Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Retro game engine for developers that enjoy creating games like it's 1997

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 124 posts

Re: Retro game engine for developers that enjoy creating games like it's 1997

#21

Post by klodolph »

tracker1 wrote: post #13
klodolph wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since this engine is GPL-licensed it seems like any game built with this engine would then also need to be GPL-licensed, correct? Yes, mostly correct. In order to comply with the GPL, and distribute game binaries, you need to make the source to any game you make with it available under the same terms. Technically that does not mean that you have to distribute the game under the GPL, but in practice that's how you w…

Could just release the game engine binary with a separate loader for assets and license check... Utilizing steam for distribution and in game features could help too.

You can't link a GPL engine against the Steam library (Steamworks SDK is proprietary) and then distribute binaries without violating the GPL.

It's also not assets that are the problem, it's the game-specific code.

Re: Retro game engine for developers that enjoy creating games like it's 1997

#22

Post by openbasic »

tracker1 wrote: post #17
openbasic wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having no OpenGL makes an HTML5 port even easier.

Wouldn't opengl be closer to webgl?

Emscripten has an SDL implementation so you can just SDL_BlitSurface inside a .

Re: Retro game engine for developers that enjoy creating games like it's 1997

#23

Post by mikepurvis »

peterangular wrote: post #10
mdavidn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factorio, a recent relatively popular indie game, was developed on Allegro.

They're moving off of it last I heard. Sounds like it's a legacy solution at this point. https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-230

Huh, I wonder what that'll mean for cross-platform compatibility. As they say in the post, Allegro supports a lot of platforms, whereas if they end up just targeting DirectX 11, that pretty much locks out everyone other than Windows and Xbox, doesn't it?

Re: Retro game engine for developers that enjoy creating games like it's 1997

#24

Post by badsectoracula »

claudiulodro wrote: post #3

Super cool. I always loved that mid-90s 3D look. I'm familiar with how the GPL applies to regular system/web software, but I haven't had experience with it and game engines before. Since this engine is GPL-licensed it seems like any game built with this engine would then also need to be GPL-licensed, correct?

Yes the code needs to be GPL, but that does not apply to the assets of course since the assets (including any scripts, although Q2 does not use scripts) are just "data".

For PC games this isn't really a limitations, there are several games on Steam using GPL engines (mainly based on id's releases) - a known one is Quadrilateral Cowboy which uses the Doom 3 engine.

Re: Retro game engine for developers that enjoy creating games like it's 1997

#26

Post by badsectoracula »

zokier wrote: post #9

> Removal of OpenGL Huh. I suppose CPUs are fast and all, but still seems odd to replace perfectly good OpenGL renderer with SW rendering.

Considering this, I wonder why the choice of Quake 2 instead of Quake 1 since the main thing Quake 2 introduced has over Quake 1 was colored lighting but that was only available in the OpenGL version.

Re: Retro game engine for developers that enjoy creating games like it's 1997

#27

Post by setr »

klodolph wrote: post #5
claudiulodro wrote: post #3

Super cool. I always loved that mid-90s 3D look. I'm familiar with how the GPL applies to regular system/web software, but I haven't had experience with it and game engines before. Since this engine is GPL-licensed it seems like any game built with this engine would then also need to be GPL-licensed, correct?

> Since this engine is GPL-licensed it seems like any game built with this engine would then also need to be GPL-licensed, correct? Yes, mostly correct. In order to comply with the GPL, and distribute game binaries, you need to make the source to any game you make with it available under the same terms. Technically that does not mean that you have to distribute the game under the GPL, but in practice that's how you w…

Wouldn’t a game engine have the same role as gcc? As a tool, unless you’re extending the source itself, you shouldn’t be infected by the engine’s license

Re: Retro game engine for developers that enjoy creating games like it's 1997

#28

Post by badsectoracula »

openbasic wrote: post #15
tracker1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed... I'm a little surprised they wouldn't adapt to work/build to wasm+webgl target. It seems to me that could make a pretty good cross platform base.

Having no OpenGL makes an HTML5 port even easier.

Emscripten has an OpenGL 1.x implementation and Quake 2 uses pretty much OpenGL 1.1. Some years ago i ported my engine that has a GL1.x-only path to Emscripten and had an SDL backend (i removed it since then) and it took just a couple of hours to "port" (the two main problems i had were that i was doing some unaligned pointer accesses - casting a byte array to a float array to read vertex data - that Emscripten didn't knew how to handle so i wrote a slower path for Emscripten and that the OpenGL 1.x implementation wasn't that great and i had to write some workarounds).

Re: Retro game engine for developers that enjoy creating games like it's 1997

#29

Post by openbasic »

Jaruzel wrote: post #12

This is great. I remember back to the late 90s when I was busy hacking gamex86.dll to customise my Quake2 Death-matches with my friends. One thing I wonder about this release is though - the Original Quake2 engine had a very fixed palette and also some odd lighting that always skewed the palette to a brown tint - does qengine fix this? Also... Bonus... Some Quake2 maps, that I made way back: http://www.jaruzel.com/bl…

From my perspective, that odd lighting and tint is part of the aesthetic that makes it great. You can learn more about how the renderer works here:

http://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/quake2_software_renderer.ph...

You can create your own palette using the included pcx2pal: https://github.com/klaussilveira/qengine/blob/master/src/too...

After that, you might want to generate the colormap: https://github.com/klaussilveira/qengine/blob/master/src/too...

If you enjoy the code of Q2, but also would like more modern rendering, I highly recommend quake2xp from Barnes: https://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-2-xp

Yamagi is the gold standard for all Q2 engines: https://github.com/yquake2/yquake2

And some art help: http://maps.rcmd.org/tutorials/q2_palette_textures/

Re: Retro game engine for developers that enjoy creating games like it's 1997

#30

Post by [deleted] »

mikepurvis wrote: post #23
peterangular wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're moving off of it last I heard. Sounds like it's a legacy solution at this point. https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-230

Huh, I wonder what that'll mean for cross-platform compatibility. As they say in the post, Allegro supports a lot of platforms, whereas if they end up just targeting DirectX 11, that pretty much locks out everyone other than Windows and Xbox, doesn't it?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN