What about 3D engine ?

[Asche]

I speak for the Tremap group (french mapper group) and some tremulous players who think that it's time, as some other games, to enhance the graphic quality of Tremulous

Have you already check Nexuiz ? (Open source quake like)



Lenext Urban terror client under development ? :



The Xreal game (quake 3 but beautiful) ? :

http://www.xreal-project.net/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/gwdm2/xreal-20090303-000555-000.jpg
http://www.xreal-project.net/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/gwdm2/xreal-20090303-000546-000.jpg
http://www.xreal-project.net/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/mic_modeltester/xreal-20090215-143040-000.jpg
http://www.xreal-project.net/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/mic_modeltester/xreal-20090216-233728-000.jpg
http://www.xreal-project.net/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/mic_modeltester/xreal-20090217-123634-000.jpg


All the segames use a technique to render the textures called "Bump mapping"(or parallax bump mapping for Xreal), that add a better realism

Example of bump :



Example of parallax bump (Xreal) :


(Nice, isn't it?)

The best is the implementation or the complete conversion to an existing 3D engine is possible!
There are plenty of programmers who know how to convert a tremulous mod to a standalone version!

Inaddition, Tr3b, the Xreal engine developer wrote a tremulous mod for Xreal (like the first version of tremulous that was a mod for Quake 3)
And it work fine. I compiled Xreal with the tremulous mod and all the graphical effects (Bump/Specular/Parallax mapping) are working
It miss only someone to create a standalone version and add minor fixes (the client was wrote only for Linux)

The tremulous community is waiting for it, a game that can be compared to the commercial games

The Tremap group found a new way to use high definition textures so map are better when you look details
Some example:

Standard quality texture on the left/ High quality texture on the right


High quality texture on the left / Standard quality texture on the right


And we find new things each evening!
We have several maps in project, with HD textures, and we can easily rebuild the mostplayed maps (ATCS, Tremor, ...) with HD textures
With an upgraded 3D engine ( like the Xreal one, that seems the best to use for tremulous) Tremap could be some map with a quality that you never seen on afree games
With this quality and the good tremulous gameplay, it would be marvelous for everyone:

- Current players
- New players
- The developers that would have more possibility
- Mappers

Some HD texture and 3D engine like xreal would make a game better than the IDTech 4 engine used in some famous game: Quake 4, Doom 3, Quake Wars Enemyterritory and Prey.

What isa pity:
The tremulous gameplay is very nice and the 1.2 version will make it better. Yes,it's good, but is it a higher priority than graphics quality?
The gameplay is currently very good, it was awarded "Standalone Game of the Year" for 2007.

What are doing all these Devs that created all these mods and new version of tremulous?

So, it'sthe time to think to the visual pleasure of the game, not to the gameplay! Let this gameplay like it is and work about Xreal tremulous!

There is alot of people, including me, that are ready to pay a professional developer todo this work!

Thinkabout: creating a game excellent in all point of view (exceptional gameplay and maps), would make crazy several commercial game editor!

A word to the wise is enough.

[kevlarman]

a new engine means essentially remaking the entire game (code and assets) from scratch (except maybe xreal, that would require somewhat less effort for the code, but it's not stable enough yet to start making games off of). also, other than the crappy urt screenshot (just because it has bloom doesn't mean it's a modern engine), you need a very recent graphics card to make it look like anything other than q3, and a $200 graphics card for maxed out settings in some of those engines.

[Hendrich]

One reason I love Tremulous is that virtually any PC can play the game so anyone can jump in and play, and if the devs disagree I would kill them slowly, starting with Who.

Also, you said the gameplay is already good and that they should concentrate on visual quality, but I disagree. Tremulous is still considered to be unbalanced and I assume much of the development time has been into tweaking Tremulous and Tremulous already has significant lag issues in the community so throwing in an engine demanding a more powerful rig isn''t gonna help that. 

Yes we know, Xreal looks very sexy and its possible to import most of the Tremulous models/animations/etc, but like Paradox said, the Xreal engine hasn't been matured, reliable or practical yet for games to start using it, thus explaining the utter lack of open source games using the engine.

I'm not saying your idea sucks, no, no, but my opinion stands that in this point of time, its unwise to start concentrating on visual quality when theres so many factors of Tremulous needing to be fixed for v1.2.   
 

[Archangel]

kevlardox? paraman?!

[kevlarman]

also, people seem to act like a more modern engine magically looks like those screenshots. so far many mappers can't even figure out that there are texture sets other than eq2, let alone create the normal/height/spec maps to make their textures actually look like that.

