Red Eclipse 2.0: Porting to Tesseract

[qreeves]

eihrul, aka the developer for the Tesseract project, has made us an offer for an official port of RE to the Tesseract Engine. At the beginning of the year, he will have some considerable time available to dedicate to this port, but he needs to stay afloat financially whilst doing so. He has suggested to me a Kickstarter/IndieGoGo campaign in order to raise the US$ 2500 to 3000 he estimates he would need at the very least. Considering there has been a lot of chatter regarding Tesseract, I thought this would be worth a shot despite the amount we would need to raise.

Along with "new rendering features" including "fully dynamic omnidirectional shadows, global illumination, HDR lighting, deferred shading, morphological/temporal/multisample anti-aliasing, and much more", as always, we will be provided with backports from the main branch so long as eihrul continues to develop it, along with help using the new rendering techniques to suit our own unique purposes. As a pillar of the Cube Engine family of games, his track record speaks for itself. He has always provided Red Eclipse with ongoing assistance, often filling in for me when necessary.

I want to bring this up now, because I would like to get the campaign to start along with the new release; affording us the possibility to ride on the PR that goes with it. I think if we show how far we've come, and the possibility of where we could go for v2.0, we will have a real chance of obtaining this goal. Maybe we can combine the campaign into our 1.5 trailer too. So let us help a fellow developer, and get a kickass upgrade in the process!

Ideas and comments are welcome. If you're familiar with campaigning I'd love to hear from you.

UPDATE (later in this thread): Can we raise US$750-900 within the community alone? I'm in for at least $50. At $50 we would require at least 15 people to contribute, at $25 at least 30. So I guess this thread is our "soft launch", who can we count in to reach 30%? Who knows, if this works out we might even be able to fund other things successfully (models, assets, maybe even get on Steam).

[Honno]

Was the money for the professional models crowdfunded? I'm interested to see how free/open-source games have done potent campaigns in the past- all I can think of right now is 0A.D.'s IndieGoGo thing.

Sorry I'm dumb- does backports mean having a Cube2 & Tess version of the game that work together?

Otherwise, awesome. Good idea to coincide the release with a campaign. Many thanks to eihrul for this oppurtunity to have a more competitve and prettier Eclipse (tho we've always known he's a cool dude). I'll pitch in if I can.

[qreeves]

Was the money for the professional models crowdfunded?

Sort of. We raised the money via Paypal donations before crowdfunding was cool. The new platforms to do this now are better than what we had.

Sorry I'm dumb- does backports mean having a Cube2 & Tess version of the game that work together?

Menus, and as far as I am aware, mapping is fundamentally different. This is why it would be v2.0 rather than just a "port". By backport, I mean that even though we're paying for this initial effort to port RE, eihrul will continue to integrate updates made to the Tesseract "engine" after that is done. He has supported our bastardisation of the Cube 2 "engine" the same way for years now :P

[Iceflower]

Menus, and as far as I am aware, mapping is fundamentally different.

That would be my question, as far as I understood it mapping is just different with the better and faster visual and dynamical light? The easy cube editing is there too possible? If it as i understood i would like to support this Mapping should be then faster and easier

[freezurbern]

I'm very pleased to hear this might be possible, though I do have a couple of concerns:

• What will you, Quin, need help with from the community? (other than the crowdfunding)
• Will the maps need to be remade?
• Is 1.5 delayed until a trailer can be made that includes mention of this?
• Will 1.5 mention this effort in-game for the duration of the funding window?

[Julius]

Sounds great, but the crowdfunding efforts (especially for open-source projects) as of late have been a bit lackluster. Maybe he can do a flexi-funding campain on indigogo and just collect as much money as he can get and work on the port as long as that takes him? Would be a pity if we could raise $1500 or so and fail because it isn't the $3000 asked for.

P.S.: AFAIK the maps just need their lightning redone, but should load fine in Tesseract edit mode.

[bonifarz]

Interesting news. For people who have not seen the engine discussion on the old forums, here's the topic:
http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=72&t=4745
It also includes some thoughts about porting maps and changes to lighting, as well as hardware considerations (^^comment above).

[SniperGoth]

Well, i really like Tesseract's lightning/rendering system. I think it would benefit a lot the game.
About the performance , you could just play without all of the graphical features turned on, depending on the situation. I mean , even my very "meh" pc can handle it.
The only problem that tess has, is that you can't make maps that are bigger than 13 scale. If you do that, then the lightning gets totally glitchy.

[JDWhyte]

I can help put video trailers together... I definitely support the idea. I have Adobe Creative Suite at my fingertips and don't mind helping to create material (pictures, videos, etc).

