Posted by Dr. Willard on August 19, 2000 at 03:10:01:
In reply to: You're forgetting "something"... posted by Vagrant on August 18, 2000 at 21:43:45:
: hi TombBiker...
: don't mean to throw cold water on yer' idea(acually I do)...
: but, there's other reasons why certain games cannot be ...er...
: "converted to another game engine"...
: it's called "identity" ...
Actually, the real problem is engine incompatibility. Different game engines assume different world geometries, and all the inhabitant physics is closely bound to whatever world geometry is used. So it's difficult to change world geometries.
Example: The TR series uses a room/portal architecture, where rooms can be substituted for other rooms, while the Quake engine uses Binary Space Partitions. Translating from TR to Quake can be difficult, especially since rooms can overlap in space, an effect sometimes called "5D space", by fans of Bungie's Marathon series, whose engine has a similar room-portal architecture, but with Doom-like rooms.
However, displaying 3D models is a relatively trivial task by comparison, since these are essentially an appearance feature, not something fundamental like the world geometry. Thus, open-source versions of Doom have gotten 3D-model characters and weapons without fundamental changes in the engine architecture.
And what I'm proposing is for having Doom or Quake import TR models and use them for rendering.