Irrlicht vs Id Tech engines (former Quake Engines)

kburkhart84 · Post by **kburkhart84** » Mon Jul 14, 2008 2:38 pm

lostclimategames wrote:actually many phones are powerful enough to run low poly 3d games, why do you think the new big thing with indie engines are iphone support?

exactly what I mean. "low poly 3d games" The OP wants something as realistic as possible, which is this case isn't very realistic, or high poly either. That was what I wanted to clarify, the fact that it would have to be low poly.

lostclimategames · Post by **lostclimategames** » Mon Jul 14, 2008 2:50 pm

i thought realistic as in not cartoony like realistic textures etc, or at least thats what i believe he means.

kburkhart84 · Post by **kburkhart84** » Mon Jul 14, 2008 3:04 pm

lostclimategames wrote:i thought realistic as in not cartoony like realistic textures etc, or at least thats what i believe he means.

I'm would think he meant realistic like Crysis

Actaully I'm not sure what and how realistic he meant, and because he wasn't specified, I went ahead to specify the details of how "realistic" it could be before the OP got high hopes of having characters of 10,000 polys with parallax mapping shaders on every vertex.

jmpep · Post by **jmpep** » Mon Jul 14, 2008 8:58 pm

kburkhart84 wrote:I'm would think he meant realistic like Crysis.

Nope, I didn't. I had to tweak cvars for days in order to run Crysis in Very High (more or less) in a QuadCore with a 8800 card.

My target phone is the Nokia N95, which has a dual ARM11 @ 320Mhz processor and a PowerVR graphics card similar to the one available in the old Dreamcast -but with shaders... I don't expect much, really.

I meant what lostclimategames said

PS: By the way, it is the first time I read the OP accronym, what does it refers to? "old-pal"?

lostclimategames · Post by **lostclimategames** » Mon Jul 14, 2008 10:01 pm

priginal poster

dlangdev · Post by **dlangdev** » Mon Jul 14, 2008 10:06 pm

Have you seen the N95, that thing is EXPENSIVE!

http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/nok ... 85029.html

Whopping $437.99 - $623.95, I won't be able to buy computer for sure, tho. Definitely a huge crater hole it will create in my pocket.

For that price, it should have all the bells-n-whistles, including the GPU soldered beside the latest-n-greatest mobile CPU.

Here's the graphics spec:

Code: Select all

Fully HW accelerated 3D (OpenGL ES 1.1, HW accelerated Java 3D)

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95

dlangdev · Post by **dlangdev** » Mon Jul 14, 2008 10:18 pm

well, if you look at the memory spec, you probably can figure out what kind of games are possible for that device.

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Demand paging (although the N95 supports this too, since firmware version 20.0.015[16]) 
128 MB RAM, 95MB available.

jmpep · Post by **jmpep** » Mon Jul 14, 2008 11:43 pm

dlangdev wrote:Have you seen the N95, that thing is EXPENSIVE"

Yes, I know, I bought one... concerning the type of games that are possible for the device, there is a version of Quake II available for it ... (http://koti.mbnet.fi/hinkka/playing.html)

However I amb not sure about what to expect (this is my first 3D application... I chose the "hard way" to start in the graphics' world... well, it wasn't a choice, really).

PS: A sample of what can be seen in the phone:

From the game: Creatures of the deep

kburkhart84 · Post by **kburkhart84** » Tue Jul 15, 2008 5:22 am

Well, atleast the OP(Original Poster) has pretty close to the "top-of-the-line". In that case, I can see something nice(and I was being sarcastic about crysis:)). The point I had though was for you not to expect more than what the device is capable of, especially as mobile phones range very much in power, from almost non-existent to the IPhone/N95/HTC Diamond types of power. Since that is out of the way, I would say your best bet is to port Irrlicht to Symbian drivers. On the N95, you could probably get OK detail, but not very extreme. The harder part to me would probably be actually getting Irrlicht to port over, but not so much the graphics, rather the Symbian APIs for creating a window for your OpenGL commands. In the case of Windows Mobile devices, the code is very similar, and Irrlicht's SVN already has the beginnings of a mobile device for Windows Mobile. Besides that, I think the coding will work, asuming you can compile for Symbian. I'd like to see the progress you make.

jmpep · Post by **jmpep** » Tue Jul 15, 2008 2:17 pm

kburkhart84 wrote:I'd like to see the progress you make.

It may take some time, but I'll post some captures as soon as they are available

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Tue Jul 15, 2008 4:55 pm

Since hte PowerVR modules usually support ogl-es thee'S another good point for Irrlicht: An upcoming ogl-es 1.x an 2.x driver. The 1.x driver is already nearly finished, the 2.x driver needs the shader stuff to be done first. So don't hold your breath, but put it on the pros for Irrlicht

jmpep · Post by **jmpep** » Tue Jul 15, 2008 5:53 pm

Is the OGL-ES driver currently in the SVN? Do you have any estimation about when it will be finished -a week? a month? a year?

Actually developing the OpenGL|ES Driver was one of the tasks is my schedule. However I don't see the point in reinventing the wheel, so I'll begin from whatever it is available in the SVN by the time I start coding, if possible.

I'll start the coding part in a week, -and I have to deliver the whole engine running in SymbianOS S60 v3.1 by the start of September (I'll be coding all the summer)-.

My plan is having Irrlicht compile for the S60, then make it runnable with the software driver, then with OpenGL 1.xm then with OpenGL 2.x and then try to optimize whatever I can optimize. Maybe I could be of help as soon as I reach the OpenGL|ES 2.0 stage -in about three weeks, or a month at worst-...

dlangdev · Post by **dlangdev** » Tue Jul 15, 2008 7:05 pm

can you clarify this for me, there's quake code already running on the device, why do u want to port another quake? someone closer to quake code is going to do it anyway.

by the way, i'm almost halfway through reading this book. now i kinda bit understand the subculture behind those games. especially, the people who created those games. quake is simply one of them.

http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Crea ... 0375505245

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Tue Jul 15, 2008 8:31 pm

The ogl-es driver is not yet in SVN. But I think the great demand for it makes itnecessary to open u a branch already now and get people involved with it. I'll try to do it in the next days, but I can also send it to you directly.
If you can use OpenGL on the device there's no point in using the OpenGL-ES driver, because it is only limited in features and might have some annoyances the original driver doesn't have. It's just for devices which don't support the real OpenGL.

jmpep · Post by **jmpep** » Wed Jul 16, 2008 3:26 am

According to the PowerVR MBX brochure, it is not OpenGL compatible but only OpenGL|ES (actually only OpenGL|ES 1.0 and 1.1 are supported, which is quite a surprise to me, I thought 2.0 was supported...).

Thanks you very much for offering sending me the driver if it is not in the SVN yet

PS: After a bit of low-quality researching: there is no phone right now that supports OpenGL|ES 2.0, only the PS3 -yep, the console- supports it right now.