AssaultCube2 or something like that (help needed/ very WIP)

[Julius]

UPDATE: PROJECT ON HOLD, e.g. I am busy with other stuff and think we should rather hope TC:CQB will be open-sourced.

I am doodling around with some models from Blenderswap and RedEclipse to make a sort of realism shooter based on the Cube2 engine (Aka http://assault.cubers.net/ version 2.0 ??? seems like that will not happen, but it doesn't really matter.).

So far is is just a pretty horrible replacement of the RedEclipse weapon models using the following files:
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/19238
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/17879
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/63369
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/52432
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/47984 (the arms only, but they lack a normal-map)
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/25166 (not in game, but still a great model I plan to integrate)

And as you can see in the attached screens, it really has a lot of problems in-game still, but it proves that I am not just an idea person (besides a COD clone isn't exactly the greatest idea )

I also need to pester this guy some more:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthr ... dier-model
to release the model on blenderswap (he did so with a few other great models before). Well or make a playermodel myself (but I am slow as hell).

For maps-models and textures etc I am planning to convert most of this guy's stuff: http://opengameart.org/users/yughues
And I have already selected a few more FOSS models to use (f.e. http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/57648 ), however converting and "game readying" them will be quite a bit or work still.

Why am I posting this? Well the Octaforge engine will see a great new release in a few hours: http://octaforge.org/ and that one is a pretty beefed up Cube2 engine with tesseract realtime lights and full LUA scripting! And so I am looking for a partner in crime to code up the game-play bits for such a fully FOSS COD/Counterstrike clone

I have to say however that I am not necessarily looking into making this the best Call of Duty FOSS clone ever, but rather would like to have this as a convenient FOSS modding base for other smart people to make FOSS Left4Dead, Farcry, Crysis and whatever clone mods

So if you are a skilled LUA coder and think this would be a cool project to contribute to, please don't be shy and come forward!

[Julius]

Got a PM from Durion basically asking why I was making another COD clone instead of joining his Übergame project.

Here is my reply:
Thanks for the message, you could have easily posted in on the forum thread too though Feels a bit strange that no-one is replying.

Honestly... all that clone stuff was rather a joke, I am really not in making a COD clone at all. I am not even really planning to making a game, but rather a playable base asset pack for further modding, that accidentally happens to be a simple but fun game (sort of like AssaultCube).

I have seen your nice project, but it really seems to have a completely different direction, and the Torque3D engine isn't that suitable for what I have in mind (besides not having a Linux port yet).

Besides that, with the new "tesseract" render engine, Cube2 is actually a technically more modern engine than Torque3D (but it doesn't really matter since both look sufficiently fine).

What really sets Cube2 and especially now Octaforge apart is the extremely easy modding options... with the industry standard full LUA scripting, the easy ingame editor and the good integration with Blender3D through the .iqm format.

Now if I had anything other than a strait urban FPS in mind, Torque 3D would have been probably a good contender (it would be really suitable for a mech game for example)... but ease of use wise it really isn't at the same level as Cube2 yet, especially if your are developing on Linux (like me). And besides that... the guys behind the Cube engine (forks) are just much closer to our community and thus more willing to add needed features upon request.

However I would be happy if we found a way of exchanging free assets, if for example update the HUD hand animations from the current RedEclipse ones, I see no reason why you couldn't use them for your game too... and I hope you feel vise-versa.

[Duion]

What I don't like on these games/engines, that they all exactly look and play like quake and since there are a lot of these quake-clone games out there, it gets boring. Today they may have a better render engine and higher resolution, but basically there is not much difference to quake 2 and that was about 15 years ago.
It may be simple to use, but if you want to convert this to a realism shooter, it will get difficult again.
I will try to make some urban maps in Torque3D and see how this turns out, but I don't think it is not suited for that, you just have to think a little different.

[Evropi]

I'm not sure... urban FPSs are all the rage nowadays, but I find large-scale shooters like Battlefield and Far Cry 3 more my cup of tea. I think something like that would be more important as there currently exists no alternative.

