Engine Development

[Hendrix]

Hi guys,

Didnt really know where to send this, but thought this may be a good start. Im currently working on a mod called 1985 for HL2 www.1985-mod.com or www.moddb.com/mods/1985

anyway, we're looking at developing for at least another year, and then moving onto doing an RTS version, we're seriously considering licensing an engine. dont worry, we are not a two bob team with an idea, we have spent an awful lot of time looking for a decent costing engine and we are willing to invest large sums of money.

I must say your engine is probably top of the list so far, and that's only because i accidentally stumbled across it! Firstly, the 0AD game itself, well thats one that will definitely grace my hard drive one day, looks great.

Our questions are as follows, will you be releasing the engine to the public? if so what are the costs for a license? and finally, how manipulable and easy to edit will it be? - I appreciate this last one is a difficult question to answer, so a rough Guesstimation would be highly appreciated.

Thank you guys for taking the time to read this, and i'm sorry if I sent this to you, and it doesnt concern you.

Kindest Regards

Anthony 'Hendrix' Barker.

[Ykkrosh]

The engine is already released to the public, in its current (incomplete) state - the game is now open source, including the engine code. There's information around here on getting and building it from SVN. The code is all GPL licensed, so if you wanted to use it and modify it then your changes would have be publicly released too - I don't know whether that would be acceptable to you or not.

Ease of modding has always been a design goal: most data is specified in XML files, and much of the gameplay logic is in JavaScript (at least in the current ongoing redesign of the gameplay system), and we've tried to avoid putting game-specific stuff in the C++ engine code. The focus is on making 0 A.D. and not on making a generic reusable RTS engine, but I think we still want to encourage reusability, particularly if it means we can share resources with people who want to do similar things to us

[Hendrix]

Thanks for the quick reply. I'll be discussing the options of using this for our next project.

Thanks guys.

[feneur]

Sounds great

And while I don't have a lot of experience as to the exact options I believe there are ways to make money/protect your content even if you use a GPL licensed engine for your game. If nothing else there are examples of companies making the game free, but selling special content (commercial games for that matter, and not using a GPL engine). Not saying you have to choose Pyrogenesis, but just want to make sure you get a better idea of your options if you do.

[Hendrix]

To be completely honest, i kind of fell in love with the engine when i saw the water effects on your moddb profile.

Its a case now of seeing if it will be usable for our ideas!

[feneur]

Nice

Good luck with both your present project and the future one

[Hendrix]

much appreciated, although im sure we'll be speaking very soon! until then, i'll hang around the forums!!!

[Hendrix]

Hi again guys.

Just been considering other options and such, but will need some feedback on something, now im not asking if you 'like' the idea or anything, i just want to know if you consider the following feesible:

The entire game is based around 4 Resources: Food, fuel, ammo & recovery (basically rubble) and the aim is quite simple to harvest them.

You will have two types of unit/building, military & civilian, here are very early ideas on their tech trees. Do you guys think this is feesible.

Appreciate your views on this one lads!

[Hendrix]

We are considering the following, and again would like to know if this is feesible:

-Day and night cycle:

Obviously if this is doable, then our coder can change the length of time of each cycle.

-Resource Collection:

4x Resources (food/fuel/ammo/recovery)

-Ammunition states lowering as units rearm.

-Helicopters and airborne units

-Seabound units.

-does the engine so far support specular, normal and alpha maps?

Appreciate that a lot of this is to do with our own code, but is this something you guys think is viable?

Thanks

Edited February 19, 2010 by Hendrix

[WhiteTreePaladin]

The engine does not currently support specular or normal maps. [edit] alpha maps already supported

Seabound units is something we will have in our game, so that should be doable. (That part isn't finished though.)

Airborne units might be a problem. I wanted those as well, but currently coordinates are 2D... Not sure about how hard it would be to change.

Ammunition states lowering as units rearm should be possible.

Resources (food/fuel/ammo/recovery) should be possible.

I think our day and night was intended to only be used in custom scenarios and not change, but I do think I heard it would be possible to use it in a cycle without too much effort.

Ykkrosh, janwas or another one of the more experienced programmers could give you a more accurate picture of what is really possible.

[edit] see following post by Ykkrosh.

[Ykkrosh]

That sounds accurate to me . I don't think any of those features are fundamentally incompatible with our engine. With the things that we're not planning to have in our game, our code makes various assumptions (like all units are fixed to the terrain/water and can't move up and down relative to it, and AI and pathfinding can be entirely 2D, etc), so it'd take some work to avoid those assumptions in the C++ code, and there's likely to be more work changing the gameplay scripts. It's certainly not trivial, but it's easier than programming everything from scratch

We do have alpha maps (for trees etc) - every mesh just has a single RGB/RGBA diffuse texture. I don't think there's anything in the renderer architecture that would prevent more complex rendering with specular/normal, we just haven't considered it worthwhile yet.

Lighting and shadows are all dynamic so I don't see anything that would prevent the light direction/colour being modified to follow some cycle.

[Hendrix]

thanks a lot for your help guys.

Do you have a sheet with poly limits and such?

[Kimball]

These are better classified as guidelines than maximums, but I wouldn't recommend you go too far over them if you don't want your game to lag.

• Poly counts - Low as possible! Here are the maximums:
  Humanoid Bodies – 500
  Animal Bodies – 700
  Humanoid and Building Props – 50
  World Objects – 150
  Buildings – 800
  

[Hendrix]

thanks muchly.