Request for documentation
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Hi,
the looks of the engine are almost unbelievable, it's amazing. Let me still express one thing that concerns me. This is only a humble request I'm not ordering anyone to do anything and I know it may not yet to be time for this but still please read and consider.
I have the impression this projects main goal is to produce an engine, not really a game. The purpose of an engine is to serve as a platform to build games on (or mods however you want to see it). Therefore (as I see it) it's extremely vital to have good documentation, tutorials and how-tos explaining step by step how to make graphics, maps, models and code and finally how to put it all together. It would be a great shame if a project like this wouldn't get used as an engine just because people get frustrated before they get anything visible done with it.
I know building a game is a long and tedious process and one might think "if someone gives up so easily he's not going to make any real game either". While there's some truth in this, why not make it any harder than it has to be, people may be very diligent and enthusiastic as soon as they see they're making progress.
Also I would like to see attention paid on the tools which are needed to build such a mod/game. The engine itself is great, it's GPLed, compiled on several platforms. I wish the tools needed would be "free" as well and available on other platforms than windows. If this is absolutely impossible, I think it should be sufficient if you could provide extendable API and documentation how to provide importers for other formats.
Please don't take this as I was telling you how to do things, all these points might have been considered already. I just have seen too many promising projects abandoned due to the extreme difficulty to utilize it / lack of the documentation. Like I said this is just too good to get the same fate. I'm willing to help with testing, collecting docs/howtos whatever to make the engine easier to utilize.
Thanks for reading this long rant, also thanks for the great work you've done with this project.
I agree with you about the need for documentation and I'm very glad that there are other people interested in helping to improve the engine and its documentation. At the moment the developers are working on coding the Tenebrae2 engine. Its not really anywhere near a working release at the moment the developers seem to have allot of things planed that would change the way games based on the engine would need to be made and structured. I haven't seen a list of planed features but i get the impression that the finished 2.0 version of the engine will break compatibility anything made to work on the current version (even the Industri_leak mod will need to have allot of things re-implemented). The developers are planing to add support for new model formats and i'm guessing that this will make current models and animations useless. I can see the map support staying quite stable for a while(if not forever) and this area has already started to be documented(by tig-on of the Industri Game/Mod).
Whats not free about GTKRadiant(the Map editor) and Q3map2(the map compiler)? I don't know for sure but i think they are both open source. Also if you don't want to use Photoshop or some other closed source application for the normal map generation(part of the texture creation) there is the "gimp-normalmap" plug-in(if you can find a download of it).
Documentation that already exists and is relevant to Tenebrae2(in its current ever-changing form):
For texture creating infomation:
http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=technical/textures.htm
Also there are some Gimp plugins that might be of some interest:
http://nifelheim.dyndns.org/~cocidius/normalmap/ - i cant download the tar.gz package or connect to the CVS server :(
http://registry.gimp.org/plugin?id=402 - Might be good for making bumpmaps but i haven't tryed it.
For maping information:
http://industri.sourceforge.net/gtkradiant-t2.php
I don't know of any Linux based modelers that can export to md3(one of tenebrae2's supported model formats) but i also don't fully know what the state of animation is with this Engine. Also the XML menu system used in Tenebrae2 could use a small bit of documentation, its really easy to play around with if you just look at how the industri menus have been made. I don't know if the XML menu's are fully working in tenebrae2 atm, I think I remember a comment somewhere saying "more work to come". They are working quite well though.
I would like to know about a Linux Quake-C compiler(for the .qc source files), this is quite needed for mod making using the current engine. Does QuakeForge make one that would work? Who knows though maybe when the Tenebrae2.0 release comes out the support for Quake-c may be removed, replaced with a python interface maybe? Ok the python stuff is purely my imagination but maybe it would be a good option for the future.
Dennis is close to it :)
As we're changing the way how the engine works all the time, adding
new cool stuff, writing a full documentation on it is a waste of time until Tenebrae 2.0 with all the major stuff is finished. Tho the mapping stuff is pretty solid but will get extended. Animation hasen't even been touch yet. Menus need some work still. Still some old quake stuff that needs to be removed and the list goes on... there is just so much we can do in your free time, which I personally don't have much of. Even if Tenebrae 2.0 is in a release state it will still change, at leased then you got something solid to work from and we will have documentation for it too.
Major things that are still missing from it is a model format and animation stuff, there are some ideas how it could work or what to use but hasn't been done yet.
And there are still some internal changed going on with the rendering and adding new fancy stuff :)
Even particle system needs to be redesigned since it now can do a lot more then in Tenebrae2 since we don't have the Quake limitations anymore.
game source wise, so far we wanna stick to the progs.dat, so quake c. as it would take a lot of time to redesign and write that part of it as well, tho we're adding new stuff to it.
Ah well still a lot of shit to do :)
Yeah, all valid points here.
There is some mapping documentation already available, thanks to Tig, some is in the current closed alpha site (shaders, menu language, ...), also coming to the public beta site (which Charles has been putting up for ages now :), but much more is still to be written. Most of Quake 3 documentation applies to mapping, md3 models and shaders, but per pixel lighting etc. brings some differences.
The best possible situation would be that people that are now experimenting with the Industri leak for example would make some kind of "documentation" on what they found especially confusing or difficult and how they solved those. Perhaps a wiki or something on the beta site would be good?
Sounds like an idea to me
Hi, i doesnt know much about wiki - is it some kind of a devjounal ? - where people can write in a step-by-step how to, with a avoid list :D, so that other people dont make the same mistakes?
That would be just great. - for tenebrae1x too ?
low
It's an online collaborating tool where basically everyone can create and edit content non-destructively. Interesting concept really, check http://c2.com/cgi/wiki for example if you want details. There are literally dozens of different implementations of the idea.
A wiki would be quite good :).