[MUD-Dev] Quake II has gone GPL

[Frank Crowell]

From: <Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com>
> From: ling at slimy.com [mailto:ling at slimy.com]

> engine. Worse than the boneing issue I would imagine, is the BSP
> based rendering engine. Whilst this is ideal for interior
> environments, its no use for exterior, so you'd have to splice on
> a whole different engine and put portals in to bridge (I don't
> know what portaling support quake 2 has, I suspect none?).

Outdoor rending to me is very important. Of course I expect good
indoor/outdoor. I don't see Q2 right now strong in outdoor.  For the
little that I saw in Tribes 2, I really like the indoor/outdoor
feeling.

> I don't even think that rendering the dungeon walls is the hardest
> part really, character animation/path finding/collision
> detection/occlusion detection are all more difficult I feel, so
> given that you'd have to rework so much of this to build a typical
> MMORPG, I think you'd be pretty stuffed if thats what you were
> aiming for.

Difficult but not impossible.  The FPS bots are really the only labs
we have to pathfinding.  The stuff that UO or EQ do belongs to them,
so who cares how good they are at it or not.  But the FPS Bots are
for the most part open to inspection.  Plus the AI-gaming guys are
alway up for the challenge, but they don't get an environment to
show their stuff because reasonable complex 3D worlds are not
readily available.  The few that exist, have essentially a "no bots"
policy.  So the AI guys are stuck playing with themselves.

The fact is that except for a handful of commerical MMORPG, path
finding is a not a big thing in virtual worlds.  The mobs barely
move -- if they even move.

> As someone mentioned previously, it might be ideal for a
> Neverwinter Nights style small group dungeon crawl type game. Of
> course half the focus NWN appears to be its tools, and I don't
> know how many budding GMs are going to be wanting to use complex
> map modeling tools.

Don't know either.

frank


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