Doom 3 engine release and game code

[revelator]

i built ode with mingw64 and premake just to try it out and see if i would notice any laggyness. so far it runs ok hmm.
ode also uses c++ in places btw but the library is directly usable with c so yeah a bit easier than bullet.
did doom3 roll its own physics code ? .

[Spike]

my concerns with ode is summed up by a 4*4 grid of objects causing stack overflows within ODE and crashing, due to too many contact points.
alient arena has the luxary that its all C based and strongly tied to the engine, the ragdoll is specifically tied to a single model. The aproach pionered in DP attempts to give the QC full control (thus allowing players to kick barrels or whatever to the side by walking through them), but in doing so there is a massive overhead in verifying entity state and propogating ODE changes back to QC (plus qc->ode) and across the network.
If I were more serious about ODE, I would avoid all of that propogating and run it clientside only.

[toneddu2000]

[revelator]

ah aye i notice that to :S i got bullet compiled if you want something to compare with ? its c++ but linking to a C based engine is trivial at best though it might look a bit odd codewise.
i did wonder about dooms physics core and it seems they allready do things clientside so nice tbh i thought i read somewhere a long time ago that it used havoc but yeah that would not have gone well with futuremark to gpl there code hehe.
well not much besides my buzzing lately so i guess the thread hijack actually brought a bit more attention

[revelator]

im not sure but once got told that doom3 couldnt do large outdoor areas very well ? but tbh. i havent had a single problem even with very large outdoor maps so im a bit miffed hmm.
playing mass effect atm which has a very nice story (besides the console portage leftovers like the controls yuck. also you cannot jump so dont get stuck ).
my dream for a long time was doing a game similar based on nivens ringworld but as a PC game. sadly i lack any skill as a mapper
doom3 would be excellent for this (its fully capable of not being dark and gloomy hehe) it would be an insanely long game though as the story expands over about 9 books (pretty large books...).

[motorsep]

I'd like to ask Doom 3 gurus here a couple of questions.

I am still pondering the idea of using Doom 3 for Steel Storm 2. The questions is how hard would it be to work with Doom 3 compare to DarkPlaces ?

As Spike mentioned, working with ODE and skeletal is a pain (plus DP still has ODE broken in csqc). Documentation is zero on ODE, skeletal, and menuqc (menuqc is a b17ch, even with some help it takes ages to get simple menu with both kb and mouse working; I think scripting menu in Doom 3 would take equally long, but at least there is a comprehensive documentation for that) or most of the QuakeC (not the Quake 1 QuakeC) for that matter.

Quickly going over the scripts in Doom 3 and glancing at the SDK revealed that all the systems are ready and exposed to the script. All I have to do is to script characters, etc. and they will be looking up and down, their heads will follow other entities , etc. I am simplifying the case of course, but the documentation and commented scripts should help the development IMO.

One thing I wonder about is mesh collisions. How are they in Doom 3 ? Is it possible to have huge walking mechas and have player / monsters to walk under it?

So the ultimate questions are if it worth moving to Doom 3 GPL from DP, and how much more difficult would it be to develop using Doom 3 (I am not concerned about art pipeline at all, just coding), and would I be able to get away with mostly scripting vs C++ coding since SS2 is traditional FPS with some elements of other genres (occasional NPCs, etc.) ? Thanks.

[gnounc]

IODOOM channel on irc might be a better place to ask that.

[motorsep]

Asking.. Over there it's as quiet as here So, hopefully get answers from both places. Also people in #ioDoom3 are not familiar with QuakeC and DP.

[gnounc]

fair enough : )

[toneddu2000]

[motorsep]

There is nothing more to say, it's not working

[toneddu2000]

so is impossible to make ragdolls work?

[motorsep]

No idea. No one was able to do that yet. Plus even if it would be possible, it's no average coding job.

[Spike]

at this point, ragdoll is basically the same as that sagdoll mod, but with even more code.
Its theoretically possible, but really not nice to do.

[motorsep]

Any opinion of Doom 3, Spike ?