TTimo Announces Experimental Framework For New Games

[grigi]

Nice :-)
The best of the opensource tools put together, and working in a quite elegant way :-)

PS: 0MQ handles in-process communication using shared memory, so, pretty much no overhead :-)
Actually, 0MQ seems particularily well suited, as it doesn't try to manage reliability and in a game you don't want a queue of old input messages creating artificial lag. And I guess for sound, if you run out of resources to play sound effects, you can reliably skip that message too :-)
And a connector to AI as a multiplayer unit in another thread is much the same logic as an actual multiplayer game, since 0MQ doesn't care.
Hmmm.... I'm gonna watch this :-)

[varikonniemi]

This is exactly what has been lacking all this time. We need a "game engine kernel" that is suitable for all types of games inside one genre. That way work has not to be duplicated across the plethora of projects that are out there, and collaboratively working on one Linux FPS engine will bring forth a new paradigm of how to design game engines. Just as Linux brought a new paradigm in OS design.

[IanS]

I don't even see sound support.

I'm guessing that would be one use of SDL2.

[elanthis]

The main reason it's news is because TTimo is behind it. It has a much better chance of being developed and actually going somewhere.

"This work is a fun side project for me. I'm only giving it a few hours here and there as time and energy permits. " - TTimo's own words. TTimo is just one of the many thousands of equally-accomplished game developers doing a side project in their spare time, few of which ever turn into anything noteworthy, and it's only interesting news to non-fanboys when those projects _do_ turn into something noteworthy. A number of indie games get their start that way, e.g. how Minecraft was Notch's hobby while he worked at King.com; and he is a _way_ less talented developer than TTimo and didn't get well-known until after Valve's (iirc) blog tweeted about Minecraft, again showing how the name behind a project doesn't mean anything. I'm a bit leery of TTimo's proposed concurrency model given how that model was already the de facto standard and then abandoned in the early years of the XBox360, but then he's designing for a rather specific game model (Quake3-style twitch shooters) which the commercial space has moved on from so he might be on to something interesting for fans of such games. Hopefully this project will get far enough along for us to find out.

[Harley]

Checkout these involved blog posts by John Carmack and Michael Abrash on the importance on reducing latency for VR headsets like the Oculus Rift:

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/latency-the-sine-qua-non-of-ar-and-vr/

http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2013/02/22/latency-mitigation-strategies/

[Harley]

Sound like this could be perfect to use by game engines for the Oculus Rift!

Checkout this lengthy and involved blog post by John Carmack on latency problems in games when it comes to the Oculus Rift:

http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2013/02/22/latency-mitigation-strategies/

Virtual Reality headset for 3D-games like the Oculus Rift are extremely latency sensitive. In fact, the Oculus VR team have already informed the companies making the top commercial game engines and games, as well as graphics card manufacturers, that they seriously need to do everything that they can to reduce latency in games and drivers to make them work gread on VR headsets.

Posted link to this news article on the Oculus VR developer forums here:

http://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=1004

[n3wu53r]

The obvious question to answer once this matures some more is, "is it reasonable to actually build a game on this?" Right now it's like three files with a ton of hard-coded everything and now way to actually build up a world, specify networking synchronization for multiplayer, define game logic, or so on. I don't even see sound support. It's one day old so it's silly to expect more, but as of right now this is news the same that one kid's senior project renderer on GitHub is news: it isn't.

The main reason it's news is because TTimo is behind it. It has a much better chance of being developed and actually going somewhere.

[MaxToTheMax]

Haven't dug into this yet, but TTimo has the experience to pull this off, and his stated design goals are exactly right. I will be following this project with interest.

[elanthis]

The obvious question to answer once this matures some more is, "is it reasonable to actually build a game on this?" Right now it's like three files with a ton of hard-coded everything and now way to actually build up a world, specify networking synchronization for multiplayer, define game logic, or so on. I don't even see sound support. It's one day old so it's silly to expect more, but as of right now this is news the same that one kid's senior project renderer on GitHub is news: it isn't.

[slojam]

Hallelujah! An id guy finally gets it! Quake3 was the last decent thing they made. Yeah, Doom3 may run just great now, but 10 years ago it was slow laggy choppy crap. Games should be rock solid 60fps or higher. If the shiny junk and the shadows can't be rendered lightning fast, leave them out.