From what I have heard, the Cube Engine's map format doesn't easily allow for procedural terrain generation, or, especially for ground terrain, more than a half-decent apperance due to the way textures get stretched and not so well-blended. Duion, I suppose, is right in that respect. The Cube 2 mapping tool is doubtlessly geared around smaller maps, as bigger maps would require just too much detail for a human to comprehend.

Anyway, each to their own! I don't think Julius should be dissuaded from this at all. I'd love to see a balanced game similar to the Call of Duty: MW series of games (which I actually think is a great series and greatly enjoy it - though I accept that recent iterations have been rehashes of the same thing).

I understand you are just creating art assets Julius, or will you be doing programming too? Mixed feelings on Lua. It's very fast, but it has no support for OOP and it's seriously lacking in terms of libraries. Still, it's probably the best choice for games as a high-performance, high-level programming language.

[Duion]

I think Julius idea was to collect already made free artwork and merge it into a game, that was my idea also, but then I realized, that most of the free models are not useful, they all have different style, polycount, quality, bad texturing and so on, in many cases you would be even faster to remodel it from scratch, than fixing it to make it gameready. When I make a model by myself I know what and how I have done it, but when I open other peoples blend file I am often confused about their style and techniques, so fixing them and set up levels of detail can get difficult.
I would prefer to not mix the people working on a game, for example, one guy does the weapons, one does the characters, one does the levels, one does textures, one is coding and so on. Modeling weapons for example is not that hard, a skilled artist can make one in a day.

[Calinou]

Besides that, with the new "tesseract" render engine, Cube2 is actually a technically more modern engine than Torque3D (but it doesn't really matter since both look sufficiently fine).

Merging Red Eclipse (much more advanced Sauerbraten everything-wise) and Tesseract (more advanced Sauerbraten render-wise) would be very difficult. You have to choose between last decade graphics and other additional engine features, pretty much.

[Julius]

I think Julius idea was to collect already made free artwork and merge it into a game, that was my idea also, but then I realized, that most of the free models are not useful, they all have different style, polycount, quality, bad texturing and so on, in many cases you would be even faster to remodel it from scratch, than fixing it to make it gameready. When I make a model by myself I know what and how I have done it, but when I open other peoples blend file I am often confused about their style and techniques, so fixing them and set up levels of detail can get difficult.
I would prefer to not mix the people working on a game, for example, one guy does the weapons, one does the characters, one does the levels, one does textures, one is coding and so on. Modeling weapons for example is not that hard, a skilled artist can make one in a day.

I get what you mean, but I have since then lost such high artistic goals and have also realized that (even if I would work full-time on it) it will never happen that I manage to make most of the artwork myself.
Thus I looked at what there is in high-quality FOSS assets of a somewhat consistent style and urban realism FPS it is (a 3D fantasy RPG comes a somewhat distant second though)

The only lacking graphics I still need is a good but sufficiently generic looking playermodel to allow for modular variations, everything else I need for such a game (well give or take a few gui graphics etc. and most sound effects) I have already in my asset library. I have started doodling with some meshes (and Make-human head variations) for that however... but I am sure progress will be slow on that sadly.
And besides that I also think it is better to have a working and and somewhat ok looking "prototype" game and work on polishing and extending the graphics later on... most players will lack the "critical eye" of an artist anyways

So currently I am planning on fixing the hud hands rig and animations (a new mesh will follow once I have sorted out the playermodel issue), and the idea is that this can benefit RedEclipse the same time (it's a sort of collaborative project). I will probably use the RE player-animations for a start too (more realistic parcour would be a nice feature too for this game btw.) and hope that in the mid-term those animations can be commonly shared and improved on too.

About the coding side, if at all I would like to avoid coding the mod myself as I really suck with that and my limited time is better spend on artistic stuff (even just getting free stuff fixed and integrated in a game is a lot of work as mentioned by me and others). I really have no high ambitions for the game-play code (or crazy ideas what to implement), so it should be quite strait forward to do and shouldn't require too much time at all I hope. Maybe a simple bomb & diffuse and a TDM mode would be all that is necessary.

A bit of background:
Originally I was actually thinking about making this a RedEclipse mod (which is still a fall-back option, but the lack of game-play scripting is a serious negative point for this project), but after evaluating the situation a bit, it seemed to me that Octaforge (and with it lua and tesseract) is the much more mod friendly and future proof option (after all the former is the main goal and the latter will be necessary for a long project life).
However after chatting with the Octaforge guys a bit today, I still think it is a viable option, but the current status of the upcoming release still seems to be not quite as far along as I hoped...

At first, I actually wanted to make this a Xonotic mod btw. (good modding tools and mature engine), but all that user-unfriendly server-side/client side quakeC coding drove me nuts As sort of mentioned above, I also evaluated Torque3D, and while I think it will be a great choice for "open world" FOSS games in the very near future, I don't think it would be the right choice for this specific project.

[Duion]

Player model and animations is what I fail at also at the moment, seems to be the hardest thing.
Torque is not only for open worlds, you can also make small urban maps, but there is no ingame editor for this, you would have to build it in your modeling program completely or make parts and put them together, which of course needs a higher level of skill than just using the ingame editor. I also miss the old .bsp map format and the style of building maps with it, but it seems to be a thing of the past, most games do not use it anymore, since it fails on large worlds. Modern games often use modular systems for their levels now.

[andrewj]

Mixed feelings on Lua. It's very fast, but it has no support for OOP

Lua can do some OOP, though it is fairly DIY, mainly using metatables and the ':' operator for calling methods, and you don't get some things that make OOP compelling (e.g. I miss being able to access, in a method, fields of an object using just their bare name).

Regarding Octaforge: their anti-GPL stance is an instant turn-off for me, as I believe that copyleft licenses (such as GPL) are the only true way to ensure users' freedoms. To quote their wiki:

We believe that idea of copyleft specified by GPL is evil. That's why we deliver an engine for you under a liberal and really free license.

[Julius]

Well, does it really matter (their anti GPL stance)? It's not that I don't agree with you in principle, but in this case it really isn't worth it to start a "license war". Besides, they seem to be perfectly fine with CC-By-SA content, so it's a bit less black and white as it sounds at first.

[Duion]

You can take it an relicense it as gpl

[Julius]

Ok, after some discussion with Duion, I have decided to give Torque3D another look and try to get the weapons in his game. No promises at this point, but collaborating with him even though I don't necessarily like such "open world games" quite as much is probably the more reasonable thing to do.
And the Linux-port from Torque3D seems to be coming along well (I hope).

[CyberKlown28]

Please don't quit this project.
There are no real tactical shooters in the foss scene.

[Duion]

He said he wants to collaborate, so there still will be a tactical shooter if this will work, but with the ability for bigger terrains, but you can still have small urban maps.

[Julius]

Arg... the Torque3D files don't play well with the Blender collada Importer and Exporter and as nice as the build in level editor is... I can't see it being of much use for anything but outdoor levels (Duion disagrees on that though ).

Darkplaces/Xonotic is starting to look like the best platform again... at least I know it would work for my purposes, runs well on Linux and has decent tools :-/
Ahh well... maybe Octaforge really makes a jump in development now that the first beta was released.

[Evropi]

Arg... the Torque3D files don't play well with the Blender collada Importer and Exporter and as nice as the build in level editor is... I can't see it being of much use for anything but outdoor levels (Duion disagrees on that though ).

Darkplaces/Xonotic is starting to look like the best platform again... at least I know it would work for my purposes, runs well on Linux and has decent tools :-/
Ahh well... maybe Octaforge really makes a jump in development now that the first beta was released.

To be honest, RBDOOM3-BFG, jMonkeyEngine and Torque3D are pretty far ahead of the competition in terms of the toolchain available for them. The other open source engines/frameworks... yeah.

[Julius]

Yeah, tool-chains and usable content source (canned humanoid player anims etc) are really what is holding back open-source engines as viable modding/hobbiistet game dev platforms. Things have improved a lot, but it is still a long way to go.
But IMHO as I said, Darkplaces actually is the only platform that seems mature enough to waste my time on (and it has an a bit outdated but usable toolchain). And that it now has an android port might be an interesting feature in the longer run...

