunks of code get written certain ways to be optimized for what you are doing. It's even worse in a commercial project because deadlines and such drive people to do incredibly stupid things to get out patches or builds. I wish I could get paid for the amount of times I fixed problems where someone just would add a random parameter, data type, or wrapped data type just to get something done rather than do it properly (you will see things like PlayerOptions2, PlayerOptions3 used side by side in real code because someone didn't want to change the old class).
Code reuse all sounds good on paper, but it ends up being mostly theory and pipe dreams. I do love having source to pick through, but usually it just says to me - wow, wtf was this person thinking, I can think of 10 better ways to do it. Like I said, good for inspiration and learning, bad for real application. I find it's usually the people that don't program or are really poor programmers who endlessly tout this kind of stuff. Bravo for releasing source, but boo to the summary for suggesting as much. Also boo for the jab at DirectX and VC - like it or not, people use it for a reason. I love Linux, but it's no joy to write games in, I'm sorry. And no, things like Boost and other popular C/C++ libs don't get used much in most real games for better or worse.
If someone can fix the impossible-to-get-outside-past-the-troll-in-the-cave-because-the-damn-objective-never-triggers bug so I can actually play the whole game for once I'd really appreciate it :)
Amusing CAPTCHA sequence today. Apparently I've had my bowels verified.
Couldn't you just compile it against Wine instead of porting it to OpenGL?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The FPS "modern" interface is, IMHO, overused and the addiction to virtual reality is what is killing the brain cells of the gamers. Profitable, sure, whizz-bang impressive makes profitable, sure, good games, definitely not.
The Ultima series is one of (perhaps only) the few that became better with sequels. That was because they were perfectly timed to progress with the progressing technology. Ultima I had good game play and story line but was primitive on graphics. Ultima II had good game play and good new concepts woven in but was similarly primitive on graphics. Ultima III (Exodus) took the intricate storyline concepts from I and II, meshed them together, and then put that into a fantastic and colorful UI with that completely outside background music.
What I miss is that Ultima ]I[ was not an FPS. I am sick and tired of FPSs. I haven't actually played a video game for more than an hour since the first release of Half-Life. After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang. Half-Life was still appealing because it was such an enormous improvement over DOOM (which was great because it really brought the FPS concept to life) because the hardware video card technology was once again on the perfect timeline (3D accelerating algorithms were beginning to stabilize). After Half-Life it was all the same; more whizz-bang, more glitz and glimmer, more anime, prettier girls, more graphica fantastica, more innuendo to keep the teenagers drewling.
What I miss about Ultima ]I[ is that the graphics were good, real good, game play was good, real good, game complexity was good, real good, and story line was complex, real good--it was also top down 2D so your characters _really_ looked the way you wanted them to look, the encounters were top down 2D so the enemies _really_ looked as frightening and gruesome as you wanted them to look, the battles were not movie quality full-motion video so you could imagine your spellcasting and imagine the impacts and imagine the blow by blow the way you wanted to imagine it.
Modern FPS is all about being brain dead and watching what we want you to watch. It is hardly different from advertising.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Nice troll try harder.
In case you are not trolling, hahaha keep drinking the MS koolaid bro; OpenGL is actually ahead of DirectX...
Looking at it, a lot of the init code revolves arounds windows stuff (HINSTANCE, for example), it looks difficult, somewhat.
And then, there are the damn tabs. Why does a "professional" IDE still use tabs for indentation?
Well, yeah. If they didn't do that then developers might create/use/improve cross-platform game libraries instead, and that's definitely not in Microsoft's interests. Games are one major area where it's far easier to just use Windows. Microsoft is more than smart enough to realize that this might change if they fail to cater to game developers. To them, furtherance of vendor lock-in is more than worth whatever money and resources they have to invest in development of DirectX.
It's the kind of thing that helps keep Windows from having to compete on its merits on a level playing field where migration to another platform is easy and relatively painless. A world where no one uses Windows unless they really do prefer it over other platforms is something they will struggle mightily to avoid. Easy cross-platform compatibility has never been in their interests.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
So you seem rather surprised and/or disgusted that a game that was written for MS Windows uses DirectX.