[Ravicale]

I'm stuck with Intel Integrated graphics for the time being (GPU died) and I average around 40-55 fps on Tesseract with decent settings so... yeah...

[restcoser]

I definitly support this, although not monetarily at the moment (my current situation doesn't allow that :/ )(not much at least, i will see)
If this port were to happen, I'd be definitly mapping far more though, since my frustration with RE is it being old and my frustration with TA is it having no gameplay, so that would fix that

It would also be insteresting if network compability between RE 1.x and RE 2.0 could be there, so the users with the system not suited for tesseract or not willing to run the drivers for it can still play with other players. (Would this be possible? Would that suck up too much time/be far to complicated?)

I love this idea and hope we can get it going.

[shirepirate]

Red Eclipse on the tesseract engine may be very different from Tess, but I can picture it being a lot more demanding than even Tess currently is

this old PC i play on at the moment (core 2 duo, Radeon HD 5450, 4GB RAM) can manage nice playable frame rates on semi-demanding games at medium settings (crysis, skyrim, bioshock), but i get no more than 25fps on low-mid settings in Tesseract, even on the simple deathmatch maps in the first release (in complex it's much worse). this is without any other players/bots or action happening. Tess is very demanding and poorly optimized, it's free after all and not made by a professional studio with a team of developers. it looks very beautiful in practice but a lot of that is due to the high amount of map-models and high-res textures. RE would be ported with what it's currently got.

my setup or x setup is no way to measure true performance, some thorough tests should be done to see if the majority of the existing RE playerbase will struggle to achieve playable frame-rates on this new engine. and if it turns out that's the case, then it's a bad idea, regardless of the very obvious improvements it offers. RE could stand to improve a lot before a drastic change like this anyway, perhaps it's not done with it's journey in the Cube 2 engine.

conversely, the improvements it offers could potentially attract new players with it's nicer aesthetics, the breed of gamer with powerful machines that could easily max out the new visual implementations. the ultimate question is whether or not it's worth the risk (Tesseract doesn't have a playerbase worth speaking of at the moment)

additionally i don't think this decision should hinder the rush to a 1.5 release, i mean come on already

[qreeves]

What will you, Quin, need help with from the community? (other than the crowdfunding)

I'll need help with promotion, both by spreading the word and building the resources/materials we need to make a fundraising campaign.

Will the maps need to be remade?

It is quite probable, considering Tesseract ditched support for Cube 2: Sauerbraten maps, it might not be a problem we can overcome. I will try to save every asset I can, even if that means I have to write an importer (if I can).

Is 1.5 delayed until a trailer can be made that includes mention of this?

I know this is all very last minute, and people are dismayed at the idea of 1.5 being postponed. The truth is eihrul really needs this in order to survive several months of unemployment while he moves back to the USA. You have him to thank for Red Eclipse in the first place. He encouraged, supported, and even pitched in to make this game a reality. He cares about the integrity of the games that use his engines. I hope you can understand why I would do anything I can to help him.

Will 1.5 mention this effort in-game for the duration of the funding window?

That is probably a good idea, yes.

Sounds great, but the crowdfunding efforts (especially for open-source projects) as of late have been a bit lackluster. Maybe he can do a flexi-funding campain on indigogo and just collect as much money as he can get and work on the port as long as that takes him? Would be a pity if we could raise $1500 or so and fail because it isn't the $3000 asked for.

Yeah, that is my concern too. It will be us who will be running the campaign, we're basically just contracting him to do the port. He suggested IndieGoGo, but I've only taken a cursory glance at the majority fundraising sites so far. Hopefully we can do the flexi-funding, but we also need to consider the minimum amount which eihrul would need, which his lowest estimate is US$2500. I'm also not sure how this works for non-incorporated entities, if the money has to pass through me, it might have an adverse impact on my personal tax exemption status and social security benefits which I rely on to live.

To all those who have trouble running Tesseract, I'm sorry it doesn't work great for you right now, but let's not make this drivers/performance discussion. This isn't about whether people can run the engine, this is about making a port of RE using it. I should point out that v2.0 could very well be a year or two away, and what we're doing is looking to the future, forward-thinking. I've been using Cube 2 as the base of my projects for 8 years now (starting with "Bots for Sauerbraten" in September 2006), any normal developer would be looking to take advantage of newer technologies after that amount of time.

That's what it comes down to. There is so much more I could do given access to the new features in Tesseract, including some I can't do in RE now because they require shaders (for example: more than one software palette for model textures). Don't think about what Tesseract is now, think about what we could do with it. Look at what we did with Cube 2; we inspired many new features which even made it back into the main branch. In a way, I think eihrul counts on people like us to use his tech in ways he never thought of.

