Some general questions about water, shadows, standalone mods and fps

[Sprony]

Hello everybody,

I'm new here. I just registered. I used to be very active in mapping communities (as Infernis) and recently I felt like diving back into it. It's sad to see that so many communities have died. It also makes it harder to find information. Now I've been looking up sources for id Tech 4 editing which led me here. I've got some questions if you don't mind? Most of it is due to me being gone for over a decade, so I'm just out of the loop.

Has anyone successfully managed to add proper liquids to the engine? Back in the day their were some hacks, but none of the convincing. Water always looked terrible.
Did those hard black shadow lines on rocky terrain every got addressed by someone? Always bothered me.
I'm not a coder, but how difficult would it be to take an existing mod for example and make it standalone?
If that's possible, what can and can't you use from the game?
Id tech 4 always felt slow, even though it's capped to 60fps, it felt much slower than that. Now it was fixed in the BFG edition, but is there a fix for vanilla as well?
Are there still mods in development or is the scene dead?

Thank you for reading!

[The Happy Friar]

Hello everybody,

Howdy!  I'll do my best here.  Another good place for d3 tech info q/a is the discord in the upper right.

Has anyone successfully managed to add proper liquids to the engine? Back in the day their were some hacks, but none of the convincing. Water always looked terrible.

Not that I'm aware of.  Kind of depends on what you mean by "proper liquids" though.  Just for looks, I think there's a couple engine forks that improved it, but I'm not aware of any engine that did full fluid physics & the like.

Did those hard black shadow lines on rocky terrain every got addressed by someone? Always bothered me.

Can't say for all engines, but pretty sure fhDoom does: https://github.com/eXistence/fhDOOM

I'm not a coder, but how difficult would it be to take an existing mod for example and make it standalone?
[/size]If that's possible, what can and can't you use from the game?

To make a mod a 100% standalone product, besides replacing all stock assets that are used, you'd need to remake all the script/def/etc. files as those were never GPL'ed.  Honestly, that's what always stopped me.

Id tech 4 always felt slow, even though it's capped to 60fps, it fet much slower than that. Now it was fixed in the BFG edition, but is there a fix for vanilla as well?

Not sure what you mean by "felt slow".  It was a slower paced game then most shooters, but Q4, ETQW, Prey, those were pretty fast paced.  Or do you mean something else?

Are there still mods in development or is the scene dead?

Off the top of my head I know BladeGhost is still working on content: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG4o2Lt-NZrtTX3kYutTp1w
The moddb page for Doom 3 has stuff updated frequently too: https://www.moddb.com/games/doom-iii

Thank you for reading!

You're welcome!   

[Sprony]

Hello The Happy Friar! I remember your nickname from the Doom3world days.

Yeah, take water as an example. The possibility to swim in it or be submerged without it looking like crap. I haven't found anything yet either, so I guess not.
**EDIT**Well, I was going through your suggestion of fhDOOM, which is hosted on the Facing Hell website, and apparently they were working on adding water. The screenshots are still up.

I see, apparently RBDOOM-3-BFG does too (which your example is a fork of). It's specifically mentioned in the readme. Good to know.

I didn't expect it to be easy, but goes way beyond my capabilities. A lot of people don't have Doom 3 installed anymore and it would be cool to release a mod that's standalone so your potential reach is bigger.

The pace was slower, but even looking at videos it felt like it was running in 15fps or something. I don't exactly now how to describe it. But since there are source ports based on the BFG edition, that problem is solved.

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I gather I'll not be able to do what I wanted to do, which is a shame.

[aphexjh]

I'm not a coder, but how difficult would it be to take an existing mod for example and make it standalone?
If that's possible, what can and can't you use from the game?

I don't know how hard it would be, but Blendo released a minimal pack to get the process started. this might help. Seems to be working for them:

http://blendogames.com/files/d3_starterkit.zip

they also put up an BFG version which may be preferable for graphics and other modern comforts.

welcome.

[Sprony]

Thank you. I'll look into it.

[bitterman]

Blendo released a minimal pack to get the process started.

Thanks.

[motorsep]

Has anyone successfully managed to add proper liquids to the engine? Back in the day their were some hacks, but none of the convincing. Water always looked terrible.

What do you think of this water

[The Happy Friar]

I'm not seeing a pic or video. 

[motorsep]

I'm not seeing a pic or video.

That's odd :/ I am in Chrome and I see embedded video.

Here is a link (remove "_"): _https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsWMTX3E1WI