[FTEQW] Nuclide

[Eukara]

I figure I may post about my project Nuclide here. It's history is long and convoluted but the gist is this:

• I started working on my game The Wastes in April 2015, it released in April 2018.
• I started FreeCS (then known as OpenCS) in November 2016, while working on TW I started to share bits of code between them.
• I knew that they should probably share a unified code base for the most part.
• I knew there was gonna be other games/mods that people might want to build on top of that SDK/Platform if it proves to be viable.
• Thus Nuclide was born!

Now it's 2023, people have written about projects like FreeCS/HL in several places and even have made videos on YouTube about it. Plus one game that's shipped is built entirely using it - so that's worth something! I've heard that people like to peek at my code to learn how to use FTEQW. That is very cool, but do please give attribution for when you take code. I've had to scold some people about this already, so there you go

General feature overview:

• SDK in the spirit of 'id Tech' development environments
• Client-side predicted movement, predicted weapons and vehicle systems
• Implementations of well known, established entity classes as seen in popular and critically acclaimed games
• Reference implementations for a lot of features exlusive to the FTEQW engine
• Designed to be familar to developers who are used to GoldSrc and Source engine project workflows
• Everything written from scratch with the modern QuakeC language advancements in mind

If anyone has any questions about the project itself, or how I'd do something in FTEQW you might as well ask it here. This is it, this is the thread!

Main Project: https://code.idtech.space/vera/nuclide, https://github.com/veravisions/nuclide
Documentation: https://developer.vera-visions.com/

Some projects built using Nuclide:
The Wastes - A Post-Apocalyptic First Person Shooter
FreeHL - A port of Half-Life to QuakeC, GitHub mirror
FreeCS - A port of Counter-Strike 1.5 to QuakeC, GitHub mirror
FreeGunman - A port of Gunman Chronicles to QuakeC, GitHub mirror

[Eukara]

The past week I've mainly been working on abstractions to make the 'menu' codebase leaner that developers have to implement.



A game like FreeHL ships with a 'Custom game' menu that lists not just locally installed mods - but also mods installed from the built-in mod and updater manager.
So you have to know how to use those builtins, try to figure out what's actually a valid mod - where to parse the metadata (can come in various forms and from various sources) and that's a hassle. So a new unified API can be found here.



The same can be said for the Updates menu. What are updates in this context? Well, not all packages that the engine's package manager reports apply to the current game. If there's like 100 packages across various different games you want to focus on only the ones relevant to you. So with the Updates API you can have a much easier time building that for your game.

The end result is that we have a pretty minimal codebase within the menu.dat QuakeC module that has to be implemented to interface with Updates. FreeHL already uses it and makes it so it can update itself.

A beautiful thing that's a result of this work and FTE's package manager:
The latest upstream/git version of FTEQW also knows that Half-Life should be handled by me - so now you only need to install FTEQW, have it detect your Half-Life install, and it'll automatically recommend and install the FreeHL project... which in turn keeps itself updated with its own menu

[Eukara]

It's been a few busy days traveling and spending time with (new!) family here in the US, so I didn't get to post this sooner, but a new FreeHL release was published a few days ago:

https://www.frag-net.com/projects.html



And it got a small shout-out on Blues News.

Hope everyone in the community had a great thanksgiving!