Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

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Mantar
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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by Mantar » Post

thomasthespacefox wrote:Some may argue we should write our own graphics engine
Oh, hell no. The amount of work required goes, in order of difficulty:
1. Keep using Irrlicht until it breaks
2. Port to a different engine
3. Take over development of Irrlicht
4. Build a whole new graphics engine

We're currently on 1, and some folks are discussing the possibility of 2, because 1 does not look like a good long-term strategy since Irrlicht is basically getting nothing but occasional maintenace patches to keep it running, and those seem to be all coming from just one guy. If he ever stops, it's dead, Jim. As it is, it's not going anywhere and the various features Minetest needs are never going to happen.
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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by sofar » Post

Linuxdirk wrote:the era of general purpose open source graphics engines is over.
This is a good way of putting it.

Irrlicht has done well - it allowed MT to remain extremely small. That's always been a bonus. With today's computing devices, it's less and less of a bonus every year. People would still install Minetest if it was 1gb to download. (I'm only slightly exaggerating there).

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by thomasthespacefox » Post

After reading up on the subject some more (I should have done research first, I admit), i must admit that my opinion has been changed: we need to start planning on what we will replace irrlicht with, before it dies altogether. The longer we have to make such a change, the better.

Regardless on what option is chosen, a few things to consider:

- Lets face it: we're going to need Vulkan support one day.
- having better shader support at the get-go would certainly be nice.
- everything relying on irrlicht will need a ton of work to port over/rewrite. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that.
- support for loading media on-the-fly would certainly be easier if we used an engine that already supported this.
- most importantly: we switch to an engine that isn't dead.

Questions for the devs: Has this been discussed before? Is there currently any discussion on what to do when irrlicht finally dies?

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by TumeniNodes » Post

The biggest question is... who is going to do all that work? 0_0

The team is so small now, contributors are random.
Switching engines or creating one from scratch... hell, even heavily modifying the current beast will be an extreme amount of work, and time, and...
It would have to be an entirely separate project, which could possibly mean no new work done to the current project if the current dev team ever actually said "Yeh, why not? Let's do it."

So very many pros & cons to seriously think about, and so little time to do so.
Minetest is going to end in 12 years!!! 00
This is our WW2 people!
XD
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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by thomasthespacefox » Post

TumeniNodes wrote:The biggest question is... who is going to do all that work? 0_0

The team is so small now, contributors are random.
Switching engines or creating one from scratch... hell, even heavily modifying the current beast will be an extreme amount of work, and time, and...
It would have to be an entirely separate project, which could possibly mean no new work done to the current project if the current dev team ever actually said "Yeh, why not? Let's do it."

So very many pros & cons to seriously think about, and so little time to do so.
Minetest is going to end in 12 years!!! 00
This is our WW2 people!
XD
"Who?" Is a very excellent question TumeniNodes, a very excellent question indeed. In fact, its such an excellent question, that, as far as any answers, i, have absolutely no idea...

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by TumeniNodes » Post

One of the important things to look at ahead of time (as best one can predict the future) is if there were to be a full on switch, whichever engine is chosen is, what limitations does it have, which will cause issues down the road, as there are now and, just how likely is it, that dev on it may fall off in any foreseeable future (same as Irrlicht did)
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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by thomasthespacefox » Post

TumeniNodes wrote:One of the important things to look at ahead of time (as best one can predict the future) is if there were to be a full on switch, whichever engine is chosen is, what limitations does it have, which will cause issues down the road, as there are now and, just how likely is it, that dev on it may fall off in any foreseeable future (same as Irrlicht did)
A fair point. Super Tux Kart forked irrlicht, though thats likely due to STK having the development manpower to pull off such a stunt, minetest on the other hand... Err... :|

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by bhree » Post

Maybe what we only need is something like this, it is written irrlicht and it looks very good
https://youtu.be/BUr1PZr-hYY
i dont know if other game engine can offer more speed and robustness on the same hardware.

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by Inocudom » Post

At this rate I wish SWAMP GAMER and/or Horatio, who own Swamp Cinema in Garry's Mod, would create a server for Minetest. Maybe in the end their involvement would benefit us somehow? I do show videos of our game on their server on a regular basis, even though some people will just votedown/voteskip them.

Yes, we better get to know the licenses of these engines a little better:
Spring-GNU Version 2
Panda 3D-Revised BSD
Xenko-MIT License
Luxe-MIT License
Godot-MIT License
IrrlichtBAW-Apache License 2.0
Ogre3D-MIT License

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by Inocudom » Post

Inocudom wrote:At this rate I wish SWAMP GAMER and/or Horatio, who own Swamp Cinema in Garry's Mod, would create a server for Minetest. Maybe in the end their involvement would benefit us somehow? I do show videos of our game on their server on a regular basis, even though some people will just votedown/voteskip them.

