Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

61–70 of 124 posts

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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two other cool engines with a software renderer that support colored lighting: http://super8.qbism.com/ https://github.com/leilei-/Engoo Both are Q1 though. However, the gray-ish/brown-ish look is entirely dependent on the color palette that you chose to use in your game. You have 256 colors to choose from, and with the 256x320 colormap, you get 64 shades of each.

Even GZDoom (A Doom port) has software color lighting now, so I'm shocked this doesn't have it, that's all. And engoo is very good; I was one of its beta testers!

PRs are welcome! :D

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

#62
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in their early 20's don't even know Half-Life (released at the end of 1998, over 20 years ago now), let alone Quake. We're definitely getting old!

Blame Valve's lack of interest in maintaining their franchises for that one.

i lowkey kinda feel that the pervasive gamer hype about half-life 3 (for example the "hl3 confirmed" meme was extremely pervasive) made valve feel like it would be impossible to match the hype, and any flaw would be hyper focused. maybe now that it's faded a bit there won't be as much pressure. or i could be wrong about that mattering.

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

#63
post #20

Quake 2 is retro ? Shit, I'm old.

That's how I feel. I misread the title as "1987" and conjured up ideas of Zelda and Mega Man... and then I see Qauke 2 in the screenshot and I immediately thought "A modern game engine?"

I suppose it's not really all that modern, but still... wow I'm old.

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

#64
post #46

This is really cool, and I can’t believe I’ve lived long enough to see Quake 2 be called “retro.” I’ll likely live long enough to see the Unreal Engine of today called retro. I’ve never thought of this before, and it’s wild.

Full with tutorials/plugins to emulate artifacts caused by temporal anti-aliasing, old-school shadow maps and heavy usage of screen space reflection and ambient occlusion in modern engines

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

#65
post #46

This is really cool, and I can’t believe I’ve lived long enough to see Quake 2 be called “retro.” I’ll likely live long enough to see the Unreal Engine of today called retro. I’ve never thought of this before, and it’s wild.

Reading around, retro seems to be about 20+ years old, which fits.

Doesn't make it hurt and less though :( .

Ps what do you expect your life span to be if you're excited that you've lived long enough to see quake 2 become retro, and will see the games of today become retro? That's only 40 years. I'm glad that it pleases you all the same.

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

#66
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The license can be a problem for some studios, specially ones with uncomfortable contracts with publishers. If you are in that situation, I highly recommend writing a LuaJIT integration layer. The game code is very well separated from the engine, and qengine already removes a lot of non-generic game code from Q2. So all you have to do is delete a little bit more, write some glue code to tie in Lua, and you can write…

I think using Lua scripting like that still counts as "dynamic linking" from the point of view of the GPL. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPlugins

probably so.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#IfInterpreterIs... also seems relevant.

stallman's portion of https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/11/msg00217.html too

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

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could separate the rendering logic from the game logic and create messaging channels for them... Also, the game specific code is rarely worth anything without the assets... that's why Id has released these codebases, so that people can learn/adapt... the assets retain copyright, etc. Also, you can separate out the game runtime from launcher parts... the launcher can contain other communication channels and be res…

I think when engineers answer these questions it's easy to get bogged down in issues like whether something is a single process linked together or whether you have multiple processes communicating with one another. I don't think these arguments have serious legal merit. The question at hand is whether the game you are making is a work based on the engine. If true, to comply with the GPL you must release source. Estab…

In either case, the game isn't much use without assets... and those can be copyrighted separately from the executable.

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

#68
post #55
post #46

This is really cool, and I can’t believe I’ve lived long enough to see Quake 2 be called “retro.” I’ll likely live long enough to see the Unreal Engine of today called retro. I’ve never thought of this before, and it’s wild.

Came here to say the same; it’s like the first time I heard Nirvana on a “classic rock” station.

“Nevermind” is longer ago from today than “Rubber Soul” was from “Nevermind.”

Time is cruel.

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

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame Valve's lack of interest in maintaining their franchises for that one.

i lowkey kinda feel that the pervasive gamer hype about half-life 3 (for example the "hl3 confirmed" meme was extremely pervasive) made valve feel like it would be impossible to match the hype, and any flaw would be hyper focused. maybe now that it's faded a bit there won't be as much pressure. or i could be wrong about that mattering.

The book "The Final Hours of Portal 2" has a section where they explained how much pressure they felt to try and have Portal 2 live up to Portal 1. Even effectively shutting down development of of other games for 2 months so the whole company could focus on prototyping experiments for new gameplay concepts that could be incorporated into Portal 2.

I would not be surprised of the pressure they feel for Half-Life 3 to be great is an order of magnitude greater than what they felt with Portal 2

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

#70
I know this will probably get buried here, but like - I want to try this. I was a huge fan of Quake 1 and 2. How the hell do I get started? (Note: I'm not a programmer, I'm a marketer. I know just enough PHP/JS to be stupidly dangerous.)
Post reply on HN