P.S.: Maybe I will steer this a bit towards a anime-style mix... sort of like Metal Gear Solid. That saves a lot of work on texture details and there is also more choice in regards to playermodels under free licenses. And I always wanted to add samurai style mechs to it

[Evropi]

anime-style mix... sort of like Metal Gear Solid

Lol wut? MGS is animu-style? It's distinctly Japanese - it just has that something, but I wouldn't say it's anywhere near anime.

Still hoping for a sequel to JSRF. It's one of my favourite games of all time actually - definitely top 3. You can get the original ('Jet Grind Radio' in the US) for Windows by the way, it was released for it last summer IIRC. Because we need more open source unrealistic but awesome rollerskating games!

Also, surprised to hear that there's more choice in that field. I've always found there to be a big lack of open content JRPG-style art, even in 2D form. If you want to do mechs by the way, cdxbow is your friend. Yeah I guess you're right, he's got that distinctive 'Japanese game' look for his.

[Julius]

Well yes, maybe MGS isn't quite as anime has what I had in mind (basically anime without all those silly costumes and so on, e.g. a somewhat realistic anime style).
There are quite a lot of high-quality 3D anime models on Blendswap... so that is what I am talking about (for good looking realistic player models there is just... nothing).
You got a real point that it would be somewhat duplicating MekArcade then however Ahh well not sure what to do right now...

Edit: The reason I don't like base Cube2/Redeclipse (and thus MekArcade) as something to work with as a platform, is that it doesn't really support mods and unless you are a good C++ programmer you are pretty much screwed even for the most basic things (that's why I thought Octaforge would be a good choice, as it works on these exact issues).

[CyberKlown28]

If you go with xonotic, maybe you can port their anti-cheat over to this game. Any modern shooter is hack city.

[Julius]

Well, I guess I would make a xonotic mod at first (similar to Overkill), however do they really have an anti-cheat system? Ok they have the online statistics, but otherwise I am really not aware of anything like that.

[cdxbow]

Julius: The Wolf model we are currently in the (long and painful, and as yet to be 100% successful) process of getting to work is a good quality model, with a good set of animations and could easily be made over into a 20C or 21C soldier. It needs ragdolls, a crouch forward animation and 'splitting the mesh'. In the images below there are no weapons cause they have been 'nulled' for MekArcade.

Now I have to take a little issue with this....

The reason I don't like base Cube2/Redeclipse (and thus MekArcade) as something to work with as a platform, is that it doesn't really support mods and unless you are a good C++ programmer you are pretty much screwed even for the most basic things (that's why I thought Octaforge would be a good choice, as it works on these exact issues).

The devs have delivered the engine with the easiest map making ever. If you look at mod sites, probably the commonest mods are maps. Most other mods are either models or scripts, both of which you can do with the Cube2 engine. So to say it 'doesn't really support mods' is unfair, at the least. Perhaps you should 'it is difficult to mod the source', but heck, when are source mods easy. Even then the code is liberally licenced and people are free to mod up, and unfortunately beyond, their ability.

I can't see any reason why the game you wish to make couldn't be made out of RE/MekArcade, it would be mostly modelling work (characters/weapons) and tweaking.

[leilei]

Perhaps you should 'it is difficult to mod the source', but heck, when are source mods easy.

Since Quake and its Quakec, since Unreal and its Unrealscript, since Quake3 and its QVMs....

[Julius]

Yeah, lack of easy game-play scripting is one of my main issues with Cube2. The other one (and that was the one I was referring to when I wrote "doesn't really support mods") is that you can't just have a self-contained sub-directory where you drop in base-game overwriting content and script and then start the game with a console parameter to run the mod. That is pretty much standard since quake1 days...

Now don't get me wrong... I really like the Cube2 engine, and it's mapping features are unsurpassed, but from this specific point of view, e.g. making a platform for easy total conversion modding it is still far from suitable.

[CyberKlown28]

Says they have anti-cheat under features. :3


Not sure if it's already implemented or not though, I don't play it.