Quake

[66470c1b31ce9Pacmikey]

There used to be a post here. It's gone now.

[66470c1b31eacicemann]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYHO0-0W5To

[66470c1b32016Gawain]

Cool.

[66470c1b321d1JDoran]

This looks interesting, but is the Quake engine really a good match for an immersive sim? Can it handle (semi) realistic physics, sufficiently deep RPG elements, detailed enough in-game objects, convincing enough movement in the NPC's movement, etc?

Anyway, please keep us updated on your progress. It will be great to have something to look forward to, especially since the gaming scene is so dull and predictable at the moment.

[66470c1b323a4JosiahJack]

To the above probably only if FTE is used as that engine supports the most features, full fledged CSQC for custom hud such as dragndrop inventory, support for various model formats beyond the restrictive original mdl's punitive limits, support for various shader effects.

As for doing things like layered NPC animation, pathing, realistic physics (beyond being the only suite of engines with truly reliable solidity due to its simplicity), not really no.  It's best suited for fast, fluid, crunchy pixel stylistic type of games/mods with more minimalistic gameplay, much to my enjoyment for being so, but no really suitable for "immersive sim" type of gameplay, depending on what you mean by that I spose.

[66470c1b324acVucaDev]

I'm currently using FTEQW, but I'll likely switch to Unity.

[66470c1b325beGawain]

Won't be a TC anymore then

[66470c1b329e3ZylonBane]

Won't be a TC anymore then

Why does that matter even the slightest bit?

[66470c1b32c56JosiahJack]

As someone who started with Quake and moved to Unity, don't.

You'd be better off using something fully open source like Godot or FTE itself that way you can rewrite the portions of the engine that are broken or incomplete.  Otherwise you'll have to pay $$ to access and rewrite portions of Unity or be cheap like me and suffer through it by engineering complex workarounds.

Unity frustrations:
- Scene reloading does not preserve unique ids on reloaded same scene
- World assumed to be made of many smaller convex objects rather than one model with submeshes causing occlusion to break due to culling only per object and not per mesh/submesh
- Light baking cannot be incremental per object and forced to entire world all at once causing out of RAM crashes and no ability to bake toggled overlapping models.  Disabled objects are not baked
- Automatic lightmaps overlap
- Light baking takes forever
- Architecture encourages fragile references and spaghetti code
- Hidden performance overhead behind many engine actions, easily worsened by large numbers of prefab instances with those calls
- Duplicate camera culling overhead for every camera even if same fov and position are set
- Scene bloat from prefab overrides
- Obsolescence of features without being carried over to the new systems (HDRP vs Builtin, LWRP vs URP) forcing being stuck with older less maintained versions
- Very many settings that can have significant performance impact good or bad with poorest performance as default in many cases such as import settings

If you'd prefer to focus on the core gameplay features I highly recommend going the FTE Quake mod route (using skeletal md3 models or iqm) for fast iteration of core gameplay without worrying about things like walking and jumping then you can slowly rewrite pieces that need to do more into FTE as needed.  This would help maintain your motivation as you'd be able to have playable features much more quickly.  In Unity you'd have to start from the ground up just to get basic walking, shooting mechanics, HUD, etc.

[66470c1b3324fsarge945]

As someone who started with Quake and moved to Unity, don't.

You'd be better off using something fully open source like Godot or FTE itself that way you can rewrite the portions of the engine that are broken or incomplete.  Otherwise you'll have to pay $$ to access and rewrite portions of Unity or be cheap like me and suffer through it by engineering complex workarounds.

I really hope people don't fall for misinformation like this...

[66470c1b333caJosiahJack]

Having the capability to affect every aspect of your game project by using an open source engine and giving the developer freedom is very appealing compared to black box monolithic frameworks that, while very capable and feature rich, have many pitfalls and obstacles to performance and portability not immediately obvious.

Also a moddable game is something valuable to me, as is level creation by anyone.  Unity isn't designed with this capability given to the player by default but instead bundle everything up on build, using a one-stop-shop editor that requires players to essentially rebuild an entire game just to make a custom level unless a developer puts forth the effort themselves to engineer their own solution.

[66470c1b33567sarge945]

I agree that using an open source model is usually the best choice.

But in this case you're talking about a 20+ year old engine.

Even if you're using a more updated version with more modern features, it's still based on the same 20+ year old framework.

I wish Unity was more open and had more moddability, but practically speaking it's the best choice for a modern engine if you want to actually make a game, especially if you don't want the stink of Epic.

Also, Quake is only moddable because they gave the source code away. The vast majority of game developers aren't interested in giving their games source code away, and so usually have to do a bunch of extra legwork to support modding. This is true with or without Unity.

[66470c1b33740Nameless Voice]

Unreal Engine gives you full source access for free, if that's what you're looking for.  It also has support for making custom editors and modding support, though I haven't looked into that much myself.

[66470c1b33880sarge945]

I do like Unreal Engine, the issue I have is that Epic is a very shitty company, and I don't really like seeing them get marketshare.

Even if Unreal gives away source (although with a somewhat restrictive license), the vast majority of developers who use Unreal don't, so unless something is done in Blueprints, there's really no way to mod it without hacking the exe