For the record though, open source drivers generally don't improve until us software developers start making use of the tech they need to implement. If we don't do it now, then it could be years before they actually implement the newer GL contexts properly. I think it is a little bit silly to be limiting ourselves just because the open source version of a driver isn't working right now. It will, after you pester them to fix it ;)

[unixfreak]

Will the maps need to be remade?

It is quite probable, considering Tesseract ditched support for Cube 2: Sauerbraten maps, it might not be a problem we can overcome. I will try to save every asset I can, even if that means I have to write an importer (if I can).

There already is an (unofficial) importer

In Red Eclipse;
Select the entire grid space of the map,

Code: Select all

/saveprefab mymap

copy the created prefab/mymap.obr into tesseracts local config dir, (eg; ~/.tesseract/media/prefab/mymap.obr)

In Tesseract, start a new map, change the map size so it's the same as the map you are going to import, then after setting the correct gridsize (for the same scale);

Code: Select all

/pasteprefab mymap

Material and texture slots are kept in the process, the only things you really lose are entities, blendmaps and vdelta stuff (vcolour, vscroll, shaders, etc)

For example, the map octavus:

[Julius]

It will be us who will be running the campaign, we're basically just contracting him to do the port. He suggested IndieGoGo, but I've only taken a cursory glance at the majority fundraising sites so far. Hopefully we can do the flexi-funding, but we also need to consider the minimum amount which eihrul would need, which his lowest estimate is US$2500. I'm also not sure how this works for non-incorporated entities, if the money has to pass through me, it might have an adverse impact on my personal tax exemption status and social security benefits which I rely on to live.

Does he need a contract of some sort for insurance etc. reasons? If it isn't for something like this, it will be much less hassle for him to be the "owner" of the campaign, especially if Kickstarter is used, which while being the largest platform does not allow projects by people outside the US and a few other selected countries. Also think of transfer fees and stupid stuff for example paypal pulls often when there are "strange" movemets of money. The net is full of stories like that, so the most common setup, i.e. Eihrul running the campain will be much preferrable (he can always give you his Kickstarter account details or something like that).

[qreeves]

Does he need a contract of some sort for insurance etc. reasons?

Uh, I don't think so, it was just poor phrasing I guess on my part. I'm not sure either of us knows what we're doing yet, hence this topic :P

[Honno]

Regarding platforms...

I can't give stats, but it has seemed to me that in recent years Kickstarter's rise to popularity makes it great for no-name projects like RE, simply because it has more of an invested (browsers of the site) user base which alone is a great campaign tool. As opposed to IndieGoGo and other platforms (someones gotta enlighten me here).

As Julius said however, KS doesn't offer no-minimum campaigns so setting a higher (~3K range) could be risky. Having a 1K as the target then hope for the best would counter that problem, but maybe psychologically this would make people feel less compassionate if the set goal is already reached. If that was the case you could say the more-the-merrier in a hypothetical campaign video would diminish this, I dunno.

Anyway, I do believe that a game like Red Eclipse, which is fully-fledged and fun already (demonstrating RE's devs legitimacy) and open-source (so favoring a community spirit), would make a Kickstarter endeavor a success in both consumer retention (see the page then wanna kick it) and in journalism/social media advertising.

[SniperGoth]

Out of curiosity, i decided to try to port Darkness onto Tesseract.
Im still on the beginning of the port, but i can already see that the overall lightning will need to be totally revised for it.

[Calinou]

Regarding platforms...

I can't give stats, but it has seemed to me that in recent years Kickstarter's rise to popularity makes it great for no-name projects like RE, simply because it has more of an invested (browsers of the site) user base which alone is a great campaign tool. As opposed to IndieGoGo and other platforms (someones gotta enlighten me here).

You are forgetting that large crowdfunding sites suffer from “saturation” – that is, a lot, too many projects (including a lot of low-quality) ones being submitted. Also, many people have been deceived by crowdfunding, as there is little to no guarantee the work will be done. 75 % of projects don't follow the schedule they planned.

[shirepirate]

it wasn't clear this was already decided upon. in that case, as much advertisement as possible will help with a fundraiser. share with everyone you know that might get a kick out of it. good news to hear Red Eclipse is making progress that will bring it up-to-date with many gamers' standards for a shooter these days. i think RE will need a lot more variety in map models not too far down the road. i'll help in any way i can.

[qreeves]

http://go.indiegogo.com/playbook/life-cycle-phase/setting-up-your-campaign

Most campaigns that meet their goals raise about 30% of their funds from their immediate network. It’s best to raise this money right away, because early momentum can be leveraged for marketing and press. When people outside your network see that others trust you with their money, they gain the confidence to contribute, too.