[Odin]

also, people seem to act like a more modern engine magically looks like those screenshots. so far many mappers can't even figure out that there are texture sets other than eq2, let alone create the normal/height/spec maps to make their textures actually look like that.

Also, people don't seem to know about maps other than ATCS.

[Asvarox]

crappy urt screenshot

it has reflection and 128 fps (in nexuiz my fps was dropping from 150 to 15 when i was looking at a slop)

Tremulous running in XreaL with (very experimental)HDR enabled. Mr. Granger has stars in his eyes!

[Asche]

Xreal can be configure for low systeme !

I think that "a unbalanced game play" is not a good argument for denying graph. evolution

If Xreal doesn't have mature enough, why not look at the Nexuiz code which also Open Source?

[Taiyo.uk]

Both XreaL and DarkPlaces (the Nexuiz engine) can be configured to run on low-end systems, at which point they both look like Q3. This still requires that most of the game assets are rewritten, which is a somewhat larger task than porting the trem code to another Q3-derived engine such as XreaL, or even to a completely different engine such as DarkPlaces.

You might want to check out TremFusion: http://www.tremfusion.net/ They're currently trying to port Tremulous to XreaL.

[Plague Bringer]

This has been suggested many, many times. French community wants to split and port, please do so (insert Quebec joke here).

Also, I think XReal looks like a piece of shit. Everything looks wet, overly shiny, and ugly as anything.

[Thorn]

I do  believe Xreal runs horribly slow for what it does ( even latest svn runs slow ). As for it looking "wet, overly shiny, and ugly as anything" would be more an issue with the data and not the engine itself. I'm sure all those parameters are part of the materials.

[Baconizer]

One reason I love Tremulous is that virtually any PC can play the game so anyone can jump in and play

Agreed. Plus, I don't really care about graphics as long as the gameplay is good. Tremulous gameplay is awesome.\

And I think that the number 1 priority for the Tremulous devs should be a flying granger.

[Odin]

Despite XreaL being able to be scaled back to look like Q3, it still requires a Geforce 6600 or better. This is because of XreaL's requirement of Shader Model 3.0. One way to fix this would be to detect OpenGL 1.4 or below for older cards and have the engine disable everything that the card cannot do(shadows, bump-mapping, HDR/bloom/SSAO post process effects, specularity, deluxemaps, etc) and do everything that IS possible on the video card. If that's not enough, implement the required features in software(like Q3) to get the game running. One cool feature for this sort of backwards-compatibility would be to bake bumpmaps into the diffusemaps to achieve static bumpiness in textures, like how bump detail is baked into textures in Q3A.

[kozak6]

It's dangerous to increase graphical quality.

To my understanding, a large part of our playerbase enjoy Tremulous because it will run and run well on old shitty computers (such as mine).  Increasing graphical quality significantly lowers performance, which will have the potential to drive off such players.

It's interesting that the original poster mentioned Nexuiz, as it's a particularly good example of this. 

In the good old days of Nexuiz 1.2.1, it didn't look absolutely breathtaking, but since my old worthless computer bounded along at several hundred frames per second regardless of what was going on in the game, I was fairly happy.

Since then, quality has increased to what you see in the above pictures, except instead of several hundred FPS, I only get ... several.

I don't play Nexuiz much these days.

[CreatureofHell]

It's dangerous to increase graphical quality.

True. Aliens might come down and blow up the planet if we increase it too high.

[Asche]

From my perspective, I have the impression that the tremulous.net community refuses progress that would be good for everybody.

The idea of being able to detect if the graphics card of the user support the bump mapping texturing is very good, that it could be in the code.

Tremulous is ugly, but he can be beautiful, if some people (Dev) really thinks about the possibility of changing the engine.

[Amanieu]

It is possible to have the client choose between 2 renderers, such as the current one and XReal.

[Asche]

Great news no ?

[Odin]

You'd have to re-do almost all of the assets in Tremulous to have it work with XreaL anyway.

^ Redacted.

[Plague Bringer]

It's dangerous to increase graphical quality.

To my understanding, a large part of our playerbase enjoy Tremulous because it will run and run well on old shitty computers (such as mine).  Increasing graphical quality significantly lowers performance, which will have the potential to drive off such players.

It's interesting that the original poster mentioned Nexuiz, as it's a particularly good example of this. 

