Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2005 6:48 pm
Oh no. I wasn't suggesting getting the source from Take 2. There are thousands of games out there, many which look/play exactly/mostly the same and very few weren't coded from scratch. If someone can make Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake/Unreal/Halo from scratch (ok, _mostly_ from scratch) I don't see why I can't make another Real Time Tactical game from scratch. I'm just looking for discussion from programmers (preferably ones who haven't seen the Myth Source code) about the reasons the Myth engine fails to scale.
As for the features, mipmapping I think would have actually made the Myth Engine faster, as it would allow distant units to use a pre-filtered lower level of detail image, and I am surprised that Bungie didn't use it in their Engine, but I'm guessing since the additional images would have to be included in the unit collections somehow adding one third to their size and alot to their complexity, they just said to hell with it.
The 3d audio chat was on the original list of things that was supposed to be in the game, since 3d audio was already in there. I think they just realized that most of there customers/players were going to be on 56k modems at best and opted to skip this feature too.
The no skybox thing was just plain lazy. If there was a completely free z (or y depending on how you label the axis) the camera could fly over the units wrecking the illusion of the unit/scenery billboards. By fixing z to the C/V arc, like they did, the units and scenery only had to be rendered from one particular elevation to look good at any Zoom setting, another Engine compromise/shortcut, that as a side effect eliminated the need for a skybox. Why have the engine render a skybox when the player can't ever stop looking at the ground?
The multiple, modifyable media types would be a nice-to-have.
I also need more than two meshes to load after the current one. Ideally you should be able to have as many "next meshes" as you want but at least 4 would have been nice.
As for the features, mipmapping I think would have actually made the Myth Engine faster, as it would allow distant units to use a pre-filtered lower level of detail image, and I am surprised that Bungie didn't use it in their Engine, but I'm guessing since the additional images would have to be included in the unit collections somehow adding one third to their size and alot to their complexity, they just said to hell with it.
The 3d audio chat was on the original list of things that was supposed to be in the game, since 3d audio was already in there. I think they just realized that most of there customers/players were going to be on 56k modems at best and opted to skip this feature too.
The no skybox thing was just plain lazy. If there was a completely free z (or y depending on how you label the axis) the camera could fly over the units wrecking the illusion of the unit/scenery billboards. By fixing z to the C/V arc, like they did, the units and scenery only had to be rendered from one particular elevation to look good at any Zoom setting, another Engine compromise/shortcut, that as a side effect eliminated the need for a skybox. Why have the engine render a skybox when the player can't ever stop looking at the ground?
The multiple, modifyable media types would be a nice-to-have.
I also need more than two meshes to load after the current one. Ideally you should be able to have as many "next meshes" as you want but at least 4 would have been nice.