Achieve early momentum by “soft launching” your campaign:

• Before it goes live, ask everyone you know to contribute in the first few days of the campaign
• Make a list of the people who committed to helping out, and ask them to make their contributions within the first 1-3 days of your launch.

If you don’t think that your own network will be able to provide roughly 30% of the funds for your campaign, scale back. Try aiming for a lower funding goal to complement a more manageable objective.

So I guess the question is, can we raise US$750-900 within the community alone? I'm in for at least $50. At $50 we would require at least 15 people to contribute, at $25 at least 30. So I guess this thread is our "soft launch", who can we count in to reach 30%? Who knows, if this works out we might even be able to fund other things successfully (models, assets, maybe even get on Steam).

[Evropi]

I think this would work out really well. Red Eclipse has always had an excellent art direction. I can't wait to see what RE's wonderful particle effects look like in Tesseract.

I would definitely contribute some money towards a crowdfunding campaign. I supported OpenROTC's campaign at the start of this year and it has really paid off. I'm very confident in Lee's ability to pull this off, especially if he is doing it in a paid, professional capacity. I encourage everyone else to support this game we all love reach today's heights of graphical fidelity.

Just be aware Quin and Lee that you will have to reach out to press a lot during a crowdfunding campaign and a whole lot more than that. Put the game on databases. Post it on reddit. Give interviews. Do Q&A's and regular blog posts for backers and non-backers alike. It will require a massive push not just from willing backers, but from the founders too. Getting $3000 of people's hard-earned cash is never easy. OpenROTC (now Terminal Overload) only just pulled through after fr1tz contacted everyone he knew. So be prepared to put a lot of effort in.

As to the people that are concerned about portability to old hardware... look, I've been there myself. Until last year, I played RE on sub-25 FPS until last year, with the lowest settings /texreduce 12 enabled. My hardware was about as powerful as the PlayStation 2's. When I got to play it in its full graphical glory for the first time, I was shocked by the beautiful graphics I was missing out on and how much better graphics enchanced the immersive experience that RE already is. I have good hardware now, but I wouldn't want to hold anyone with better hardware back by so much from experiencing the best RE can ever be. How do we get there? By moving to Tesseract. Let's not drag down the project by our selfishness - if you want the best for RE, support this campaign and believe me, you will be glad you did.

[Julius]

Getting a Steam greenlight campaign running the same time (or close after) might make sense as the PR buzz would not have to be duplicated. A "donation" based Steam distribution could also help funding more stuff (ask for something like $5 and make it clear that this is more of a donation, other open-source games do it on Steam also, and it avoids being sorted together with the mostly crappy F2P shovelware). Later donation drives could then take the form of special DLCs. Costs something like $100 to get even listed on Greenlight though.

P.S.: I am also in for $50 if the porting to tesseract campain starts.

[freezurbern]

So I guess the question is, can we raise US$750-900 within the community alone? I'm in for at least $50. At $50 we would require at least 15 people to contribute, at $25 at least 30. So I guess this thread is our "soft launch", who can we count in to reach 30%?

I too am in for $50. I would love to see RE taken to the next level, and have complete confidence in eihrul.

[Goku]

I can donate $100 to this. I have gotten years of fun experiences from BF/RE at no cost to me. I am very excited to see there is still ambition to go bigger with this game. I believe in quin and this community. The new graphic engine looks great, and I hope this move can bring RE into the spotlight it deserves as one of the most solid arena fps's I have ever played.

I really believe that RE can get on steam, I also think this game can be profitable without selling out (quin can be reimbursed for all the time he has given to this project!) . One of my main hopes is that the community/development team takes this opportunity to not only make the game look better, but play better as well. The current state of the game is fantastic, but I do not believe we have hit the brick wall on new ideas, mechanics, weapons, gamemodes, models, ect. I hope we do take the leap into a newer engine, and bring with us the pace of development and creativity RE saw when transitioning from BloodFrontier. No matter if its just going to be a graphic overhaul, or a complete game overhaul, I support this fully.

[Calinou]

If someone needs a list of upsides and downsides about Tesseract:

Upsides:

