what do those alternative engines offer that benefits SP, more eye-candy? 

More stability/compatibility. The ultimate eyecandy engine would probably be DarkPlaces.

Each engine has its merits and disavantages, but generally you can't go wrong with ezQuake for QW and Fitzquake/Bengt Jardrup's modified glQuake for SP, as Spirit suggested. 

http://www.bspquakeeditor.com/

Go for it! 

The first version of bsp that runs on my system
(with WinNT 4.0) 

runs MUCH faster than any other engine i've tried out in the past, which is what draws me to it the most.. i can run through full-sized unvised maps with barely any slowdown. the fog/skybox support is nice as well, along with the smoothed-out animations.. and of course the informative error messages when you go over certain limits (although for non-mappers that isn't really an important factor)

darkplaces was fun to play around on for a brief while, but it's a little too fancy for me..

fitzquake is more for those who prefer the look of software mode, only with advanced gl features & performance. i always preferred the look of glquake though, so it didn't grab me majorly 

it is possible to make fitzquake look mostly like glquake...

1. gl_overbright 0 to flatten the lighting
2. gl_overbright_models 0 to darken the models
3. gl_fullbrights 0 to hide fullbright pixels
4. r_oldwater 1 to make water surface slide and stretch instead of swirling

There are some things you can't do unfortunately:

1. can't make the underwater warp have constant HOM and shearing
2. can't make the sky look jittery and melted
3. can't make the particles look like a blurry cracker with bites taken out of it 

fitzquake just died for me... 

point taken.. although i was getting more at the fact that the software emulation is its selling point (so to speak) and if that isn't what you desire, then there's no real reason to use it over aguire's engine (apart from possible compatibility issues i've read about)

the particles in your engine are indeed much nicer, but that's the only real plus point for me, since i use skyboxes most of the time & have never bothered with waterwarp.. plus i barely notice the difference with overbrights & find the models to look inferior with them included. the jittery animation really grates on me too :/ 

did you see my post above on fitzquake and the new nvidia drivers? 

I've heard that Nvidia drivers may stop being compatible with older versions of Opengl whose (ARB) extensions have been deprecated. If it is true, then FitzQuake needs a bit of a rewrite.

Side note, I'm using the latest Fire Fox with auto spell (A chorus of relief from the gallery). It wanted me to replace 'Opengl' with 'penguins'. 

oh, thanks for reminding me. Yes, I did see, it, and I would check it out for myself but I have no internet access at home. It certainly sucks if nvidia is beginning to drop compatability with standard opengl extensions.

I'll have to investigate later. 

so, the reason to use fitzquake can be more than just "liking software mode" in that it has a bunch of bug fixes, and generally loads textures better than most engines, and it has stuff like gamedir switching and video mode switching and hardware gamma and better console usability etc. etc.

Aguirre has done a lot of work on his engine and it probably has most of the bug fixes that fitzquake has, plus a pile of bug fixes that fitzquake doesn't have. In general, my fixes and improvements are in usability and graphics, and aguirre's fixes are map/mod compatability and crash resistance. So my graphics might be more polished, but his engines support a lot of weird mods and crashy maps. 

install multiple engines, and use what works :) 

Are you running on Vista? I only have XP, not sure if the drivers are different or not. 

install multiple engines, and use what works :)

Using FitzQuake and aguirRe's GL engine is enough.. Others engine are useless... ;o) 

To be honest I never realised there was a difference on the looks of Fitzquake and glquake. 

The difference is more about performances: FitzQuake is my reference for playing "clean map", and I personally use aguirRe's engine for debug during mapping.
As example, when a big map leaks, sometimes Fitzquake crashes because it is unable to load huge bsp (due to the "unsealedness" of the map, due to its own limitations...)... So if it is also difficult to detect the leak with the editor (i.e not obvious to detect when there are lot of brushes), I load the bsp with aguirRe's engine, I load the pointfile, and check visaully where is the issue, as aguirRe's engine is enhanced and allows to load very big maps that exceed the current limits.
Nevertheless, I have to agree that visually, except for monster moves (smoother with aguirRe's engine), the engines are quite the same... 

The main visual improvements in FitzQuake that are important to me are the improved lighting (superior to GlQuake, closer to software quake) and fullbright support. Subtle but highly important differences! 

nope, on XP.

the drivers I'm using are 162.18 forceware.


And multiple installs is the way to go. I have fitz (preach's hacked version that adds smoother model interpolation), aguire's gl and aguire's nehahra.

That's all that's necessary IMHO. 

... but I refuse to use anything but FitzQuake for single player. Unless it is absolutely necessary (e.g. Nehahra). 

I use fitz for sp and fuh for qw.

Both are good products - they do what they are supposed to do and do it well, with style, easiness and robustness. I don't need extra features.

(Run fuhquake with -no24bit and it's pretty far along the path to normal looking.) 

I hadnt upgraded drivers in a while as there was no need to (was on 84 version forceware), but some recent games had some trouble (fifa 2007 and painkiller) so I got the new drivers and everything was ok.

of course, then I loaded fitz and noticed the issue. hopefully is nothing big, and even if its unfixable, remains confined to the console. 

i don't really know what to check aside from looking for burn marks.

as far as i can tell, the machine still works perfectly fine. and all the components aside from the HDDs are less than half a year old.

i did purchase my monitor used though. at this point, i don't think there's anything furthur to do but wait and see if it happens again. 

I am looking for a coder who can help me with a probably rather simple job.
http://www.quaddicted.com/?p=21

I am crossposting this in a few Quake boards, sorry if you stumble on it more than once. 

This spam-mail topic made me smile before hitting delete :)