id Tech Forums

Ok yesterday i got updated to win10 1903 and now gamma is no longer working wtf... ?!?
Does not work on any opengl engines that uses wingdi actually  , this seems to be a bug in 1903 but microsnot
seems to believe they fixed it (well they did not...) sigh.

Well my experiments with using darkmods SMP system has yielded some interresting results.
vsync on 58.5 fps on sikkmod Oo. sadly SSAO and softshadows continue to be major FPS sinks due to the fact that sikkmod uses a hacked depthrenderer to simulate real depthrender access.
But everything else was on and previous runs without the darkmod optimizations only yielded about 25 to 30 fps with
those options.

So it gives a rather neat speed boost .

One gripe though was with the hybrid GLSL ARB2 renderer, it causes bad UV's in maps with loads of decal blood, so it might be prudent to turn of GLSL interactions when using sikkmod.
Weird thing is that it only affects sikkmod other mods work fine so wtf...

Eh yes ?!?.

What i meant with physx is that it will only run with "GPU acceleration" on nvidia cards.
It runs fine on AMD but with lower performance as a side effect.
Bullet runs with hardware accelleration on both AMD and Nvidia.

Frostbite is actually a pretty good engine but as was the case with idtech4 it was a niche product since it could not handle an RPG out of the box (it was mostly used for shooters and car games).
Bioware had to implement a facial animation system as well as several other elements like inventory and whatnot.
Sadly this coupled with a troubled development cycle, with problems with procedurally generated environments and starting over on a totally different engine,
ment a 5 year project suddenly had to be finished in 18 months.

Anthem makes use of the new frostbite developed for mass effect andromeda, though it has had a bit more polish now:).

Unfortunatly physx will only run on the GPU with nvidia cards since it relies on the cuda core,
so bullet would be a better choice i reckon ?. It would probably break existing game code as you noticed,
but might come in handy for new games developed using it.

We also have a plethora of different idtech4 projects that each have there strengths like you noticed.
It would be a nice move to consolidate the work on those into a shared project i think.

The goal for my little side project is in fact similar since im consolidating work from various ports into an all purpose engine.
So far i have added the SMP changes from darkmod as well as newer CPU intrinsics like AVX and AVX2.
Still in progress is porting the OpenAL Soft implementation from dhewm as well as 64 bit support.
Engine uses a hybrid GLSL ARB assembly backend which allows use of old shader mods like sikkmod,
but that might change if someone can port sikkpins shaders to GLSL.

But its a huge undertaking so it will take a while.

Agreed idtech4 is a niche product as it is, dependant on the work we put into expanding its capabilities.

Things that may make sense would be to expand the work done on fhDoom's tools to port and expand the toolset.
QT is excellent for that purpose as was shown with fhDoom.
Next would be to expand the engines uses by introducing virtual texturing (not nessesarily megatextures, there are other options we can use),
this would push it in a more all purpose direction, though we would still have to expand a few other areas to truely take advantage of the engine.
Physics could be changed to take advantage of bullet or the open dynamics engine ODE, not sure how much work it would take though.

Bump and normal maps can be produced by code but the generated images would lack certain details that artists making them by hand can, but its entirely possible to do.

As for the multiplayer part, idtech 1 and 2 also used this approach so it is not uncommon in id's engines,
however security concerns are definatly valid so maybe change the NET code to SSL based ?.

I admit most grievances i heard about idtechs NET code was about bad performance because it does not compress the stream (LAG galore).

Learning from industry standard game engines, can be good but most studios are starting to move away from third parties like UE and focussing on in house code.
Just look at what happened between mass effect 3 and mass effect andromeda. All previous games in that series has used unreal tech, but andromeda and in fact all upcomming titles from EA
will use EA's own inhouse frostbite engine.

There was a time when money was not everything... most coders i learned from over the years did it mostly for fun and to tinker with ideas.
This has lead to some amazing projects over the years -> darkplaces FTE xonotic xash to name a few, by coders who did not accept the "this can not be done" clause .

Sure development on some of these projects has taken years but quite a lot of them are even used today by artists who dont need the latest and most flashy toys,
it all comes down to what you intend to make.
idtech4 is mostly geared towards corridor shooters, it can do large outdoor areas but it is not where it shines (in that regard it was actually less flexible than idtech3).

also mesa is a software renderer so even if you got it running it would be at an unplayable 1-2fps :S
The best recourse would be to recompile the engine and libs with XP as a target.

Loads very slow, but once its up it runs like oil gameplay is not really my cup of tea though.

Well lets not turn this into a flame war motorsep is right in regards to the older tech in idtech4 being substandard as of today,
but that is where indie coders might actually shine by creating updates to old paths that in some circumstances are not only just as good as current tech but sometimes even better .

Most teams today unfortunatly seem to focus on the art and dont give a flying f... about what engine they want to run it on as long as it has the stuff they want by default.
And while corporations opening the code to their propriarity engines to the public for a modest fee if it goes into production might have sounded like a good idea,
it actually killed the coding scene because now the artists push engine side feature request to whatever corp holds the rights to that engine benefitting them
for whatever game they themself plan on developing.

Indie coders rarely if ever have a chance of keeping up with the big boys when it comes to manpower, so it is a lost battle sadly .
So there you have it, and im being rather blunt about it now.

Yep that is pretty much how it is done, it strings together a series of stills in jpg format to create the roq

There is also setgamma from lord havocs darkplaces site.

Yes SSAO and HDR do not work together on AMD and some nvidia cards, i have an R9 390 myself.

It was only a take on what was possible by default between the two engines , better formats do exist, quake 4 used megamaps for only a few outdoor areas, rage used them extensively but at the time it still looked like crap compared to many other games with huge outdoor areas.
Still i kinda like how megamaps look in idtech 6 now and with some (or a lot) of work, the megamap code in tech4 could possibly be made usefull.

And yeah since most large gaming corporations have opened up for the free use of there tech like unreal and cryengine,
not many feel the need to make use of code that would require for them to gasp... do some work themselfs.
Its sad really, because even though the code might lack some features or be in need of some polish to bring it up to date,
it seems noone can be arsed to make that sacrifice even if it means your game might become unique.

Sadly we newer got to see the original Prey2 which used a heavily modified tech4 engine,
from the early pics though it looked freaking awesome and seems to have supported some pretty large maps.

Main os Win10 1809, secondly ubuntu.
Previous main os was Win7 64 but my mainboard started having trouble with newer usb and sata drivers (asmedia) it would BSOD to no end even in safe mode.
I really like Win7 but not being able to use updated drivers kinda broke my enthusiasm.

BEX is a buffer overflow error, can be in the code itself, in a driver or even in the OS.
Most likely its a bug in the GFX driver, AMD has had a few of those, but report it upstream anyway.