• Real-time lighting. Maps can be edited without breaking lights. Map authors no longer have to deal with tweaking lightprecision and lighterror.
• Dynamic lights cast shadows, stack correctly and use normal maps. Shadows can be casted on all sides of geometry, including ceilings, and can be casted on all models, static and animated.
• Model rendering integrates seamlessly into world geometry (no fake lighting). Model-world geometry “convergence” (has decals, collision and lighting done the same way).
• Overbright lights (brightness > 255) work properly. Negative lights could work, but are disabled due to them not working on some hardware.
• Ability to make specific lights not cast shadows at all.
• Per-triangle collision for static mapmodels (more accurate than the already-available cubic and elliptic collision boxes).
• Volumetric lighting (“god rays”). Efficient, yet slow compared to non-volumetric lights, but can look great. Better use them with static shadows only, or without shadows.
• Improved gloss/specular rendering.
• Procedural skybox generation (gradient + sun/moon), automatic sun/moon placement. Follows sun light direction, so a day-night is possible (with some flickering when global illumination is enabled).
• Improved fog rendering (exponential fog wrapping around the player, instead of a flat, linear plane).
• High dynamic range (mandatory) and simulated eye adaptation.
• Real-time global illumination and ambient occlusion.
• Advanced anti-aliasing methods: MLAA, FXAA.
• Glass refraction, better glass colouring (substracts colour instead of adds), any surface can use refraction using the “vrefract I R G B” where I is intensity and R/G/B colour.
• vcommands in multiplayer. Undo/redo in multiplayer. vcolor can use colours above 1.
• Much lower map sizes. Quicker save times. Very short calclight times (still needed for re-calculating smoothing and re-mipping).
• Improved water reflection and refraction (one can now use as many water planes as needed, without any slowdown).
• Particles can be seen through transparent (alpha) surfaces.
• Outlines are thinner (looks better and less invading).
• Dynamic shadows are cast on 3D grass.
• Remade GUI system (called “newui”, uses “ui”-prefixed commands), slightly harder to code for, but more flexible (allows multiple windows at once). Can draw arbitrary rectangles, gradients and lines in any colour.
• Stains (the new name of decals): can be put as entities in the world (with any glowing or non-glowing texture), can be cast on static mapmodels.
• Uses SDL 2 instead of SDL 1.2 (improved input, Wayland support).
• .tex files are used for texture registrations (cleaner; can be implemented in CubeScript for compatibility).
• General code cleanup and cruft removal.

Downsides:

• Slower graphics performance, higher graphics requirement. Graphics performance decreases quickly with resolution increases. In particular, MSAA is very slow.
• Higher software requirements: SDL 2 (not available in repositories of older GNU/Linux distributions), OpenGL 2.1 (minimum), OpenGL 4.3 (optimal). In comparison, the versions used by Red Eclipse are OpenGL 1.4 as a minimum and OpenGL 3.3 as optimal.
• Lighting glitches on large maps (shadows).
• No motion blur.
• 3D grass uses 1-bit blending: aliasing happens and, while blendmap is followed, it isn't followed as accurately as in Red Eclipse (due to that particular 1-bit blending).
• Many breaking changes, like the change of the default texture scale or model rotation.

[restcoser]

Talking about funding, I'd be happy to support such a move, however my financial situation doesn't allow me much. The more months between this and the fundraiser the better for me... im guessing id put down 50, no promises though.

[JonathanR]

Hi guys, I'm very exited for this port to happen, I really like the tesseract engine, and I believe it will do RE justice! :p I can give 50-100 euro's

[favorito]

Put me down for $100usd. Where do we donate nowadays?

[qreeves]

The idea is that we get everyone to commit to contributing to the fundraiser on day one to encourage the general populous to do the same, so it is best to hold off until we set that up. Great to see the response from everyone though!

[Unnamed]

I don't know how donating works so it depends on whether I find out how it works or not.

Compared to the first version of Tesseract I downloaded the framerate seems to be much higher now. I think a lot of optimization was done.
I think the two big problems of this engine are the lighting glitches on large maps and the higher graphics requirement (though I got about 40-50 fps on my old computer and this is enough I think). And btw MSAA is way too slow (my framerate drops by 20-30).
The full dynamic lighting is great for editing maps. It is quite annoying to wait 10 or even 30 seconds until the lightmaps are calculated.

Volumetric lighting (“god rays”). Slow, but can look great.

It is not slow. At least my framerate is not decreased with volumetric lighting. Maybe it is slow in general, but the way it is done in Tesseract volumetric lighting is quite fast.

[Imerion]

Hi everyone! I'm new here, but I have been playing and following this game for quite a long time, always being excited about the next release! Red Eclipse is one of my favorite PC games, mostly due to the combination of agile gameplay and fast-paced FPS action together with with many maps and gameplay options.
So I finally decided to join the discussion, because this proposition sounds fantastic! Releasing 1.5 together with a funding campaign for a Tesseract-ported 2.0 would be amazing, and I'd love to support it if it becomes possible. I don't have much money, but I have donated a bit to this project before and for such a cool development as this I'd do it again.

Just a thought. I really think you should go ahead, and prove how amazing open source games can be if skilled people and a good community are behind them!

