[MUD-Dev] Quake II has gone GPL

[ling at slimy.com]

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Original message: http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/2002Q1/msg00070.php

On Thu, 10 Jan 2002 11:25:35 -0800 (PST)
"Frank Crowell" <frankc at maddog.com> wrote:
> From: "Chris Jacobson" <chris at mainecoon.net>
>> On 1/7/02 5:51 PM, Frank Crowell (frankc at maddog.com) stated:
 
>> I've done a professional port of a Q2 engine game (the company I
>> work for did Quake 2 for the Mac, and I did SiN for the Mac).
 
>> It would take a lot of work to make it support a boatload of
>> players and have seperate areas - that is just not how the engine
>> was written to work.

> Didn't say it was the perfect candidate.  But network support
> aside, there are some plus to working with QII over almost
> anything else that is available:

[snipped some]

>   -graphics engine is decent and people are already working on
>   bells-and-whistles for it
 
>   -has a well-know level and model format and you don't need 3D
>   Studio Max 4 to work with it

Not meaning to be a nit-picking but I don't think the .md2 format is
a good idea for muds.  I spent a small amount of time looking at 3D
animation for muds and came to the conclusion that skin and bones
(or a variant of it, even hierarchy animation) seem to be the best
bet when it comes to choosing between size of data, cost to create
animations and that sorta thing.

The .md2 format is a series of keyframed meshes.  That is, each
frame details the position of every vertex, an animation consists of
a number of these frames strung together.  The advantage is that the
artist gets to position each vertex very carefully during animation
along with whatever else is desired, like playing with textures and
it's fast (unsurprisingly, this is where Quake excels), the
disadvantage includes storage costs and creating new
animations. It's this last issue which cause a big headache.  It's
pretty much agreed that socialising in a mud is good so therefore it
would be good to have social animations but try adding social
animations to a given model.  This involves generating a new set of
frames.  Multiple that with the number of models and social
animations you want.

Skin and bones is less pretty since it relies more on algorithms to
generate the animation but has correspondingly smaller storage
costs.  In this case, an arm might be a bone with the skin vertices
positioned according to how the arm is orientated in relation to the
bones around it (and maybe gravity).  Animation data simply concerns
the position of the bones, the more cunning coders might apply a
physics engine or use the same animation data across multiple
models.  I won't get into more details, suffice to say it is more
algorithmic in nature and presents additional difficulties in model
creation (tuning the weightings and hoping it doesn't look like the
bug in a skin out of Men in Black) but should have a better payoff
in the long term.

It's all very much like using midi files instead of mp3's (or for
the old skool, MOD's).

Of course, it could be argued that the engine can be reworked, or
there's already a Quake 2 mod to add skin and bones (or there
probably is a project to do such a thing emerging right now).  My
point was that if this part is deemed to be needing a rework along
with whatever else, would the ROI on Quake 2 be worthwhile?

--
  |   Ling Lo
_O_O_ Look, my sig is easy to type out!
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