Good engines Created 17 years ago2007-10-17 15:45:29 UTC by Zami90

Does anyone know a good, light fps engine with dynamic lights, static models, and nice base to start making a single player mod?

Doom 3 was rather nice, and i've been mapping/modelling for it for long time. Now i only have my laptop, which isn't that good. 'Heaviest' game i got working on this, was HL2 with medium details. Hammer was being a bitch, tho.

Any suggestions?

Source.

No kidding. Wish i could make anything with it. Im kinda experienced to map with it, but my laptop is not powerful enough for it.

I suggest getting a better computer.
You won't get any fun games if your computer can't run source.

True, true.

I always mourn about how game engines should be created etc etc.

First off, look at the old Doom coding language. It was just few silly lines, and voila! There was really nice, monster, item or even player class. C++ is gay, because it takes damn long time to understand completely, and no way in hell im going to even try it out.

Unreal engine would be awesome, because it's coding is rather simple and almost everything can be done in 3ds max - Photoshop - UnrealEd.

Well.. It's nice, as long you are going to create a multiplayer mod. It's almost impossible to create one good Singleplayer mod on it.

Well, the reason Doom's code was simpler was because the game engine was simpler.

True dat. Still, new games has much stupider and clumsier creatures than doom, even tho they use C++

Why's that? Because C++ is overrated crap

i agree wholeheartedly with C++ being a steaming pile of you know what

shit?

correct

So C++ is bad because you can't understand it and don't want to take the time to figure it out? =/

The programming language has nothing to do with good or bad AI; it's how the language is used to program such things and the proficiency of the programmer.

yeah, you can honestly make some amazing stuff with BASIC. and BASIC is... Basic. But C/C++ are the main coding languages... like of the Gods... =)

Yeah Rabid pretty much hit the nail on the head
I hate it because im too stupid to figure it out.. that and i dont have the motivation to care enough.

oh cmon the only half hard thing about C++ is understanding pointers. the difficult thing is getting it to interact with the graphics core.

also, source kinda sucks. BSP format? archaic. don't let Ant see this thread.

>>Does anyone know a good, light fps engine with dynamic lights, static models, and nice base to start making a single player mod?
+
>>Now i only have my laptop, which isn't that good. 'Heaviest' game i got working on this, was HL2 with medium details.

Well, game developing is hi-tech related industry and rapidly grayup. So, its strange to hear your request. You can work with any top engine but it will be slow and laggy; you can work with goldsrc or unreal 2.5 - faster, but looks old and no perspectives - then you finish your work it will be 2008-2009 and it will be hard to find a lot of users that using this old games.

So, search for stand-alone game engines that dont requare old game to run - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines or upgrade your PC (it cost just 1500$ for realy good 4-core 8gb ram configuration).

Why's that? Because C++ is overrated crap

i agree wholeheartedly with C++ being a steaming pile of you know what

What Rabid said. Or hell, point out a better language for game dev.

C++ is extremely powerful, yet pretty hard-to-learn if all you do is look up some tutorials on the 'net. If you're really willing to learn it - the only way to do so is getting a proper book on it or, even better, taking a short course to get the basics straight. Once that's sorted - all it takes to learn the more complex stuff is practice.

also, source kinda sucks. BSP format? archaic. don't let Ant see this thread.

Well; not necessarily. I used to think of BSP as an outdated method as well but if you really break it down it's fairly effective, especially with the newer version of the BSP Tree (KDTree) that Valve is now using. (Compare the Source engine's methods of rendering and occlusion to Unreal's; they each have their pros and cons.) Also, the upcoming particle editor and other useful features in Hammer should really make Source a much more powerful and useful engine, and should also make it more attractive to developers.

Yeah Rabid pretty much hit the nail on the head
I hate it because im too stupid to figure it out.. that and i dont have the motivation to care enough.

Hey, me too, I'm too lazy/not interested enough to sit down and figure out the intricacies of C++, but that doesn't make it bad ;P

seriously, it's not C++ thats hard to learn. its the three-dimensional part that is a bitch.

Rabid, about the source BSP thing, i've read the BSP stuff before, and while it is fairly effective, it is far from elegant. i haven't compared it to anything tho, so it might still be better than various other popular formats (in some areas, compiling is still really annoying).

i've heard about the in-editor particle editor and wondered how it was being implemented. rabid, do you know any 1337 insider info about how flexible it is?

i know the fizzlers in portal are an entity you set to particle effect "<name here>" and set the angles, etc., but this doesn't seem to be an "editor" as such.

I'm really looking forward to the new particle effects. Hopefully, I'll finally be able to create a nice 'volumetric' fire effect with multiple particles rather than one crappy sprite that looks like shit from up high.

Yeah - imagen, no sprites, just awesome particles flying around in a three dimensional space.
Imagen what you could do! ;O

i want to parent a particle effect to gordon's face

I think c++ is a great language.

I tried learning C++
to complicated for me
I was reading some online thing about it. It was trying to teach me the basics but it seemed as if they skipped a lot. Or I didn't understand it and I gave up. But ya C++ is the most basic and dominant.

you dont go and try to learn C++ straight away. before i even touched C++ i had already learned (in roughly this order):

html
visual basic
scheme
php
java (learning at the same time)

i recommend a similar path. html isn't really a programming language, but its a start. visual basic is easy and lets you know the basics. php keeps it easy but introduces parenthesis and line terminators among other things, and java introduces object orientation. you might want to skip scheme, but its useful to know about iterative programming. (btw, scheme is almost the same as lisp, with a few changes)

you'll want to do one project in each language at least (only 1000 or so lines), making sure you have learned everything before moving on.
C++ introduces pointers (and a few other bits and pieces)

Mine was a bit different..

Super Logo/Html
Pascal/Delphi
C++

It'd be cool to try Lisp some day though.