[Ulukai]

Holy crap this is awesome! I'm reading this while I have been very busy at work and for my family lately, but I try to follow the progress and the community from a distance for now, and this is a huge surprise! I'll support as well with some money, no promises whether it will be at launch, because we have a tight budget these last months of the year, but eventually I will have something to donate as well.

Nice to see the commitment going on!

[Calinou]

It is not slow. At least my framerate is not decreased with volumetric lighting. Maybe it is slow in general, but the way it is done in Tesseract volumetric lighting is quite fast.

I clarified it. Better use shadow-less or static-shadow volumetric lights and limit their amount in general.

[Ravicale]

And btw MSAA is way too slow (my framerate drops by 20-30).

MSAA is typically very demanding. That's why other forms of AA can be chosen.

[MirceaKitsune]

If the Tesseract engine is also free and open-source, and no graphical features would be lost in the process, it doesn't sound like a bad idea. But Red Eclipse already has great graphics in my opinion, as well as impressive performance with all effects set to maximum (always 60 FPS on most maps). So I'm unsure whether it's worth such a great effort, or if the same visual features can be added to Cube 2 instead.

[BurritoBazooka]

I'd be happy to contribute at least 25 GBP (about 40 USD) once funding opens for porting RE to Tesseract.

Even if porting doesn't eventually happen, I wouldn't mind contributing the same amount to general development.

edit: I tried running Tesseract on my computer to see how it does, today. It is definitely more demanding, but I agree with shirepirate that the engine is probably not optimised. I don't want to give stats because I realised afterwards that it wasn't a fair test (Flash was running in the background, taking up 50% CPU).

Would there be changes made to the Tesseract engine so that it can be more optimised, if possible? edit2: Since the license is the same, could development efforts be shared with others who also use the engine?

/edits

[Calinou]

If the Tesseract engine is also free and open-source

Yes it is, under the zlib license just like Red Eclipse.

Motion blur is lost, grass rendering is better but also worse in some ways (read the feature list I wrote) but all other graphical features are enhanced.

Most visual features can't be added to Cube 2 directly, it'd be too much work for not much gain.

[Ravicale]

If the Tesseract engine is also free and open-source

Yes it is, under the zlib license just like Red Eclipse.

Motion blur is lost, grass rendering is better but also worse in some ways (read the feature list I wrote) but all other graphical features are enhanced.

Most visual features can't be added to Cube 2 directly, it'd be too much work for not much gain.

The gain would be based on what you aim to do with the engine. At the moment, there isn't a huge bonus beyond visuals and easier map creation (still great to have), but the enhancements in Tesseract may lead to Red Eclipse being far better in the long run.

[qreeves]

The two engines (Cube 2 and Tesseract) have fundamentally different rendering pipelines. You can't just tack bits from one to the other, it just won't work. Tesseract is basically "what if all the legacy stuff was abandoned and the engine focused on modern rendering techniques?".

I should point out that when I first started using Cube 2, it still had more than its fair share of problems on certain chipsets, many of which we identified and helped eihrul fix over the years. An engine developer needs projects like ours to make use of their technology so they can become aware of the problems and fix them. Give it a year or so and things will be running more smoothly.

[Imerion]

Also, not at all important. But would a rewrite such as this allow for the inclusion of some kind of vehicles to the game? Perhaps used on bigger CTF-maps or so?
I realize this is not the focus of the game, but it would be something I'd enjoy. I also remember another Sauerbraten-based game using vehicles, but I can't remember it's name now. It was online only, if I remember right...

[MirceaKitsune]

Also, not at all important. But would a rewrite such as this allow for the inclusion of some kind of vehicles to the game? Perhaps used on bigger CTF-maps or so?
I realize this is not the focus of the game, but it would be something I'd enjoy. I also remember another Sauerbraten-based game using vehicles, but I can't remember it's name now. It was online only, if I remember right...

Likely unrelated to the engine... unless there's also a difference in physics engines between Cube2 and Tesseract that's helpful. I think this only affects rendering though, no gameplay elements. That said, vehicles would be very nice!

[Julius]

Would make it less likely to have vehicles, as tesseract is equally or even worse that Cube2 in dealing with large outdoor terrains. But IMHO vehicles are totally unneeded for a game like RE.

[Evropi]

Yeah, it would be really hard to make them fit with RE's gameplay, especially the maps it currently has. Not to mention how it would make balancing the game many times harder. Let's stick to what RE does best.

[Ravicale]

Yeah, it would be really hard to make them fit with RE's gameplay, especially the maps it currently has. Not to mention how it would make balancing the game many times harder. Let's stick to what RE does best.

It should be about the same as making RE's gameplay in the Cube 2 engine.

[qreeves]

Seems we've succeeded in getting 30% pledged. Now need to plan and design. I'm gonna need some help here!

