Steel Storm 2 Development Update: Not Too Fast

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Steel Storm 2 Development Update: Not Too Fast

For those curious about the development progress on Steel Storm 2, a quick video update has been published...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE2ODI

[alexThunder]

Afaik there are only 2 people working at steel storm 2 and ToM (at the same time?), so you shouldn't expect a rapid development.

After playing the first steel storm and ToM alpha, I think it's worth the waiting

[curaga]

If they're using straight-up Tech4, isn't that a step backwards from DarkPlaces in many ways? Tech4's most advanced pipeline was GL assembly, IIRC, while DarkPlaces has supported many modern methods for a while.

[n3wu53r]

Michael,

DarkPlaces, which is a heavily-modified version of the open-source id Tech 2 engine

.
Id tech 2 generally refers to the Quake 2 engine. Id tech 1 refers to the Quake 1 engine or the Doom engine.
Darkplaces is based off the Quake 1 engine.

[schmidtbag]

Michael,
.
Id tech 2 generally refers to the Quake 2 engine. Id tech 1 refers to the Quake 1 engine or the Doom engine.
Darkplaces is based off the Quake 1 engine.

Darkplaces is based on Quake 1 but supports some content from Quake 3.


Here's an interesting chart I found on id engines:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...amily_tree.svg

The chart does confuse me a little because I thought Rage was a new engine, is it not? Also, where's the bajillion games associated with Doom 3?

[Xilanaz]

Afaik there are only 2 people working at steel storm 2 and ToM (at the same time?), so you shouldn't expect a rapid development.

After playing the first steel storm and ToM alpha, I think it's worth the waiting

agreed, Michael should give the new ToM video some attentions, it really is getting a lot better.

btw KoT posted a why he moved to idtech4 http://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.p...t-update.1003/

Yeah, right There is one particular bug that heavily contributed to my desire to switch - player getting stuck in the terrain (or hitting invisible walls). That bug had been in DP for ages, it got a partial fix and never got completely resolved.
ODE physics isn't working on client side at all. Afaik only one type of ODE joints works. Real-time radiosity which claimed to be working doesn't seem to be working with BSP levels (at least no matter what I did I was unable to get it working with BSP levels) and it 100% doesn't work with real-time generated levels on ToM.

DP devs don't care to implement certain features in engine (matrix transformations for ragdolls is one of them). A lot of features had been thrown into the engine without testing, so when we dug deeper we got bugs that sometimes are not fixed.

Another issue with svn repo not being updated means the engine is no longer actively supported. Meaning if we get a bug that needs urgent attention, it won't get fixed. And I don't mean bug created by us, I mean a bug that has been dormant for years.

So while DP could be successfully used in another top-down game, or side scroller, or Quake 3 like game, I wouldn't use it for something more modern - lacks features that are widely accepted and are defacto standard in modern games (some of those features could be implemented in QuakeC, but is way less than optimal solution and will be slow)

Going with idTech 4 has many advantages over DP, but also has trade offs (awesome networking is one of them)

[curaga]

I find that a bit funny thing to say about an open engine. Are they perhaps paying for DarkPlaces support, to be entitled to quick bugfixes and added features only they need?

[KameZero]

I find that a bit funny thing to say about an open engine. Are they perhaps paying for DarkPlaces support, to be entitled to quick bugfixes and added features only they need?

He never said he was entitled to it, he was asked why he wasn't using DP for this game and he gave his reasons.

[curaga]

No engine is going to be a 100% match, unless one is creating an exact clone of what it was made for.

There will be similar blocks for whatever new engine, no?

[yogi_berra]

Edit your damn videos so we don't have to sit through 50 seconds of the mouse cursor moving about the damn screen!