Making a FOSS game with Q3 src - looking for tips

[chombee]

Hi,

I'm trying to find out about using the Quake3 engine to create a little FOSS game and thought you folks might be able to give some advice.

What I want to make is an interactive story that consists of:

* The player walking around some environment by controlling an avatar (first or third person)
* AI characters that wander around the environment
* The player can stop and talk to the AI characters by passing and receiving text messages that are display on screen

It's intended to tell a children's fairy tale, so I want an environment and avatars that are suitable for children, or at least fairly generic (it's only a research prototype, so it doesn't have to be great).

I have some programming ability myself, but not much time to devote to game coding and engine hacking, I need to be able to hook up my interactive story code to Q3 and have it controlling AI bots fairly rapidly. I have no ability to create art - environments or avatars - myself.

I know Id released the code under GPL, but I'd need to find some suitable art content - a map and some character models - that I could use also.

I'd probably need to program a 2D overlay interface for text messages and menus, as I don't think Q3 had that (or did it?)

And I'd need to be able to write AI for my characters to get them to act out the story. Does the Q3 code release include the bot AI's, so that I would have access to basic functions like pathfinding?

How easy is it to get hacking with the Q3 engine on something like this, and can anyone give any pointers?

I guess Q3 is programmed in C. Is there any way to interface with it from another language, something like Python?

Thanks for any tips

[Paradox]

Sorry, this site is dedicated to Tremulous. Are you planning to make a mod for Tremulous, or for Quake. For either, i reccomend that you read other quake site's modding messageboards.

[raph]

I guess Q3 is programmed in C. Is there any way to interface with it from another language, something like Python?

Impossible is nothing, but learn C ;-)

But you should better use another engine (e.g google for "Crystal Space" or "OGRE").
But anyway, here is realy the wrong place to ask  

[Teiman]

Suggestions:

1) Read about nexuiz engine*. Its a Quake1 with Quake3 maps and models support. Use QuakeC that is very easy to use. But limited.

2) Hire a modeler.

3) If you pick Quake3, code a few text parse, and code most your stuff (ai, dialogs, etc.. ) on these files. So you will have N hours of C coding, and M hours tweaking text files.

4) If you really want to embed something fun. I suggest Spidermonkey, because its GPL and its very easy to embed. Its javascript.. How fun can be that?