[qreeves]

A few things off the top of my head:

• What kind of perks can we realistically give? ("supporter" status is a given)
• How do we demonstrate the worth of Tesseract to people without any Cube/RE background? (describe it without using anachronisms)
• What kind of visual media can we provide for comparison? (probably good to have one scene rendered in both engines)
• How can the release/trailer help us reach more people? (promotional placement, etc)

From IndieGoGo:

• Who is your target audience?
• What resources and time do you currently have to run this campaign?
• Who can you invite to be part of your campaign team?
• Fundraising aside, what objective are you hoping to achieve?
• What would success look like a year after the campaign ends?

Examples of campaign media include:

• Behind-the-scenes video clips or a complete promotional video
• Photos of your project, team, or product
• User testimonials
• Prototypes of your product
• Audio samples
• Statistics that support your goals

[Cinta]

Ok, some ideas I have about some perks, basically we know supporter is a definite.
Possible for a higher amount allows for person to be credited in RE2.0
An email thanking the supporter for their support
A tagged mention on the RE Facebook page (as long as the persons privacy settings allow)

I'll think of more too when I get to it

[WeskerHunter]

A neat perk could be a special vanity, like a badge (different than the existing one of course) or a hat.

[freezurbern]

Could we reference that eihrul is the same guy who was awarded that virtual reality thing after being voted the most?

[qreeves]

Could we reference that eihrul is the same guy who was awarded that virtual reality thing after being voted the most?

We could, but Rift support in Tesseract is only for developer kit 1 on Linux as far as I know, so I'm not sure if that is something we should really advertise.

[SniperGoth]

Well, you got to admit that time trial on certain maps with the Occulus would be a pretty awesome experience.
Or even 100+ drones running around you with swords .

[acerspyro]

Thank you Quinton, thank you Lee, both of you. As far as I'm aware, Eihrul has been here since the beginning, pushing code patches in his free time. And Quin has to manage an entire community, add features and fix a ton of bugs in his free time that is now split by his time spent with his family. I envy you, guys.

[qreeves]

I've put up a rough and unfinished draft for the fundraiser on the wiki: http://redeclipse.net/wiki/Fundraiser_2014

[Dreyeth]

New to the game in general, its game play, creativity, and execution is excellent, about the only thing holding it back is a older graphics engine, how serious a upgrade would this be?

With a chance for a engine upgrade the game is really worth it.

Too bad this comes so soon before christmas, I couldn't donate to the crowd funding until afterward.

[Calinou]

New to the game in general, its game play, creativity, and execution is excellent, about the only thing holding it back is a older graphics engine, how serious a upgrade would this be?

With a chance for a engine upgrade the game is really worth it.

Too bad this comes so soon before christmas, I couldn't donate to the crowd funding until afterward.

This would be a very large upgrade. Check out Tesseract and look at the graphics and real-time lights it features.

[Julius]

Maybe it might be worth emphasising the collaborative editing aspect more? Sure this isn't new per se, but with real time lightning it is much more convenient and I think it might be worth thinking about adding a game-mode that somehow mixes gameplay with editing a bit (think Ace of Spades and *hust* yes Minecraft *hides in shame for mentioning it*).

[unixfreak]

Maybe it might be worth emphasising the collaborative editing aspect more? Sure this isn't new per se, but with real time lightning it is much more convenient and I think it might be worth thinking about adding a game-mode that somehow mixes gameplay with editing a bit (think Ace of Spades and *hust* yes Minecraft *hides in shame for mentioning it*).

TristamK (i think it was) Temka, made a small mod for quick editing, using the different weapons to edit the map in a certain way. If i remember right, the plasma "dug" cubes, and the shotgun fired light entities at the wall. It was pretty cool.

EDIT: This was it
http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=73&t=4287

It wasn't too different from a silly script i played around with on Sauerbraten a while back. In editmode we had the chainsaw dig cubes when it contained a grass texture and you "attacked" it.... it was a gimmick for cutting hedges.

I wonder if that effect could be used for destructive geometry in tesseract?

[MirceaKitsune]

An update on my stance: I just now realized that Tesseract is itself based on Cube 2, whereas at first I thought it's a completely new engine... this means a port should be doable and safe. And looking at some of the improvements over Cube2 in more depth, there are indeed a lot of things RedEclipse is missing in regard to graphical effects, despite having great visuals as is. Therefore I'm now fully in support of such a port! I believe it's worth it and a great idea

[Calinou]

Maybe it might be worth emphasising the collaborative editing aspect more? Sure this isn't new per se, but with real time lightning it is much more convenient and I think it might be worth thinking about adding a game-mode that somehow mixes gameplay with editing a bit (think Ace of Spades and *hust* yes Minecraft *hides in shame for mentioning it*).