I guess if a Russian book written by a Russian author went public domain you would complain that it was written with a Cyrillic alphabet.
After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang.
Portal.
Oh, does it have to be an actual shooter? Alright, then, how about...
Natural Selection.
Half-Life 2.
etc...
But I chose Portal because your complaint was about the FPS interface. Portal makes good use of that interface to deliver a decidedly non-FPS game. So does Penumbra.
There's more that could be done, but I think leveraging the years of experience people have playing FPSes, and just the overall fluidity of that interface for actually exploring a 3D world, is far, far better than trying to make any sort of 3D game in which you reinvent the controls, badly. If I recall, The Sims was particularly annoying -- completely different controls which ended up being less effective overall.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You can get Arx Fatalis at Good Old Games for the required data files
Pfff no.
LOL
Games like Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D and the like are crediting with innovating and pushing 3D engines. People always seem to forget Ultima Underworld. Ultima Underworld shipped a full year before Doom, ran on lesser hardware, and had a more advanced engine.
It really is a shame these two games aren't very playable on modern systems and have been forgotten in the mists of time.
I'd kill to see the GPL Arx Fatalis engine used to remake Ultima Underworld I and II.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I liked that game - but the really, REALLY disliked the amount of time it took to properly shape out letters with the mouse input. There just seemed to be no consistency with the way it judged the curves of input - I can understand the games with subtle puzzles on learning input mechanisms, but even with practice it came out more as random than a skill to build up.
After a while, I figured out the trick. The rune stones that showed the direction/angle of curves were displayed not perfectly upright, but they were tilted maybe 10 degrees. So if you saw a line on a runestone that suggested a perfectly vertical line, it probably isn't what you were supposed to draw. Tilt your head to figure it out. But yeah, it was annoying until you learn about that trick.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
What I miss is that Ultima ]I[ was not an FPS. I am sick and tired of FPSs. I haven't actually played a video game for more than an hour since the first release of Half-Life. After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang. Half-Life was still appealing because it was such an enormous improvement over DOOM (which was great because it really brought the FPS concept to life) because the hardware video card technology was once again on the perfect timeline (3D accelerating algorithms were beginning to stabilize). After Half-Life it was all the same; more whizz-bang, more glitz and glimmer, more anime, prettier girls, more graphica fantastica, more innuendo to keep the teenagers drewling.
I think FPS games are more of a phase... I played lots of them probably starting with Doom (1993) and mostly ending with Unreal Tournament (1999) - my teens to my early 20s. If I had been born a decade later, I'm guessing I'd be playing the FPS games of a decade later but today they have no appeal to me. The fact is, if you take of those rosy glasses you were pretty easy to entertain as a teen. Give you action, give you splatter and you're entertained. In retrospect it's quite amazing how much I liked some rather braindead action flicks too, same thing. Particularly the single-player mode got all the complexity of Rambo, one man against a million of them. In the end I think it was "Capture the Flag" and my clan that kept me on UT, because they brought a bit of strategy and cooperation, pure deathmatch lost the appeal long before I quit.
So to sum it up, I don't think the games changed I think you changed. And there'll always be a generation of teens that want to play these games, just like there's always a generation of children to play children's games. Of course there are FPS games that appeal to a more adult gamer, that resemble real life where you have to sneak and cover and a few shots will kill you and there's real penalties for dying. But the whole "fantasy" FPS games where you dance around each other trying to hit the other guy with the rocket launcher and pocket nukes to get a MU-MU-MU-MULTIKILL and it's all about your mouse twitching skill are things I doubt appeal to many people over 25. Well, less so than other game types anyway as I still play games of Civilization and have done so since the original in 1991. I wouldn't be surprised if I sit these on the nursery home bored and whip up a game of Civilization XVII.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Towards the end of the accompanying license file, you'll find...
END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS
ADDITIONAL TERMS APPLICABLE TO THE ARX FATALIS GPL SOURCE CODE.
While GPL3 authorises some flavours of additional term, these ones contain spelling errors - DAMAEGS, LIABLITY - which suggest they really haven't spent much time on this.
