Future Engine: Half Life 2? Yay? Nay?

[yurch]

1677.7 SQUARE KILOMETERS !!! Screw small village maps, we could do small country maps! We could have aircraft, battleships, artillery, huge land invasions. Games could go on for weeks at a time! We could renact the invasion of Iraq, with both armys playing online! LOL!

It's all for shit if you can't put enough players in the server to begin with.
8, 16, or even 32 players if the engine could run that reasonably, still isn't going to cut it for a map that size.

 

[salad]

Anyone for waffles?

First he said...

Yeah, that was my impression after playing around with Far Cry at a Fry's Outlet here in Dallas. It was nice, but it seemed limited. It didn't seem to have much flexibility. I can't see it being stretched to the limits like UT99 has been.

Now he says...

Not too mention, go to the far cry site, and look at how beautiful the editor looks. Also the sdk allows shaders like Quake 3 used and its own scripting language like unreal tournament ( best of both worlds). So far it looks like UBI Soft is going to support this game. Also, its being said that it looks like HL2 and Far Cry are almost identicle engines.

Screw 2004. I vote for Far Cry!

 

[Logan6]

lol, like I care what your lame ass thinks salad.

Yeah, Yurch, but my god 1600 km! Thats like a whole ****ing world. Still now that the SDK has come out and they're explaining some of the programming abilities, I am impressed. The graphics I think are a little toonish, but it took me time to get used to unreal's graphics too. I think the sharpest graphics are in quake 3, but it takes hours just to create a small map in that game.
Taking a look at some of the editor shots, very nice. I've just across all of this though, so Im still looking at it. Also, they have a 180 page .pdf document if someone would care to look at it.

heres the http where I was looking at this.

Far Cry Files

 

[salad]

You know you love me.

Oh, and Far Cry has different rendering schemes/modes, you twit. Look it up.

 

[Logan6]

er, and why would I love a 12 year old troll? Who has never posted anything but rants?

Well, enough with the kiddie talk.

 

[salad]

Because I'm smarter than you. I know objects of the same size fall at the same at the same speed regardless of mass. I know ecology and animal ranges as well. I know that you can't reliably form an opinion of the modability of a game engine based on a few minutes of playtime in some store, most likely without even opening the editor. I also know that you're fairly full of ****.

 

[yurch]

Like I said, that expanse of terrain will not be of any use. Not only do you have to generate artwork for that much terrain (which, if you don't want it to be cut and paste, could take well over a year for a single map), but you won't be able to use it feasably with the low farcry playercount. Period.

The max mapsize is just a number.

 

[Logan6]

Well there goes my dream of mapping germany in scale . Maybe I'll just do Paris. I can imagine not just the exabytes of ram or the time it would take to put it all together, but the time it would take to compile it. Still, thats pretty amazing I think. Some 3 or 4 mile square maps would be incredible though. I see what you mean about the number of people able to be on a server. Maybe someday well be able to link to some servers together and get more people.
I just downloaded the 180 page PDF manual for its editor Sandbox and god it looks awesome. Very nice. I was very impressed. I don't know how easy it will be to directly code in but they talk about shaders ( which I messed with in Quake 3 ), and the LUA code, which sounds a lot like unreal script. Mapping looks pretty easy. Vehicles in the game seem to be no problem. Hell, they even have sharks and underwater vegetation. I really have to rethink my position on hoping for UT2004 as the next infiltration engine. I think Far Cry is going to blow it away.

 

[mat69]

A bit information about the DOOM 3 Engine:
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/doom-3/539049p1.html

 

[Crowze]

I just downloaded the 180 page PDF manual for its editor Sandbox and god it looks awesome. Very nice. I was very impressed. I don't know how easy it will be to directly code in but they talk about shaders ( which I messed with in Quake 3 ), and the LUA code, which sounds a lot like unreal script. Mapping looks pretty easy. Vehicles in the game seem to be no problem. Hell, they even have sharks and underwater vegetation. I really have to rethink my position on hoping for UT2004 as the next infiltration engine. I think Far Cry is going to blow it away.

Which one of them doesn't UT2004 do then? I will repeat the issues of peformance and multiple OS support.

Besides, I thought this thread was about HL2. There's a different one for Far Cry.

EDIT:

It was recently announced that id Software's next big game would be a whole new license: not DOOM, not Quake, not Wolfenstein, and no, not even Commander Keen. During Carmack's talk, he also made it clear that the company doesn't want to spend another four years on their next title. Carmack estimates that he'll have the game engine renderer done in less than a year. He also estimated that the art team will be able to start creating media for the new engine within the next month. Things are moving fast!

The next game for id Software will be a departure from anything they've done before, but we did learn a few things. For one thing, it'll focus on single-player, much like DOOM 3. Carmack said that this tended to be a good model -- in a single-player game, framerate isn't quite as important, so a state-of-the-art engine that really pushes systems to the limit isn't as much of a drawback. Then, partner companies can come out with multiplayer-focused games using that same engine shortly thereafter -- much like how Raven Software is doing Quake 4 using the DOOM 3 engine, focusing on multiplayer.

id's next title will be a first-person game, and although it will focus on single-player it'll have a basic multiplayer such as DOOM 3. What will it look like? What will it be about? Sadly, no details were forthcoming. We expect an announcement in the coming months.

