Game Development Community

Plan for Josef Jahn

by Josef Jahn · 11/12/2002 (12:36 am) · 10 comments

Ok, so a quick visit to www.planetstarsiege.com/sg1 will show you that the Stargate project is not dead. I've joined and will do, among other things, the AI. My experience with Spoonbot and BotPilot hopefully will be useful to the game.
Also, I'm completely re-doing the whole sky for torque. I've scrapped the skybox, and am in the process of adding a truly parametric sky that doesn't need any pre-rendered textures whatsoever. And oh, Torque looks *so* much better with a proper sky. I'll post screenies when I'm satisfied with the look of the sky.


In other news, of course I'll post all my changes to the engine according to the licence. I noticed that several individuals choose to not share their source, either because they "can't because it affects so many files" or the plain just don't want to. EDIT: I was under the impression that the torque license makes sharing engine modifications obligatory, but I was wrong. However, I'd like to see the already good percentage of shared code to grow further.

Come on and share your code.

For those who wanted to see a screenshot of the sky in it's current form, here's one:

www.playspoon.com/images/sky3.jpg
What you see here is a fractally generated cloud texture. Please note that the alpha channel is still set to zero, hence the black sky.

The goal is to make it look like this:

www.playspoon.com/draid/snap95.jpg

#1
11/12/2002 (12:51 am)
Hi Josef,

I like your stuff so far but forgive me if I've lost the plot a little but to what license are you refering?

If you are refering to the Torque license then you will find that no-one is obligated to release *any* code changes.

Please let me know if I've misunderstood you.

- Melv.
#2
11/12/2002 (12:57 am)
Can't wait to see that sky!

Eric
#3
11/12/2002 (6:46 am)
Josef: Melv is correct. This is not a GPL'ed engine, and don't treat it that way. If you want to keep your changes to yourself, you are more then free too. Just happens that some people (like Melv, cool guy that he is ;-) do indeed share all of thier changes. Some people don't. There's some very long discussions about this in various forums here at GG.

Funny part is, I've never figured out where that misconception comes from. There's nothin' mentioned about it in the license, so why do people think it's there?
#4
11/12/2002 (8:21 am)
When someone says "it affects too many files", keep in mind that some of us are too busy to make a nice neat resource on everything we do. It's unfortunate, but sometimes the decision has to be made to spend our valuable resource (time) on making a game as opposed to making resources.
#5
11/12/2002 (9:01 am)
Josef,

You are not obligated to release your engine changes to the community. I would love to see you do so though.

Jeff Tunnell GG
#6
11/13/2002 (1:46 am)
Hmm, ok so I was wrong. Strange, I was thoroughly convinced that engine code has to be shared because of a license term.

Shame on me for not reading the actual license ;)
#7
11/15/2002 (10:07 pm)
Actually, the license says all your base are belong to me. ;-) heheh=)
It looks great. :)

Eric
#8
11/18/2002 (11:24 pm)
That looks really good! can't wait :-D
#9
01/29/2003 (6:13 pm)
sky looks like a flat plane, is it? how far does it extend when rendered if there is no terrain? (thinking CPU usage here).

Are you the aussie guy who ran stormbots?
#10
01/29/2003 (11:59 pm)
Well, the sky extends to a "reasonable" distance. Don't worry about render time, it's really no burden at all for the CPU/GPU.

Nope, I wrote Spoonbot - upon which Stormbot was based on. I liked Stormbot, except it wasn't just a bot for Tribes but a whole weapon mod too. Also, Stormbots don't pilot vehicles whereas spoonbot does ;)