Take off your anti-MS blinders. OpenGL hasn't even been ahead of DirectX, and likely won't ever be.
a tomato and a .. ... ...
nevermind, what linux needs is a good mmorg engine, that can handle the I/O (atk, def, dodge,crit, etc...) and synchronise
in real-time player separated by continents and with multi 100s milliseconds lag
the graphic is handled by the client anyways. just need to co-ordinate the "roll of the dice"
OpenGL is ALWAYS ahead of Direct3D, because OpenGL can accept more instructions that are not built into D3D. As long as the card has the power to do it, you can drop that new instruction in and it can be supported. You have to wait for the same thing to purposely be built into Direct3D.
Which means D3D will always be behind in development.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Despite the tone, that's not what the GP said. He said DirectX 9 was when it surpassed OpenGL and I'm inclined to agree. This is around 2002, when the last big OpenGL games like Neverwinter Nights and Unreal Tournament 2003 were released. Version numbers are a little irrelevant when pretty much every major game made since has chosen to use DirectX and still do. May I point you to this story from 2008 - six years later when OpenGL 3.0 finally comes out and people call it a great disappointment? And that if you port it to OpenGL 4 only people running blobs can run it because mesa doesn't support OpenGL 3/4 and so neither do any open source drivers?
Be honest and admit that the OpenGL game market has been microscopic. While certainly there are a few OpenGL games, nobody has taken a serious interest in improving OpenGL for gaming use in many, many years and the fact that OpenGL 3 and 4 exist at all is more due to workstation and CAD/CAM use than anything else. Best proven by the fact that AMD and nVidia support it in their drivers - meaning they have a business case for it, while the community lack people and interest. True, OpenGL has seen some interest lately with mobile platforms but they live on limited hardware and OpenGL ES is much more a port of OpenGL 2.x than an effort to compete with DirectX.
I don't think there can be any doubt that Microsoft puts a helluva lot more time and money into DirectX than anyone does for OpenGL. And the same goes for the drivers AMD and nVidia put a helluva lot more time and money into optimizing DirectX than they do for OpenGL. Because that's where the money is. Here's AMD in direct reply to "A single open source driver with feature-parity and equal performance to the closed source drivers would certainly satisfy all customers." and I quote Yep, it would. It would also cost more each year than our total Linux graphics revenues. I would have a tough time presenting a "we lose massive amounts of money but make people happy" plan to our executives. Nobody spends money on OpenGL unless it's a moneymaker for them, and unlike the kernel there aren't many of those.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm a pretty hardcore gamer, but I've never heard of this game before. It sounds like a niche game. Can somebody give me a better description of it?
I know, I could google it or look it up on Wikipedia, but to be honest, I don't enough to do so.
Let's put it in a way a "hardcore" gamer like you understands it; it's like Halo, but good.
Actually one of the factors still driving OpenGL is that when Nvidia or AMD want to try out a new feature, they simply write it as an OpenGL extension and it's there to work with, while DirectX doesn't admit extensions _at all_. Now that DirectX is iterating very quickly and hand-in-glove with the GPU makers, this difference in process is academic on the consumer end, but the internal developers are still likely to reach for OpenGL first.
If Gallium gains any momentum, we might even see the end of some of the nastiest problems remaining in OpenGL pertaining to state management. Still seems a big if though...
I think it's more of a preference, personally. I played Doom and Doom 2 and I'm still playing Fallout and Oblivion.
That's more or less saying "FPS games are for kids, and the ones adults enjoy don't count". I think you need to work a bit harder to establish your point here.
I knew there was a reason I stayed away from multiplayer ...
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
One hears this argument a lot and it is bullshit. If crap graphics are better because they leave more to your imagination, should it not also follow that a game like Doom is better than one with a complex storyline because it leaves the plot to your imagination? If you can't cope with seeing what the characters look like, how do you ever manage to put up with being told what they say and do?
Would it be possible to port it to XBOX 360 with XNA or to a modded original XBOX with the underground XDK? The mouse input system would surely need to be overhauled to work with a game pad.
...so, where are the fully open-source OpenGL library + drivers that has more features than (or even just feature parity with) DirectX 11?
Oh, I see.
Coffee-driven development.
