I really must put that test program up on the RMQ SVN....

I've done a lot of measuring and benchmarking of formats and layouts here. Bottom line is that on all hardware (except ATI/AMD for some odd reason, where it's the same no matter) BGRA is between 6 and 30 times faster than RGBA.

For load times this may or may not be important.

If you're loading native 64x64 8-bit Quake textures, then it's likely you won't even notice.

If you're loading 512x512 TGAs it may be the difference between the player waiting 1 minute vs waiting 5 minutes for the map to load.

If you're updating lightmap textures at runtime, it may be the difference between running at 10fps and running at 250fps. That's where milliseconds are actually measurably important - 4 milliseconds will get you 250fps. 20 milliseconds will get you 50fps. If you're also running a server, running QC, drawing stuff, updating anuimations, playing sound, etc, then every single millisecond is precious. Every millisecond you save in this kind of this is a millisecond extra headroom for something else. 

OK, the test program is now on the RMQ public SVN: svn://svn.icculus.org/remakequake/engine/Experimental/TexSubImageTest

The code is mostly portable, but at present relies on some Windows-only libs for timing - you could replace this with the SDL timer stuff if you wanted (portability is not a huge concern for test programs). 

Well, some proper feedback on the sounds then (not giving a flying fuck about the bitrate because it is very irrelevant):


Nailgun and Super Nailgun sound like silenced weapons.
Sound player makes when coming out of the water sounds weak and squeamish.
Lightning gun sounds weak and silent.

All weapon sounds seem to have no bass and sound hissy. 

"BGRA is between 6 and 30 times faster than RGBA"

That makes zero sense to me but if you've measured it then I'll defer to that. 

All weapon sounds seem to have no bass and sound hissy.

This. What makes this extra strange is that the sound of soft gibs hitting the floor is the most bassy sound in the game!

All in all I have to say this is a huge improvement over the last demo. There are some great bits of atmosphere, especially thanks to some of the ambient music. As far as sounds go that's as possitive as I can be as the Enforcers (and now the ogres too) still sound as if someone's pulling a string on their back and if you get a whole load of grunts running around overhead it sounds like there are a bunch of coked up tap dancers roaming the slipgates.

For the most part the build quality of the maps is top notch, though I feel some of the "new areas" are often pretty unnecessary and just end up diluting the original level. The bit on the floating ship in Ep 3 has the most infuriating ladders I've come across in any game ever -- please put a clip brush in so it's not possible to just walk through them? A couple of times I got nearly to the top and then just shot straight through it and suffered falling damage. The third time I got to the top and an ogre raped my face. What's the fish about?

The laser rifle is way overpowered -- Fiends and Shamblers just arent scary when you can tear them apart in a matter of seconds. 

If you aren't planning on updating the animation of the Super shotgun (or are but haven't by your next release ;) ) you should add a simple 'click' noise at the end of the SSG reload imo, as the weapon sits inert but is unable to fire, so a little cue that it's ready would be helpful for learning it's firing timing since you've changed it. 

The OpenGL "common mistakes" page is quite awesome for this kind of thing; this link is relevant: http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Common_Mistakes#Texture_upload_and_pixel_reads.

Summary.

Most GPUs will internally store all textures in BGRA layout, irrespective of what you specify when creating the texture.

What should be obvious from this is (and this applies to the format param of glTexImage and glTexSubImage calls):

Using GL_RGB for starters is just plain nuts. You're not saving video RAM and when loading the texture your driver must expand it to 4 components and swap R and B.

Using G_BGR avoids the swap but means it must still be expanded.

Using GL_RGBA avoids the expansion but means it must still be swapped.

Using GL_BGRA avoids both the swap and expansion - transferring the data from system memory to GPU memory is just the equivalent of a straight memcpy which can be optimized (the most simple optimization being transferring 32 bits of source data at a time instead of 8 bits). No CPU work required before transferring, data is already in the format the GPU will use internally, result is a much faster transfer.

Of course, once the transfer has completed and the texture is in GPU memory none of this has any impact on performance. But if further transfers must happen during runtime (like e.g. Quake dynamic lightmap updating), then it most certainly does. 

The laser rifle is way overpowered -- Fiends and Shamblers just arent scary when you can tear them apart in a matter of seconds.

I think it should be toned down quite a bit as well because of this. 

