Stripping down the engine

by SSG2 on 08/03/2008 15:53, 10 messages, last message: 08/10/2008 22:47, 2080 views, last view: 04/29/2024 21:18

I\'ve been playing with Sauerbraten in my extremely limited spare time for the last month. As a potential 3D engine to use for my project, inevitably there are some things I love and some things I hate. This is the same situation for every 3D engine I have evaluated so far (Irrlict, Ogre3D, TGE, TGEA, jMonkeyEngine, RealmCrafter, Torque MMOKIT just to name a few).

Here\'s what I like:
1. Efficient renderer
2. Rapid world building tool
3. Robust physics system

Here\'s what I don\'t like:
1. The code is obfuscated. I can\'t trace my way through it and neither can any IDE. It\'s like it deliberately defies logic and prevents comprehension.
2. No useful documentation for using the engine beyond a simple FPS.

So I would like to use only the things I like, minus the physics system (because it is part of the entity system which is an undocumented mess). That is, I need only the renderer and editor, perhaps minus the entity related features.

Is it actually possible to strip down Sauerbraten to just a 3D cubic world renderer with an editor, or is Sauerbraten a completely ugly, unmodular house of cards?

   Board Index   

#1: ..

by rknigh21 on 08/03/2008 18:00

The code can be difficult to follow at first. It took me a good couple of months of spare time to get my head round some of it. I do not think it has been deliberatly obfuscated that's just the way it's ended up. It is very efficient at rendering including models. It is also very robust. I have been doing some mods to sp mode and found it practically impossible to hang up. If it compiles it runs(may not do what I intended of cause) it very rarely hangs up).

If you have not already looked at it try Apocalyx at http://apocalyx.sourceforge.net/

It is not as good at rendering as sauer but is more flexible as it is not tide to first person shooter games. It uses lau for scripting.

reply to this message

#2: ..

by Quin on 08/03/2008 20:04

Perhaps you should re-evaluate how you're posing this kind of question to its own community and try again. I see that to which some could take offense.

reply to this message

#3: Re: ..

by tentus_ on 08/03/2008 21:30, refers to #2

Quin's right, I'm a bit offended and I haven't even written any of the code. Also, you come off as sounding a bit incompetent, because the engine is soooo much easier to read than it used to be... it was not that long ago that Aard went through and separated all the engine stuff from the gameplay stuff, which makes it much easier to track stuff down IMHO.

If you're having trouble with trying to follow the code, I cannot recommend Notepad+'s cross-document searching enough. I can usually track what I'm looking for down in a few seconds by opening all the source in Notepad+ and then running a couple of searches.

reply to this message

#4: racing

by $k!llz on 08/03/2008 21:42

ya im a big racing fan and does any1 know of a racing game that includes the source code?

reply to this message

#5: ..

by Acord on 08/04/2008 10:56

The problem is that the people who do things often don't care to document. It's like a creativity refractory period, where nobody wishes to put what they just did into a wiki.

The docs for sauer are actually pretty decent. Problematically, they are spread all over the place. This drove me nuts for months.

reply to this message

#6: ..

by SSG on 08/10/2008 10:25

Yes, perhaps I came off a bit offensive, but I'm at the end of my rope. And no, i'm not incompetent. I have a severe lack of time which is why i'm not creating my own engine.

Acord, you hit the nail on the head. Unless developers are getting paid for their work, they only do the fun stuff, which never includes documentation.

Thanks rknigh21 for the link.

reply to this message

#7: textures and data?

by fhdsjkconorfdskhj on 08/10/2008 21:21

What are the licenses on the stuff in data/ and textures/?

reply to this message

#8: ..

by Acord on 08/10/2008 21:46

Depends on who made it. There are individual licenses. Stripping everything out of the engine is actually pretty time consuming, but it has to be done.

It took me a couple of months to strip and replace everything in BF with even placeholders, and I *still* missed some stuff.

I honestly wonder why nobody has made a "bare bones" mod with a few simple textures, a box guy, and a handful of demo/tutorial levels. Make the license for all materials used "free" as in free beer, and spend the majority of time working on the documentation.

It would seem to me that this would be a really good way to get more modders interested, since stripping everything out is a real pill and only gets harder as every new release of sauer has more effects and extras and resources.

reply to this message

#9: ..

by Osbios on 08/10/2008 21:55

You forget that you have to strip down every version if you want new features included in the bare bone!

Or else it just would be a fork.

reply to this message

#10: ..

by mrpiddly_000002 on 08/10/2008 22:47

For me at least, it would be much easier if the sauerbraten source was written in a more object oriented fashion.

This might be better for a "complete" rewrite however, as in a cube 3 engine.



(This is all easy for me to say when i am not writing the code)

reply to this message

   Board Index