I haven't actually played a video game for more than an hour since the first release of Half-Life. After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang.
Then you missed out on a number of great FPS games like System Shock 2, Star Trek: Elite Force, Deus Ex, Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, Star Trek: Elite Force II, Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Half-Life 2, Prey and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay.
In fact, I would say the original Half-Life was crap. It was a generic shooter that didn't bring anything new to the genre.
, I could google it or look it up on Wikipedia, but to be honest, I don't enough to do so.
you apparantly don't even ' ' enough to bother to write ' ' in your post.
Perhaps he accidentally the whole thing?
This game was plagued by bugs when I decided to buy it a year or so ago on steam. It was basically unplayable from glitches with the graphics and slowdowns on modern hardware. Hopefully now we can kill 2 birds with one stone, update the graphics bugs and port to other os'es so others won't have to play in wine. It was a good game, and it's pretty cheap on steam (under 10 dollars last I checked) so it could use all the help it can get. Knowing the state it is in now, it will probably be much work, but it will add nicely to the games that went gpl lately, especially since they weren't willing to do any updates. I wish more companies would do the same for games they have no want to update to the latest os'es and just let rott in their IP library.
DX is awful because it isn't cross-platform.
Now why it isn't possible to port DX to other platforms (i.e., make an open-source DX work-alike library that has the same API as DX, so that porting DX games requires little more than a recompile), I have no idea. If someone did such a thing, and it worked well, then DX would no longer be "awful". But as long as it's single-platform only, then it's awful.
It's a lot like PDF. If Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader) were the only way to view PDFs, and you had to use only Adobe's $$$ tools to write PDFs, then PDF would be an "awful" standard. However, there's tons of alternative readers and writers, both closed-source and open-source, for PDF, including FoxIt on Windows, and Okular and Evince on Linux, various PDF libraries, OpenOffice writes PDFs natively, etc., so PDF is actually a really useful and good standard, because it isn't locked into one vendor or platform, even though Adobe is the vendor which created it.
So what's so hard about improving OpenGL to be as good as DX? Is it too encumbered by committees or something? Also, why can't someone make a cross-platform DX clone library, which uses the same API as DX?
I think it's more of a preference, personally. I played Doom and Doom 2 and I'm still playing Fallout and Oblivion.
I played through Oblivion but I've no idea how you can call that a FPS, most people would put that squarely in the RPG category even though most RPGs have bows and arrows as well as ranged spells. When I think FPS I think more like Crysis, Call of Duty, Bioshock or Far Cry 2. Fallout is something of a FPS-RPG crossover. I'd say the essence of an FPS is that it's a high intensity adrenaline rush game that requires good aim and staying on the move, not just good equipment and high level. Most game modes particularly in multiplayer is one big rush from start to finish, there's never a second downtime. The further you get from that formula the less I consider it an FPS. In any case, I never said it was one size fits all - but I think many people consider that too much stress after a while..
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...so, where are the fully open-source OpenGL library + drivers that has more features than (or even just feature parity with) DirectX 11?
Oh, I see.
Where is the fully open-source DirectX 11 library + drivers that has feature parity with anything? (d3d1x lacks working drivers, so don't mention it.)
Oh, I see.
The graphics *were* good, they're horrible by today's standards. Furthermore, how can a top down 2D tile based game convey more realism than a 3D game depicting the viewpoint of one of its participants? That's why FPS's took off, they are more immersive. That's also why Half-life (a game you appear to classify as the last good FPS) was so well received - it was the first FPS game whose scripted events did not allow the camera to leave the player character's viewpoint. Take a look at the Deus Ex 3 boards and see how many people are up in arms about 3rd person cover, people are more at home with FPS style play. While I agree that most FPS games are terrible these days, or are halfway between terrible and good (e.g. mass effect 2 - great story, horrible cover based level design), the FPS system is not at fault, it's the nervous publishers who won't back a project that's a bit of a gamble. And yes, I think Call of Duty is ruining our children.
Despite the tone, that's not what the GP said. He said DirectX 9 was when it surpassed OpenGL and I'm inclined to agree. This is around 2002, when the last big OpenGL games like Neverwinter Nights and Unreal Tournament 2003 were released.
