Release Why quake 3? and touchscreen suggestion


Meigus

Still Fresh
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First, why is quake 3 like the standard for ports/performance? I know it's got a great community and blah-blah, but I prefer the Unreal series as, at least to me, it had a more refined, or 'astute' experience, it wasn't such a run and twitch game. Unreal Tournament 2004 would just be the icing on the cake, as it had HUGE maps, and great gameplay. I feel even the Half-Life series outperformed quake3, and was comparable to Unreal Tournament, in terms of engine capability and fun gameplay. Even just being able to play Unreal 1 (single player) on the Pandora would be fantastic.

For those that will probably say "well it's close source", couldn't you just copy the coding, and replace the models, or even just recompile the engine from source, craft a 3d renderer, and transfer all the models, maps, and "rules", since it's a modular engine?

Second, I recently found that the game Prey Invasion for iPhone was made. It's a shooter game, where there's walk on walls and stuff, but my interesting note is they developed a new touchscreen feature: tap and aim+shoot. Instead of turning, and then maybe tapping the screen for aiming, or firing, you can tap the screen, say where your enemy is, and your character will rotate the proper angles and fire. This would be a great boost to an FPS experience, at least for the most part where a handheld has limited controls. This could be accompanied by a dual analog (left one moves, right one aims) setup like Unreal Tournament had for the PS2, or a traditional external mouse+keyboard setup.
 
Id tends to open source its engines, so they can be ported to multiple platforms. Epic don't open source their engines so Unreal doesn't get ported to multiple platforms.

If you can't run it, you can't use it as a benchmark.
 
Meigus said:
For those that will probably say "well it's close source", couldn't you just copy the coding, and replace the models, or even just recompile the engine from source, craft a 3d renderer, and transfer all the models, maps, and "rules", since it's a modular engine?

Erm, to "copy the coding" you'd need the source. If you had the source, then it wouldn't be closed source any more!

Yes, you could work out how the game works, and re code it from scratch, from first principles, but that'd take a loooong time - commercial games are made by huge teams of people,
 
Meigus said:
"well it's close source", <snip> just recompile the engine from source
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
 
Just so you guys know, Unreal and the Unreal 2 engine have been made publicly available. I just figured someone would scream out "but it's commercial, the engine can't have been made available"

Link for Unreal engine:

http://unrealtournament2004.filefront.c ... Code;50393

I don't know if this is all the code, but here's the Unreal 2 engine

http://download.beyondunreal.com/filewo ... ts3369.zip

I think it would be interesting to use a "dumbed down" version of the Unreal 2 engine, as besides the obvious improvement on graphics and stuff, it could just be used at less than maximum capacity to work on the Pandora, but still have potential if people wanted a hihg-end game.
 
I have a feeling the source they released wasn't the full complete source of everything you need to build the game, just parts.

http://openut.sourceforge.net/arch/FAQv220.txt

What sources have Epic released?


At present, only the Linux sound and graphics rendering code.

Daniel Vogel summarised the source release as follows:

- most headers to Core / Engine
- source to
- UTLaunch aka UnrealTournament executable
- UCC (only a stub as it dlopens the Engine stuff)
- Renderers
- D3DDrv
- GlideDrv
- OpenGLDrv
- XMesaGLDrv
- Viewport Managers
- XDrv
- Sound (Linux part)

The OpenUT project does NOT have access to the generic renderer, the
game core, engine, server, editor, or software renderer.

That's quite old, though, so more might have been released since. The original reason for the source release was to allow the community to improve the Linux version of UT, so they released the bits that had problems (the renderer and sound engines), but not the source for the actual game, since, I presume, the idea was for the original game can just use new plugin components
 
Found a compromise

I believe I found something you guys would LOVE to have:

the xreal engine, or the engine the xreal game uses

It's a quake3 engine upgrade, featuring hardware acceleration, per-pixel lighting, they've even already figured out walking-on-walls like Prey has. Graphically, it's similar to half-life 2 I think. It has HDR lighting, realtime shadows, all sorts of fun stuff instead of stupid lightmaps and crap.

Here's a page for screenshots:

http://xreal-project.net/?page_id=15

I bet if you checked the forum or something you could get the source code.
 
Re: Found a compromise

Meigus said:
I bet if you checked the forum or something you could get the source code.

XReal is already been looked at, and has been repeatedly. Problem is it requires more memory for static variables than the Pandora actually has, so it would take a fair amount of work to get it to go.

Quake 3 is the main focus because it is the best looking game that is open source (GPL licenced) and has been made to support OpenGL ES.

If ID open source iD Tech 4, we may also get Doom 3/Quake 4, which would be - epic (pun not intended)

If Epic/Valve started fully open-sourcing their older engines, that would be even better.
 
Well I fired off an email to the vice-president of Epic Games about releasing the source.

I'll post his response if I get one.

If it's a negative, I'll shut up. If not, well woo woo.

For the record, the ut432pubsrc contains lots of src stuff for graphics and audio and the "core" is there (but doesn't have a src folder). It's C++, and I can't tell if that's a good or bad thing cause I couldn't find a google page on C++ on the arm processor. It should be fine, except for the whole opengl ES thing.

Fingers crossed!
 
midna25 said:
WizardStan said:
Meigus said:
"well it's close source", <snip> just recompile the engine from source
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Inconceivable!

What I meant was that because it's a commercial game, some linux guy would always assume it's closed source, no matter what.


> -----Original Message-----
> Sent: Monday, August 03, 2009 2:38 AM
> To: Mark Rein
> Subject: Unreal Tournament 1 source
>
> Dear Mr. Rein
> I would like to know if there has been any consideration to release the
> Unreal Tournament 1 source code?
>
> The game is quite old, but the community is still alive. I would love
> to see the possibility of community driven upgrades and revamps to the
> game engine. No offense, but many people only use the Quake 3 engine
> for first-person-shooter development solely because it's open source.
>
> I think it would be a great publicity move. Both game players and
> developers would love to see more games based on the Unreal engine, for
> it's simplicity, elegance, versatility, and performance. Not to mention
> if it was extented upon for portable devices (think iPhone and such),
> your company name could reach a much larger audience than maybe more
> 'hardcore' gamers (such as those that play Gears of War 2 or Unreal
> Tournament 3).
>
> Your fan,
> Jake
>
> P.S. I would like to mention that by "release", I meant the Unreal
> Tournament graphics could be left proprietary/closed source, but the
> rest of the engine, including the renderers, the physics, the engine
> itself, etc, could be released in the original code.

Sorry but we have no plans to do that.


Mark Rein
Epic Games, Inc.

Visit us at http://www.epicgames.com


Man, I fricken hate this guy. If there was ever a better time to release the source code, he just re-iterates a resounding "I hate any possibility of our company coming back into the spotlight, or being known for anything good, ever"

I am so bitter. Their company makes poor choices.
 
There is a lot of work involved in taking something commercial and releasing it as open source.
They need to make sure the source doesn't contain any company secrets or private information; a comment that says "Hey Joe, if you're reading this, it probably means something went wrong. Call me on my cell, 123-456-7890" or an email address, or even just names, all would need to be removed.
They need to review any libraries they used to see if they're compatible with open source and rewrite anything that isn't.
There's a lot of legal work, sending lawyers through everything to make sure copyright notices are up to date, and all that other stuff.
It is not just "eh, here's the source." They actually have to do a lot of work, and they need to do a cost-benefit analysis to determine if it's worth it. You think it is, but you don't have all the information. Mark is privy to facts you aren't aware even exist, so he's in a better position to decide than you are.
 
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