Thursday, January 20, 2005

DOOM 3 SDK

Finally I finished the single player part of DOOM 3. Yes, I know, I'm a slow player. The next step was to install the DOOM 3 SDK for Linux.

Besides the strange build system, which uses SCons instead of the usual GNU make it looks very promising with all the included source code.

Q3A had a problem with files: it could only access files in the game directory but it looks like DOOM 3 can access any OS file via the fileSystem object, which has the OpenExplicitFileRead() and OpenExplicitFileWrite()method. I'll try it out.

This is really important because the nice remote control mode of OpenDemo is based on a named pipe from the playback GUI to the game program. MS Windows cannot place named pipes in an arbitrary directory, a simple feature, which all other OSes have no problem with. MS Windows has a special file system type for named pipes, which means the using program (here DOOM 3) has to be able to access an arbitrary directory.