Minecraft
Have you considered that maybe Ultima ]|[ looked so good because you were younger and more easily impressionable?
And that is true. What Half-Life allegedly brought to the genre is the same thing Duke Nukem 3D brought.... it's an overrated credit moocher.
Your answer is nonsensical in context. Someone is claiming that OpenGL is far ahead of DirectX 11 - someone else is claiming that isn't the case.
Whether it is open source or not is immaterial.
As far as I can tell, OpenGL as a whole is probably on a par with DirectX, except that finalisation of a version number of OpenGL has to be done by committee. o, where you have Microsoft talking to graphics card providers first and agreeing a standard on where DirectX is going to go next, for OpenGL each manufacturer implements their own proprietary extensions and then the OpenGL committee decides later which of those is going to be standardised.
This means that although OpenGL as a whole has on a par feature-wise with DirectX, you have a situation by which any version of DirectX will be inherently ahead of any given version of OpenGL, because programmers really don't want to code graphics to extensions that only exist for one company.
As much as I don't like linking to Wiki, they do have a good comparison here. However, considering it's mostly original research, despite the fact that it's one of the more useful articles there it will probably be deleted sooner or later.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Not to mention it looked as good as anything else at the time...
Heck, I remember being quite impressed by how good Ultima 5 looked, and it's still the same level of technology as Ultima 3 & 4.
They just got smarter with the colors.
It's the kind of thing that helps keep Windows from having to compete on its merits
But those are its merits. Having a clean and well implemented gaming API where gaming is highly desirable for many people is a merit! What is stopping you, or anybody, from downloading the latest DX SDK and reimplementing it in *nix? Just that it's a damn huge amount of absolutely non trivial work. Add to that work the complexity of designing it in the first place, and you get why it is a major strong point of Windows.
Also, game developers are not idiots and do not care the least bit about Microsoft. DX is chosen instead of cross-platform libraries simply because it works well and is consistently implemented well by good quality drivers for practically all modern graphics cards. No game developer in their right mind would ever wish to have a chance to "create/use/improve" other tools just because those are cross-platform. Gamedev is a damn hard business in itself, and the better the API the less ginormous an undertaking making a game becomes.
My book: Friendly F#, fun with game development and XNA; my game: Galaxy Wars by VSTeam; my gamedev language: Casanova.
Lol, you have no clue, do you? A gaming library is a very complicated piece of software where a correct implementation is as important as a fast implementation. This means a lot of stuff that is very specific to the hardware on which the code will run. If it were this simple, a compatible implementation would already be there; the reason why it isn't is that such a library is full of nasty stuff like quaternions (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb281611(VS.85).aspx) and worse. This means that to implement something like DirectX you need developers who are great developers capable of writing very low-level code that directly accesses the underlying hardware (be it CPU instruction sets or GPU operations) and good mathematicians who understand the mathematical nuisances of computer-approximated algebra.
There is exactly one DirectX in the world. If some other entity shows that it is possible to undertake such a powerful development effort without being a company that throws lots of money to the problem, then I will be very glad.
And OpenGL is a graphics rendering system, not a gaming library, so the two are not easily compared without taking into account a fuckload of input, audio, networking and loop/windows management additional libraries.
My book: Friendly F#, fun with game development and XNA; my game: Galaxy Wars by VSTeam; my gamedev language: Casanova.
It was the Ultima Underworld 3, Origin-Looking Glass never did.
Actually lots of people never heard of it, it is one of those european RPG gems almost none in the US have noticed because it either did not get any reviews or just lousy reviews by us mags because there was no big US publisher behind it (another prime example is Gothic 2 one of the best RPGs ever made). The game really is a gem, it has written Ultima Underworld all over it.
Problem is, OpenGL is only the graphics stack and nowadays the computing stack. DirectX covers way more ground take what OpenGL does, add some isolation code for input, sound i/o, networking etc.. and you get DirectX.
None of that is present on OpenGL and only a subset (Networking) is standardized over all machines, the mess starts as soon as you have to handle sound and input devices, have fun!
