Do you know what happened to the nice multiplayer ideas of Korax Mod / KMOD2? Down the drain forever... just talked to SkyJake and it came out, something I did never think of before, the whole fucking pre-1.0 Doomsday engine doesn't have any facilities to restore a net savegame. Not buggy, there is just NOTHING there... that means we just screwed up with all that cooperative stuff, it doesn't really matter that some cool features are missing because the game is crashing afte half an hour of LAN gaming or so, and it doesn't matter it's crashing too often because you can't restore a saved game anyway and who the fuck is going to play 5-10 hours in a row to get through Hexen??? Man, am I glad that once we finish Korax Alpha - which doesn't have any kind of multiplayer anyway - in a couple of months, we'll forget about the Doomsday engine forever. It's certainly pretty and famous, but once you get behind the curtain it's miserable... Janis, the guy who coded (and still codes) the Vavoom port, just agreed to become an official member of the Korax team in the future, so for the big projects (Serpent Power and Korax Arena) we'll have the guy who codes the base engine in the team and issues can be solved directly. [img]images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img] OK OK, rant finished, but it really pissed me off that out of ignorance we've been promising a shiny new steel kettle to the masses and what we can now offer is just some moldy, cracked earthen pot. [img]images/smiles/icon_sad.gif[/img] Oh my, how that did sound, LOL... anyway, I'm talking only about multiplayer (==> cooperative) here, the single player part of KMOD2 is real fine. The reason it hits me this hard because this was the last planned mod ever with cooperative. While there will be tons of possibilites to enjoy single player and deathmatch in our later releases, no cooperative any more. BTW that just reminds me, Ichor, do you plan CG3 to support cooperative or only single player?

Single player. Although I may make deathmatch maps using this same mod. Just imagine walking into a room just after being killed, and you see a Tome of Power on a pedestal. You greedily take it, only to have some sneaky fool in an alcove above the room press a switch, closing all doors and spawning several Ice Gargoyles and a Blood Lich. But I'll do that at least after I finish the first hub (which it about 2/3rds done).

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *runs around frantically screaming like a girl and then jumps down from a 100 floor building* -Remi

Also, I think best would be to forget about jHexen 1.0 forever. Korax Alpha is based on the KMOD2 codebase, and I think time is better used on developing new spells and gameplay enhancements than trying to merge it with the 1.0 codebase which makes tons of things a different way, especially that the main improvements of 1.0 vs 0.99.6 are the MD2 support (which we already have) and the network capability (which we don't need for Korax Alpha). So I say let's stick to 0.99.6 for the first TC as well, afterward we go to Vavoom anyway. Remi if you have another opinion on this, let's discuss it now, I want this Q settled before we start with the next phase of work.

JHexen 1.0? What's that, heheh?

[img]images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img] BTW Ichor, did you ever take a look into the possibilities of Vavoom? 3D floors and slopes make for a whole new variety of level design possibilities, for instance. One of the reasons I decided to migrate further projects to the Vavoom engine.

If the code is similar, I might consider it.

It's somewhat differently built, but it's better suited for mods. If there is a new jHexen version, you either merge your old codebase or can't use the new engine features. With Vavoom, you write a mod that works with 1.9 and it will work with 1.10 and 1.11 and etc w/o you having to do anything. Also, Janis is rather going to implement something you'd want to use; after 1.9 came out, I talked to him and mentioned a couple of things that would be cool, some days later I got from him an 1.10 alpha 1 build that had some of these new features. I made some more suggestions and comments and a couple of days later got an alpha 2 build with more changes and new features. I really look forward working with him once Korax Alpha is out... it'll be quite a change compared to a Doomsday when you "accidentally" find out half a year too late that this or that basic feature only seems to exist but doesn't work at all...

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It's somewhat differently built, but it's better suited for mods. If there is a new jHexen version, you either merge your old codebase or can't use the new engine features. With Vavoom, you write a mod that works with 1.9 and it will work with 1.10 and 1.11 and etc w/o you having to do anything.

I'm probably making a fool of myself saying this but... don't Doomsday and Vavoom have the same "mod" system? Doomsday got it's dll system, each dll is the game itself while the exe file is merely the engine, it just "obeys" what the dll tells it to do. If a new version of Doomsday is released it doesn't have to mean that the dll is incompatible... in theory at least, even though it's easy to mess up everything (which has been done already anyway [img]images/smiles/icon_razz.gif[/img] ). Vavoom has slightly the same system. And by the way, you wrote one thing wrong, when making a mod for Vavoom it may get incompatible with later versions of Vavoom, it really just depends on what modifications Janis is doing with later versions. -Remi

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don't Doomsday and Vavoom have the same "mod" system?

Theoretically yes, but in practice it looks somewhat different... a large part of the differences between jHexen 0.99.6 and jHexen 1.0 is namely NOT in the Doomsday engine but in jhexen.dll, the same place our stuff is in. OTOH with Vavoom all our stuff is in a separate "prog", which - as long as the port specifications from the engine to the progs don't change - works with any engine version. I thought it's quite obvious from the fact how SkyJake needed half a year to release jHexen 1.0 after releasing jDOOM 1.0 (and putting out jHeretic 1.0 somewhen in between). That should pretty much show you how much of the changes are in the DLLs and how little in Doomsday itself. With Vavoom, you have one port that runs all the games (including Strife, I'll have to try it one of these days), so there is no "yep, this feature exists for the engine since June for this and this game, but for that game it'll be supported first next February". <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote

And by the way, you wrote one thing wrong, when making a mod for Vavoom it may get incompatible with later versions of Vavoom, it really just depends on what modifications Janis is doing with later versions.

This one is true and I'm aware of it, the solution is simply to talk to Janis and work out a roadmap so that he'll do all such changes - if any - in the 3 months before we start work with the Vavoom engine. [img]images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img] I've been preparing a reply to his latest mail for a week now, so I'll just include this point as well.