I don’t know game engine tech, but I watched this[0] (which was awesome), and was immediately reminded of BZFlag[1][2], though the world looks more visually sophisticated.
Re:New Sauerbraten 2020 Edition Released
by bhrgunatha on Sunday December 06, 2020 @09:18PM
(#25328746)
[0] is from 2013. Do you know of any gameplay using the 2020 edition?
The graphics haven't changed significantly. It looks like the biggest addition is new maps, which the community still seems to be quite involved in. There is a fork of the cube 2 engine intended to introduce modern graphics, called tesseract.
> Maps are basically a big octree with something like marching-cubes applied
I could be totally off on this, but isn't this a classic way of encoding levels?
It's common to take map geometry from a level editor and process the polygon soup into some kind of space partitioning tree structure, but here the octree is manipulated more directly. The idea is to accept some limitations on what shapes can be created, for the sake of better real-time editing performance.
The original Cube engine is almost as old as Quake III: Team Arena, which can do more free-form geometry and has pretty light-maps, but ‘compiling’ these maps was a lengthy, compute-intensive task at the time, which made online multiplayer in-game level editing impossible.
The developers have many notable side projects in the gaming space, too. Aardappel has a programming language, Lobster[0]. And eihrul created the ENet library for UDP networking[1]. I think Sauerbraten itself uses ENet.
[0] http://strlen.com/lobster/ [1] http://enet.bespin.org/