Looks like iD are trying to rival Epic here... doesn't it sound like the unannounced Unreal Engine 3 game they're working on?

 

[(SDS)benmcl]

The problem with that assement is that the Sandbox Editor is only one part of what is required. There are other tools needed and they have only until recently be released and will not be supported. How good are those tools I am not sure but I have yet to hear anything good about them.

Yes Epic says it does not support UnrealEd but that is only lawyer talk because they certainly do. Take a look at the UDN site. Also you can have very large maps in UT2K4 if you properly optomize it.

 

[Arethusa]

I hardly think that sounds like id copying Epic. It's so fantastically vague that it might as well be an attempt at taking on the movie industry or defeating the Medina devision in a tacical maneuver into the past for all we know. And considering that it is id, after all, if anyone's doing any rivalin', it's not them.

Also, for the love of god, Logan, forget about Far Cry. You're out of your mind and your element.

 

[Logan6]

Well, Arethusa, I've probably got more mind, and seen more element than you ever have.

Personally, Im not that pleased with Id and doom3. I thought it would look better. I think UT2004 beats Doom3. And for anybody who knows how it is to map in Quake 3, its a nightmare. A big map can take hours to days to compile. And then halfway through everything just goes critical and blows. My bets on Far Cry or UT2004 (maybe HL2 if it will ever come out). I think the pros for Far Cry are the Sandbox editor which looks really nice in the manual ( now I don't know how it is in real life ). Seems to make it pretty easy to map. That is, easier than UT2004. Also, the almost ridiculously unlimited map sizes are great. I think UT2004 would also be a great pick for the next engine. I haven't totally loved what I've seen in some of the demos so far, but I have seen some pics of some beautiful maps that one artist had made, and was pretty impressed, so I guess it can be done. Personally I hope that whatever engine isn't picked, some other team will take it up to make a realism mod for it two. Now that would be sweet.

On another note, does anyone know what the max map size for UT2004 is?

 

[Derelan]

1677721.6 square meters or 1677.7 square kilometers

Somehow i don't think thats right. According to my terrible math, 10^6 square meters = 1 square kilometer, thus 1677721.6 square meters = approx 4.4 square kilometers, or somewhere around 1000 acres. Thats a bit smaller.

Where did you get that number from, anyway?

(and from this link, 10^5 meters_sq is one km_sq, 1677721.6 square meters is 1.6777216 square kilometers, or about 400 acres.)

 

[Logan6]

Ok, was re-reading his post. The last part is a screw up. He just moved the decimal over 3 places which doesn't work. But he comes out with the corrected ( from what the game boasts ) size of the map is 32 x 40 km maximum, so that would be a total of 1280 square kilometers ( or 500 square miles ). I think I got that right. Thats still freakin huge! Not of course that anybody would ever attempt it, but some outdoor maps 3 or 4 times the size of Kandahar would be cool.
Now of course the only way to truly confirm this is tofind someone who has far cry and has downloaded the editor. But the people on the forum seemed to know what they were talking about and no one has challenged this guy on it yet, so well see.

Far Cry vs. HL2

 

[Crowze]

The people on that forum don't have a clue, because HL2 isn't released yet. Where did the numbers 40km x 50km come from anyway?

Do you realise what resolution you'd have to run the game at to see even a single pixel of someone 40km away?

 

[Arethusa]

I imagine it wouldn't matter, as any good mapper will obviously be mapping in the curvature of the Earth, putting that 40km distant figured over the horizon.

 

[Derelan]

Yes, I believe a 6-foot-tall person can see approx 4 kilometers until the curvature of the earth obstructs his view, on a perfectly clear day.

 

[Logan6]

The people on that forum don't have a clue, because HL2 isn't released yet. Where did the numbers 40km x 50km come from anyway?

Well, this isn't HL2, its Far Cry. And like I said, you got to take it with a grain of salt, unless one of you actually has the game and editor. Supposedly thats the numbers that the Far Cry programmers released. But the people on the forum seemed to know what they were talking about, and I believe it was in the manual that I downloaded that it talked about the drawing clipping at about 2 km. I would love to verify that, but I just don't have $50 bucks right now to buy the game. However, I get the feeling that this game is all about HUGE landscapes. Its why they made the editor so easy. According to the manual for Sandbox, it talks about not just placing models of tree's etc on to the terrain, but just basically painting swaths of landscape at a time.

For one clue as to how big things are, take a look at one of the pics where the sniper is looking out of the helicopter with the rifle in his lap. The copters up about 1000 feet. Think it was on the Far Cry site.

Now I guess the real question is, how is it going to be with buildings, houses, bunkers, etc?

Also, I haven't been able to verify how big the maps can be in 2004. Anyone know?

 

[Logan6]

Yes, I believe a 6-foot-tall person can see approx 4 kilometers until the curvature of the earth obstructs his view, on a perfectly clear day.

Hmm, I was thinking it was greater than 2km like Far Cry says it clips at but I could live with 2 km of view.