Yes, we better get to know the licenses of these engines a little better:
Spring-GNU Version 2
Panda 3D-Revised BSD
Xenko-MIT License
Luxe-MIT License
Godot-MIT License
IrrlichtBAW-Apache License 2.0
Ogre3D-MIT License
Minetest has many godlike builders and dedicated YouTubers now, so choosing one of those engines would be worth the effort now.

Still interested in what kind of server SWAMP GAMER and/or Horatio would make for Minetest if that ever actually happened...

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by bhree » Post

Anything beautiful, fast and backward compatible with current engine especially mods and hopefully maps. I'm not really familiar with game engine the only I played is idtech engine from the past.

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by sofar » Post

Inocudom wrote: Yes, we better get to know the licenses of these engines a little better:
Spring-GNU Version 2
Panda 3D-Revised BSD
Xenko-MIT License
Luxe-MIT License
Godot-MIT License
IrrlichtBAW-Apache License 2.0
Ogre3D-MIT License
What's more important is OS support (android, linux, windows, MacOS, possibly iOS) and whether C bindings are simple or not. I don't think we'd want to drop any OSs just yet, and scripting support is critical too.

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by mid » Post

I might also go ahead and recommend Horde3D, it's extremely flexible, however a few issues:
  • The original does not have a shaderless fallback though in a potential fork FF things can be specified in the material file.
  • No builtin GUI support (there isn't meant to be one, it's supposed to be lightweight).
  • Enforces it's own formats which will break all mods.
  • Uses it's own scenegraph structure.
But that's not to ignore the pros, it's EPL licensed, super small, shader-based, small C-style (but not C) interface, very flexible pipeline and thus easy to just "switch" between forward and deferred. And, it's not minimum GL3, always great! Though, switching to Horde3D will break everything at first as everything will need to move to the .geo and xml formats.

All in all, probably not, but still worthy of a mention.

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by Inocudom » Post

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUkke3-QhcI
Yep, guess we can add GZDoom to the list of candidates huh? The license for it is GNU General Public License v3.0...

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by TumeniNodes » Post

mispost sorry
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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by Fixer » Post

Before switching engines you have to ask yourself: Is it worth it? And how Irrlicht holding you back with minetest, is it a serious problem? In case of serious problem, you can fork irrlicht and fix minetest related problems, that will need more hands at it for sure. Switching engines will need concentrated effort and removal of red tape.

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by CalebJ » Post

Inocudom wrote:If and should Irrlicht become an issue ...
That shouldn't be an "if", its a "it already is". Irrlicht is severely outdated and hard to deal with. I can't even copy and paste things into Minetest, and it seems to be a problem with my version of Irrlicht. Keyboard handling is a frightful experience.

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by Linuxdirk » Post

CalebJ wrote:I can't even copy and paste things into Minetest, and it seems to be a problem with my version of Irrlicht. Keyboard handling is a frightful experience.
"Frightful experience"? It is utterly broken when it comes to keyboard layouts that are not roughly a variant of QWERTY.

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by Red_King_Cyclops » Post

What if there was a Minetest sequel that used a better engine?
Currently working on new mods.

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by TumeniNodes » Post

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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by Extex » Post

My opinion probably isn't worth very much when it comes to engine choices but after looking into it I'd say we have Ogre, Panda3D, and Godot.

Ogre is developed by its own team of developers but has a massive lack of activity in recent times (May go down just like irrlicht)

Panda3d is Developed by Disney Interactive so there's no way it's going to crash and burn, it seems to have a lot of flexibility so it looks like a good choice

Godot is a community developed engine it seems like a good engine and could last a long time (Really not much to say about Godot XD)

I'd say Panda3D is the best way to go, since it's got a very low chance of dying
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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by TumeniNodes » Post

Out of those 3 Godot is the best option (out of those 3 that is)

Ogre is not a very good option and I would not touch anything related, even distantly to Disney, they are the entertainment industries MS (possibly even more sinister and underhanded)
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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by Extex » Post

Honestly that's what I was thinking.
I don't trust Disney either but I was mostly thinking about survival of the engines.
After a full read through of the comments and seeing what godot can do (From links provided in comments) (Google results aren't very amazing looking) Godot probably is the best option
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Re: Other, Superior Open Source Game Engines Exist Now... :D

by TumeniNodes » Post

It's also nice that we have, somewhat of a Godot link, by the name of Calinou ; )
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