I think there's room for a little overlap in the categories, myself. RPG means the game has role-playing elements. FPS means it's a first person viewpoint. IMHO, obviously. Granted, "shooter" is probably a bit of a stretch in the case of Oblivion.
Well, if it helps I've played Crysis (lovely game, but too short and too buggy), Bioshock (loved it) and Far Cry. When I think about FC2, I imagine a scene at Ubisoft:
It's probably a better game than I give it credit for, but as a Far Cry sequel, it was a major disappointment.
And yet in Cysis I spent most of my time in stealth mode evading patrols. Likewise in Far Cry. Bioshock has a couple of mad adrenaline moments, but you can usually play tactically and manage the size of your engagements. I think you're describing a style of play more than a game genre.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
OpenGL 3.0 finally comes out and people call it a great disappointment?
Pretty much the sum of their complaints was that they decided to deprecate a load of stuff, rather than removing it outright, so old programs still compiled and worked with the new API. How terrible. Direct3D releases a new interface for each version, so porting from DirectX 9 to DirectX 10 is almost as much effort as porting to OpenGL 3. In contrast, porting from GL2 to GL3 just meant some refactoring.
OpenGL 3.1 then actually did remove things, and came with a core that was roughly equivalent to Direct3D in terms of functionality, plus extensions.
Be honest and admit that the OpenGL game market has been microscopic.
Mac games use OpenGL, although that's not a huge market. All mobile phones use OpenGL ES (basically, OpenGL without any of the legacy stuff), and that's currently a huge market. Most current consoles support OpenGL ES and provide an OpenGL-derived native API.
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i played it a couple of times way back when but it suffers from a major bug, as your character levels it becomes hungry at an absurd rate so you can only kill so much stuff and gain so much xp before you find yourself starving faster than you can down food. hope they fix it by removing the whole hunger thing and just turn food into something that gives only a slight hp heal or does nothing.
captcha: chubbier
sometimes i swear that whole computer singularity thing has already occurred...
Modern FPS is all about being brain dead and watching what we want you to watch. It is hardly different from advertising.
Really? Have you played Oblivion?
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Modern FPS is all about being brain dead and watching what we want you to watch. It is hardly different from advertising.
Really? Have you played Oblivion?
Ah, I read "first person simulator" where you meant "first person shooter". Agree, used to play a lot of shooters, got tired of it. Very little imagination in the genre, just an addiction to higher frame rates and more polygons. I suppose that is why Bethesda ended up aborbing id and not the other way round.
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Considering the size of the non-Windows gaming market, not being cross-platform isn't really a handicap.
Be honest and admit that the OpenGL game market has been microscopic
You're quite the troll, aren't you? Fact: OpenGL drives the entire console world except for XBox. Fact: OpenGL drives the entire smartphone game market. Fact: OpenGL is cross platform, GL is not. Fact: AAA OpenGL titles continue to be released regularly on Windows (id's technical dominance of each new engine generation ensures this).
Now with a much more efficient community process (Kronos) OpenGL is at least at parity with Direct3D and soon will surpass it, with a far nicer, more consistent, and more widely supported API. The Microsoft monkey is very nearly off the back of the graphics community, except for a few trolls like you.
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OpenGL 3.0 finally comes out and people call it a great disappointment?
Pretty much the sum of their complaints was that they decided to deprecate a load of stuff, rather than removing it outright, so old programs still compiled and worked with the new API. How terrible. Direct3D releases a new interface for each version, so porting from DirectX 9 to DirectX 10 is almost as much effort as porting to OpenGL 3. In contrast, porting from GL2 to GL3 just meant some refactoring.
OpenGL 3.1 then actually did remove things, and came with a core that was roughly equivalent to Direct3D in terms of functionality, plus extensions.
I am so glad Kronos did the reasonable thing and didn't throw out the entire API like some noisy game engine hotheads wanted. Immediate most is just so much faster to prototype new ideas with, this fact is often overlooked by developers who are just trying to optimize an existing code base. It would be really stupid to ever actually drop it from development profiles of OpenGL (and if any hardware vendor momentarily forgets this an angry mob of engineering organizations with be quick to remind them). The right thing to do is exactly what kronos did: make the fixed function pipeline including immediate mode an optional profile so you can do your development work in full comfort and hone your code down to the guaranteed-in-hardware subset at your leisure.