In the good old days of Nexuiz 1.2.1, it didn't look absolutely breathtaking, but since my old worthless computer bounded along at several hundred frames per second regardless of what was going on in the game, I was fairly happy.

Since then, quality has increased to what you see in the above pictures, except instead of several hundred FPS, I only get ... several.

I don't play Nexuiz much these days.

My Nexuiz does not look like that. And I'd know, too. I see a lot of dog shit on the streets. Tried setting your settings (what an awkward sentence) to low?

[your face]

Tremulous is ugly...

Your face is.   (Proof of ugliness, please).

[Asvarox]

Tremulous is ugly...

Your face is.   (Proof of ugliness, please).

Tremulous
XReal

[Demolution]

Tremulous is ugly...

Your face is.   (Proof of ugliness, please).

Tremulous
XReal

The second image doesn't look much better. If darkness is supposed to be "better", then nothnx.

[Plague Bringer]

Wow. That's so hideous. The second shot, I mean. Oh, and Asvarox, that's quite biased, as (no offense to the map maker) that isn't a proper demonstration of what Tremulous can look like. Go find shots of the Odin Tanker in the Random Devshots. Personally (yeah, yeah, I've said it enough) XReal makes everything look like shiny plastic. Ew. do-not-want.

It just makes everything look so obviously computerized.

[David]

When you resort to picking a crappy box map with zero detail, why should we take anything else you say at face value?

EDIT: Plague Bringer beat me to it

[Hendrich]

XReal makes everything look like shiny plastic

Doom 3, anyone?

Agree or disagree, I believe graphics aren't the only factor that makes the game's presentation. In the infamous Call of Cthulu, what makes the game memorable was the little things. The shadows, the poster textures, the water that moves as you walk through it, the slight change of light contrast emitting in a lamp post, etc.

Things like these can also be found in Tremulous. The small particles emitted from a Lucifer or a mass driver or the spin of the reactor. The breathing animation of a dragoon or how they added the lightning moving across the Adv. Marauder's body or even the split-second flash of bullets shot from a turret.

Even the official maps in Tremulous boosts its overall quality. The pipes running under grated floors, wires connecting to ceilings, the smoke billowing out of pipes, windows showing a desolate, unsurvivable world and more qualities too numoreous to mention.

In that way, Tremulous already looks beautiful, but dated because of the engine. But if you want sexy graphics, throw in TF's bloom lighting, maps compatible with Shiny Shaders and specular lighting and you got sexiness right there. Yea its not anything like what they're doing with Urban Terror, but atleast its good enough to look at without that plastic feel to it.   

Thats why I can't agree with others that the developers should torture themselves any further, learn a totally new engine (Xreal's code mostly resembles to I.D Tech 4 as mentioned on Xreal's website) when they already have a perfectly good engine on their hands. They know Quake 3 and if they remake Tremulous in a new engine, its likely it'll contains bugs they don't even know about.

Besides, Tremulous source code is right there in the open for free, why make developers do something that you're not willing to do yourself? If its that important to you, learn to code/model/etc with your friends and do it yourself. If you're not willing to do that, then I guess its not something worthwhile to be done.

As mentioned before, I'm not picking on anyone for suggesting such (<3), just saying its logical to say that Tremulous doesn't require a new engine. Hopefully what I said made sense.     
 

[Odin]

Wow. That's so hideous. The second shot, I mean. Oh, and Asvarox, that's quite biased, as (no offense to the map maker) that isn't a proper demonstration of what Tremulous can look like. Go find shots of the Odin Tanker in the Random Devshots. Personally (yeah, yeah, I've said it enough) XReal makes everything look like shiny plastic. Ew. do-not-want.

That was rendered on an old revision of XreaL, not to mention the texture set used(eX) didn't originally come with very good detail maps. In fact it doesn't have any height maps by default; they had to be generated in crazybump. Plus, eX doesn't tend to look good with only itself and no other combination of textures, except in some limited cases. There are some parallax test shots that look absolutely gorgeous, rendered in XreaL by the TrueCombat continuation mod group. Here's an example:
http://www.shrani.si/f/1x/1Q/1unLLeh5/xreal-20090307-153147-00.jpg

[St. Anger]

Or how about we all wait a couple of years for id Tech 4 to be open source.

[David]

Exactly the same stuff applys.

My guess is when idt4 comes along, a new game will be made much like how trem followed on from gloom.

[CATAHA]

I wont vote for 'new engine' idea.... but still wanna see some shader improvements. Some water/specular possibilities... heh...