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It seems like the kind of thing that modern but cautious custom engines (like fitzquake derivatives) should display a "extension does not match model contents" warning, and exotic custom engines that support lots of other model formats may have broken support for inadvertently. Also, bear in mind if you replace a bsp with a mdl, the game will crash if that entity is given SOLID_BSP status - you need a genuine bsp for that to work.
Everytime I read this I'm stunned... that Darkplaces & co. are still seen as "exotic" in some corners of the Quake community. Lord Havoc is among the people who put the most time and energy into this community, into QC extensions and so forth. He basically wrote the book. Yet, no one uses his engine except for custom textures. It's really weird.
Back when Nehahra was made, engine extensions were apparently cool. Don't take this as a mortal insult, I'm just completely stunned by this. I'd think a mapping theme of "use at least 1 Darkplaces extension and Q3BSP" would be pretty interesting to see. But well, that's just me. Again, no flame. Just marvelling. I'll go back into hiding now. The trouble is, for me, I really don't like the DarkPlaces look. So if the default look turns people off (I can't be alone) then engine extensions are going to be of minimal value.
Added to the fact that you'll then be locked into DP for your map and I would be interested to hear why people don't like DP (ooh-err!) around here.
To be fair, last time I tried DP (oh behave), was a few years ago, but it felt sluggish compared to fitz, had loads of annoying eyecandy crap on by default and I couldn't be arsed to trawl through a ton of stuff on the internet to figure out how to make it look more like quake - and the physics felt just slightly different. I am aware that it has loads of awesome potential for modders and mappers (q3bsp spoooge)- but because no-one here plays in it, there isn't really an audience for DP-specific maps. Darkplaces is a good engine, too XD
The only thing I disliked about it was the mouse smoothing/acceleration or whatever it is. But I'm sure I can probably adjust it, if I only knew how.... Out of sheer curiosity and insanity, I just installed DP to check how close to Quake can I make it look.
Model interpolation is essentially required, since you can't turn off movement interpolation. Particles are shit and blurry even at the highest quality, and apparently there's no option to make them square. They don't behave correctly, either, because way too many of them spawn, and also smoke particles seem to fade to solid black before disappearing. This is very noticeable when using the GL. Underwater warp exists, but the actual water surface doesn't get warped. All it does is a Q3-like rotation. No way to disable colored dynamic light, by the looks of it. The game font is scaled at some weird size that makes it blurry with linear filtering and MSPaint-quality jaggy with nearest filtering. OK, but if someone is able to use QC extensions (or, hm, if someone is able to create game levels, even) I would expect them to be able to take DP's particlefont image and just paint themselves some nice new particles, even blocky ones if they want.
If too many particles spawn, well, the particles are customizable so someone could write a vanilla set with square blocks instead of dots. Waterwarp is gonna have to be a shader. You can probably do it with a Q3 shader, but I think MH wrote some pretty cool waterwarp GLSL some time back that could be ripped. Perhaps there's even a cvar for Quake-style waterwarp. I'm just saying these issues are not insurmountable for people who routinely create game content. IMHO getting to use the QC extensions is worth a little investment polishing the particles and whatnot. Just as an example, hipnotic and I believe Chapters (and who knows, maybe Quoth) uses copyentity implemented in QC. It's in hordespawn I believe. That is absolutely horrible for various reasons. DP has a nice simple builtin that does that. Same for many other things. It's just an improvement to have such things provided as engine builtins any way you look at it. I agree that it should have a "vanilla preset" like FTE does though. Regarding DP-only, well, a lot of maps are Fitz/QS-only in practice, which is the same thing. DP is easy to install and free. On the other hand, extensions could be added to Fitzquake etc, but that's gonna be significantly more work and you need engine coders to do it, whereas most of the other stuff can be done by content authors. Just my 2 cents. Cheers. One of the absolute most basic requirements of a custom quake engine should be that it's possible to make it look like vanilla Quake.
Otherwise, well there's your reason no-one uses it here I guess. Well it sounds plausible that a modder could jump through a ton of hoops and make DP look quakey enough to please most people for a specific mod, but I don't think that will help it be adopted much.
My reasoning is that I'm assuming most of us quakers really just want to have a single engine of choice for all our quaking needs - fitz, QS, whatever - it works for everything, or at least 90% of everything. If DP only looks acceptable on maps/mods designed specifically to work around all the silly eyecandy stuff, then I don't think that's a great solution. I love DP (darkplaces not double penatration) and wouldn't use anything else. Maybe it takes a bit of getting used to, but I go back to fitz and other engines are find them a bit vanilla. Also there's lots of maps that say "don't use DP due to bugs", but I still use it and never come across any of these so-called bugs.
I started trying to use DP to get some cool texture effects going, but the shader tech in DP has some pretty severe limitations and being spoiled by Doom3, I kind of grew frustrated with it.
And then there are some fundamental changes to how some things work in the engine that break some QC stuff that relies on the original behaviour and tracking down the console variables you need to set to revert back to the old behaviour is annoying. "I go back to fitz and other engines are find them a bit vanilla"
That's what the rest of us LIKE about those engines. :P DP is great. It's just that to me and the way I generally use Quake it feels too "awkward" to use compared to ports like Fitz/QS - too complex in its usage and features/settings, too slow in terms of loading times.
In a larger, more active community, I guess it would've been more established as a modding platform, similar to ZDoom, but Quake doesn't have that anymore. For the remaining people the costs of making something DP-only may not justify or outweigh the "costs" in most cases. So yea.. it keeps going. And I have a few other sections I still need to brush out! Madness. I am enjoying this mapping thing though.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1849053/Quake_Mapping_06.jpg old sky meh:
http://i.imgur.com/Aas7Mtn.jpg new skybox hotness: http://i.imgur.com/MSq6U56.jpg Note the nice new knight.mdl. Aww. I think the new sky/fog looks way better. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161473/Misc/QuakeAO.jpg
AO or not, this screenshot fucking owns.
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