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GL is not
Ahem. DX is not.
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really? first person perspective is a step in the right direction. a true virtual reality is indistinguishable from real reality save for setting and whatnot. we are nowhere near 'virtual' reality as it is. dont be bitter just because your favorite things are outdated, be bitter that the target audiences are so dumb and marketed to that it kills what legitimacy the medium once had as an expressive form.
> So what's so hard about improving OpenGL to be as good as DX?
Graphic performance they are about par. I'm sure you could find someone from either camp showing benchmarks that their API of choice is better - but for most cases, they are about the same.
In terms of "everything else" some would say Microsoft wins here. Direct X does audio, input and even networking.
I personally like OpenAL or SDL is also good. I also think OpenGL being cross platform outweighs any downside.
The other benefit of DX is that Microsoft has captured the "heart and minds" of commercial game developers.
If you want a job on a commercial game it would be better to know DX rather then OpenGL in 95% of the cases.
> Also, why can't someone make a cross-platform DX clone library, which uses the same API as DX?
Realistically it's going to come down to converting DX calls to OpenGL unless you want to write it all from scratch. In fact, there has been various attempts to do this. Wine does it up to a certain version of DX.
Nothing legally or technical is stopping a full Open Soruce DX API. It's just extremely messy and difficult to convert DX -> OpenGL.
Writing this would require intimate knowledge of both APIs.
The only benefit would be converting older games. If you want your new game to be cross platform, why just not write in OpenGL directly?
I disagree, cross platform is indeed important since we are not just talking in terms of PC OS here. Only xbox360 market is DX driven and the others tend to be opengl. In fact the very reason MS released the xbox (ver 1) and started down the path Carmack said they would (and was one of the few who could really make a difference who opposed MS moves early on in a very vocal manner and put his money where his mouth was by proving how opengl was indeed just as good).
They made millions from their Windows games and then later used a fraction of those millions to port to OSX. So that is a model that should be avoided?
It's not that simple. Doing it the other way though (interpreting DX calls) is coming along ok in the Wine project.
It seems to be a hell lot of work to get it compiled with g++ and linked against wine.
Someone already works all day and night:
https://github.com/lubosz/ArxFatalis
It's not the drivers, the game engine just needs to include an extension in their own renderer.
You can drop new features that D3D and the current revision standard of OpenGL (4.0 as of writing) do not natively support into OpenGL.
The drivers themselves to not have to support it, as the extension is written to work with the driver itself.
Go load up any Quake and go look at all those extension detections.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yes because they could have made millions in the first place and not use any fraction later on and make more millions.
Using OpenGL is really win-win for game developers.
I know how GL extensions work, and it definitely wasn't a fun model to work with. It's nice being able to test new features, yes, and back when new DirectX versions were ages between GL had the upper hand here... but having to manage several different vendor-specific codepaths sucked.
I don't agree that vendor extensions means OpenGL will always be ahead of DirectX anyway, since the platform as a whole isn't. With DX (especially after they dropped the crappy caps flags) you pretty much know what you're going to get...
Coffee-driven development.
OGL is still ahead of D3D.
OGL is purely hardware based.
There's an additional abstraction layer with D3D and it's CPU limited.
This is why games like Unreal Tournament always ran faster with the (experimental) OpenGL Renderer or 3Dfx Glide versus their D3D renderer. You could run UT with a 133Mhz Pentium and a 4MB Voodoo2 card, or you could go with the minimum 233Mhz and 8MB Direct3D video card to get about 2/3 the framerate of a 'lower-powered' system.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Just how long is it since you've used DirectX games, and have you ever programmed either GL or DX? O_o
I coded using both...
Let me to tell you coding with DirectX was a masochists dream. Hundreds of lines of code for the simplest things... Thanks but no...
Yep, tried both for simple video overlays and for rendering hydroponics systems and sheds like this.
OpenGL is much faster and requires much less horse power to render.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I think 3Dfx GLide was easier than D3D/DX, and GLide was convoluted compared to OGL.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
OP was talking about Ultima Underworld 1 and 2.