I finally have my pc back with Q1 installed and I thought I would try this mod out! I downloaded it (400mb), readme instructions were confusing (seems to have been mentioned before).
Installed the mod in a RMQ directory, started with the -game rmq command, moved the winters content down a level. Typed map e2m1rq and got an error about a model :-

host_error: mod_loadmodel: progs/h_shal.mdl not found

I tried the original Q1 with the RMQ engine and it worked fine. Love the blur effects when taking damage. Oh well back to lurking ... 

h_shal.mdl is part of ID1 Quake content. Are you missing PAK1.PAK? 

Sounds like it can't find the original Quake there.

Laser rifle: I forgot to bump the Shambler health. This is because it conflicts with a secret plan.

How the blaster works is it get incrementally more powerful the longer you shoot, but also gains a cooldown time - thats why you see particles from it when its fired for a while.

A fiend doesn't give you enough time to warm the thing up by firing, I like how that's working. It's also good for the other enemies, since it's stupidly easy to spam away and run out of ammo.

But the poor old Shambler caught the raw end of the deal since how you fight it is ideally suited to a sustained fire = more damage weapon. 

test 

But it also put my name and IP in italic. 

I think perhaps it should take longer to warm up because no fiends got anywhere near me! 

For some reason my pak1.pak was corrupt, so replaced it and all fine.

My feedback from playing e2m1rq:-

* Initial cinematic totally confusing, I thought the game was broken at first and was teleporting me around the place randomly
* The Broken floor was not obvious (the very quickly displayed message about the floor was bad), if you need a message to tell players to do something with the floor then gameplay is broken. Should be visual in some way. Plus why am I in a prison cell with a gun!?!
* Dropped into a black hole and was lost for a while, black confined spaced early on in the game, not a good idea.
* Not sure why you give a quad so early in the game, I picked it up and it ran out in what seemed like 5 seconds.
* Grapplehook secret is pitch black (on my screen) found it by complete chance.
* Performance is terrible on my machine, I kept lowing the resolution but nothing seemed to fix it. Probably some weird setting I have missed on the command line!
* I want to shoot the security camera's off the walls!
* Too many crate styles, I kept finding new styles and was shooting them for secrets! :P I know it odd thing to say but a pile of crates the same style looks more believable than an every crate texture next to each other.
* Played on default skill setting and everything felt too easy. It felt like enemies health was scaled with skill level. Not a fan of this TBH.
* First button mashing puzzle was strange, drain water from pool below. Was looking for a cool pipe handle to turn somewhere and then I remembered it is Q1 ... and I had to bash a button in the water! I hit the button, went back to the control panel and was told I had to use a lift back in the water!?! It just seems so odd and retro level design.
* Died a couple of times to some hunter thing, first one I did not even see hitting me. Next couple just appeared out of nowhere and it was instant death. IMHO a bad mechanic.
* I still can't believe the menu's are not scaled up correctly, it makes the game feel so dated.
* I don't remember E2M1 feeling like this base layout, it felt completely different. A good thing! :)
* Maybe I have been spoilt by modern games with locations feeling like real layout. Offices, lifts, railings, even the puzzles felt old. The place lacked a scale and I know it can be done right, I have played Q1 maps with it right. (Rubicon1+2)
* The high res textures felt all wrong to me, they looked like a mashed up mix of colours, draw styles and their use in the environment felt random. The map desperately need an artist to make everything work together better. Control panels look pixelated next to high res signs, walls with too many details in the texture. There is a beauty to some surfaces being plain concrete and just having dirt on the edges.

I know I am picking at the level, but I assume you want feedback not back slapping. It is certainly a good MOD, but at the moment it feels odd, especially the visuals. 

These are untouched right now, we're just throwing some things back and forth now, before we commit to anything else with them.

Health scales, but its very slight, and has a large randomisation factor - you can still find tough enemies on low skills.

Performance could be related to the aforementioned memory settings - oldschool Quake settings are stupidly low for RMQ. Mh's engine defaults it to 128000, but you could try bumping that.

A lot of the others have been noted already, but there's some useful ones in there, thanks. 

Hmmm - the project name kind-of implies that the original Q1 shouldn't be needed to run the thing. 

I didn't even notice the heatup / cooldown in the game (kept wondering about the particles though). Probably because everything just died right away, fiends also. I tend to run away from fiends backwards and that must have given the blaster enough time to heat up.

I'm not so sure about this mechanic tbh. - Quake II had it, and the Hyperblaster bece the least uses weapon for me. It was like the Chaingun just worse because at least that's a hitscan weapon and easier to aim when moving.

So I think if you want to keep this mechanic you must balance it better because Shambler health bump or not, it's too powerful. And some better feedback about the heatup phase would be nice.