Topic: Descent clone

[Scyphi]

Well, I wanna thank D3Jake for explaining ODF to me, so that now I finally know what's going on with that project. And you have to give him and his fellow teammates credit for getting as far as they have already. Granted, it's not much, but for some projects, it's more than what some have to show.

[d3jake]

You're welcome Scyphi. Now the public has an easy-to-reach explanation.

Currently we're using the Irrlicht graphics engine as the basis for our game. On top of that we're using Bullet for physics, and the audio\networking libraries are up in the air. We decided that writing anything from scratch would be a waste of time. One of the concepts that we want to work with throughout the project is an open program (hence Open Descent Foundation). This allows development, innovation, and the ability to adapt the software to many different kinds of platforms.
As karx has pointed out, there are many full blown engines available to us, but we decided against using such an engine.

We don't want to completely leave behind Descent 1\2\3 levels, but nor do we want to rely on being able to refurbish older levels. To a certain degree, dragging the older levels with is may end up doing more harm than good, however we decided that we wanted to allow backwards compatibility with older Descent versions in an environment free of "Well, you can play these levels, but you need the original data files."

karx: I appreciate your comments. Realism is something that we need to keep in mind while we work on our project. Criticism, whatever the motivation (as we both know there are those that would like to sling garbage for the sake of it.), can be useful. Keep up the comments in the future; we'll be happy to have an outside opinion as we progress.

Sadly speed is at a premium... This past summer I've helped pick up the pace, and during the semester King_Lo and D_Cent have been working on various parts of the program. Come Winter break I'm wanting to hit the ground running.

[karx-elf-erx]

Irrlicht? I had looked at it once and turned away from it because it appeared to be too unfinished and too much of a W.I.P. to me. I wonder how it will cope with dozens and dozens of light sources during fire fights.