Whenever you edit, the geometry is cut up in pieces (“demipping”). This makes stuff slower and breaks geometry light smoothing (Phong shading), so no.

[Dreyeth]

This is to be started 'after' christmas though right? xD

I'm sure christmas will be a rough time for everyone who it comes to donating to something like this, I wouldn't be able to donate 50 bucks,
but I might be able to send 30$ depending on if shit happens, and it does frequently.
They again if it takes awhile to get through to the pledge amount that might not be my only donation either.
How hard would it be to run the pledge drive over a few months and keep sending in donations until the amount is reached the work is paid for?

[MirceaKitsune]

Okay, I gave Tesseract a try just now. Gameplay wise there isn't much... just one good map, one player model, two weapons, and three game modes. But they're enough to test the engine itself, which didn't fail to amaze.

The visuals are beautiful, and it pretty much looks like everything you could want from a modern engine. There's realtime lighting and shadow maps, dynamic 3D grass, SSAO, even caustics for water! There's also a lot of different sampling techniques on top of classic multisampling (anti-aliasing), which I haven't seen in other engines. The only things missing would be Depth of Field and Motion Blur, which some modern engines don't bother to add.

What's more impressive is that with nearly everything set to maximum, I never go under 60 FPS! Even on the default map (small but has a lot of detail) and while fighting 3 bots. And this is on the free ATI video driver (MESA / Gallium), I no longer use the proprietary one (fglrx). I didn't expect it to be this optimized so early... just wow.

I'm in full support of doing the port now! Red Eclipse with its gameplay and art would look incredible with such visuals. Please make this happen... it deserves to

[Calinou]

There's realtime lighting and shadow maps, dynamic 3D grass, SSAO, even caustics for water!

There is animated 3D grass, as well as caustics, in Sauerbraten and Red Eclipse.

[SniperGoth]

Sorry im bringing this topic up again, but i took a screenshot of the same scene on both Tesseract and Red Eclipe for comparison, if there's someone there that isn't yet convinced.
The biggest change is on the model rendering side, as you can see below.
All of the assets on the scene are made by myself ^^

[MirceaKitsune]

Thanks for that comparison! The difference is enormous, in case anyone was indeed not convinced. Highly hoping someone will find a way to make this port happen

[SniperGoth]

Im going to take more comparison shots soon enough, but with models this time.

[SniperGoth]

Sorry for the double post, but here's another comparison, but focusing more on the lightning/models this time.
If someone here wants me to do more comparisons, just ask

So yeah, tess's engine will really boost the graphical fidelity for everyone

[MirceaKitsune]

Wow... that's almost like a flat lighting preview compared to a real render. Red Eclipse did a good job at looking great even with the current engine, so I never realized just how outdated Cube 2 actually is.

[SniperGoth]

Well, it's more about on if you know how to use what you're given. After all, there's a lot of great looking maps made on Cube 2 .

[AbusBambus]

Are there any news on this? I'd really like to see RE on Tesseract happen (since I happen to have a new PC that can pull of Tesseract easily )

[Evropi]

Are there any news on this? I'd really like to see RE on Tesseract happen (since I happen to have a new PC that can pull of Tesseract easily )

Eihrul is a bit busy these days but the crowdfunding campaign will probably go ahead once he's available again.

[qreeves]

Sorry, guess I should've updated everyone. I appreciate everyone's support, but the project has been put on hold indefinitely until eihrul feels he is able to complete the task. There are a lot of mitigating factors, and the enormity of the task is simply too much at the moment. We wouldn't want to raise the money, only to disappoint the backers by being unable to complete it.

[baronvonnukem]

Have you thought of trying to get into something like the Square Enix collective? I don't know what the exact terms are (how they stand to make money) but basically they pay for a substantial amount of necessary funds, (after a community voting process) and then have the rest of the funds be made up on kickstarter...
here's the site link:
http://collective.square-enix.com/

[MirceaKitsune]

Has there been any more news on this? I'm hoping that with the summer vacation, there might be hopes for the port happening this year. Then again, like all good things, I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up not happening at all

[qreeves]

Unfortunately, there are no immediate plans to pursue this project. It was mostly wishful thinking, a complete engine change is no easy matter. The latest stable has had the new work done removing the non-shader pipelines, and this will let us do some things we couldn't before (because of backward compatibility).

[MirceaKitsune]

Ah... I understand. Well the main reason I was eager for this port was the additional graphical features... such as real dynamic lighting, depth of field, etc. I wonder if these could be implemented separately into RE in that case. Considering it already has modern shaders and seemingly a good pipeline, I'd imagine it's easier but still a matter of finding someone with the time and will to do it.