this is not 100% correct.

when people say skeletal is limited, what they mean is that it is limited because the engine is limited.

of course, we are all animating with skeletal systems in max or whatever, but the skeletal stuff is maybe 80% of the stuff. the rest is animated with scripted things and/or vertex deformations. when those skeletal + vertex animations are collapsed into pure vertex animations, we get all the power of the 3d program in quake.

if we instead relied on the engine to move the vertices, then all we have is bare bones (haha....) skeletal only animations.

or you are faced with the prospect of assigning one vertex per bone and then trying to run deformations on the bone objects which most 3d tools are not natively meant to do, so it's just needlessly harder. 

In the modelling app I'd be animating bones to do most of the movement, but I'd also be using blend shapes a lot. 

Does iqm suppose vertex assignment to multiple bones? Because soft selection on bones is remarkably helpful in creating convincing anmations when you've got a low poly count... 

preach, yeah, 4 influnces max, like most skeletal formats designed for hardware acceleration. 

I noticed ezquake you can aim down straight to the ground. Is there any netquake engine that supports FULL (180 degrees) freelook in the same way as ezquake, besides darkplaces? 

quakespasm 

Silly me, didn't check that one. Thank you. 

I tend to do most of my animation worth with bones regardless. Blendshape support would be nice though but I don't know of any other format that we could snag for the best of both worlds. MD3 would be a massive improvement but with IQM you can animate at 10FPS and then get bone rotation instead of linear interpolation for vertex positions... makes for nice big sweeping motions with proper arch. :) 

I have recently, and will be for several months, been switching to a Pentium 4 Toshiba laptop with Windows XP Home SP3.

The problem is that, no custom engine i have tried (Aguirre's Enhanced GLquake, Quakespasm, ReQuiem, Fitz, Fitz Mark V ...) runs at all or runs even close to a decently speed in this computer, even before loading a map, i don't know if because of the age of the computer, compability reasons, or bugs (this last case probably not as i have tested in several engines). In case of Fitz and Aguirre's the video fails but the rest works, in the first engine the screen is black and in the second the console doesn't drop and everything is in a low color mode. Fitz Mark V won't even load. DirectQ gives me the same error as in almost any computer till now.

So far only WinQuake that comes with Aguirre's GL engine works (haven't tested the original one to see if its different). And thanks to this i am noticing how much we are depending on the added engines features, as my maps look so different now without them.

All the info i get from the engines besides Fitz, Fitz MArk V and AGuirre's is several warning messages about non-supporting several features or not finding certain things, the newer the version engine the more the warnings.

So the question is, which engine would be able to run well besides WinQuake, or what can i turn down in any engine (i use mostly Quakespasm)so it works good enough to play? 

Because of my work I use the NumPad a lot. So far only QuakeSpasm seems to allow typing in the console with it. An engine that has individual transparency for each liquid would also be welcome. 

More than likely the laptop's hardware is lacking, the video in particular. I ran Fitzquake on XP for years, but that computer had a pretty decent Nvidia video card. 

I remember Aguirre's engine and old versions of Fitz ran perfectly on much older rigs back then. 

What's your gpu? Got drivers installed? Try r_dynamic 0. 

Is a sure sign of windows software rendering, caused by missing or not-working graphics drivers.

gl_info in the quake console will print info on the driver being used, to confirm this

If you dont know the exact gpu model in that laptop, try the utility "GPUZ" which should tell you 

If you can use winquake, then try qbism's Super 8 engine. It is a software engine like winquake but supports lots of the new features. 

With a Pentium 4 and from how you describe it, you've almost certainly got an old Intel graphics chip. The age of the CPU is unfortunate but it's still capable despite that; the graphics chip being absolute crap is what's killing you. 

The Direct3D version of Mark V should run on that old computer with flying colors.

It doesn't care about your OpenGL drivers ...

It doesn't even need them. 

Thanks. The laptop is probably running on old drivers, but i don't know, this laptop isn't mine, and i am doubting on updating them, as this is the only computer, i have seen running a certain videogame i like a lot, in the last 10 years.
I have been testing what you have told me and this are the results.

* Necros: About Qbism Super 8, it seems to work, at least the older versions i got from Quaddicted, the page for that in the official website gives error 80.


* Baker: About Fitz Mark V on Direct3d, yes, it works, thanks. It looks that i was using a version from before you added that feature.


* Spirit and Ericw:

The GPU is a Intel(R) 82852/82855 GM/GME Graphics Controller. GPU I855GM.

r_dynamic 0 doesn't look to have any impact on it.

Gl_info shows this:
gl_vendor: Microsoft Corporation
gl_renderer: gdi generic
gl_version: 1.1.0
Gl_extensions:
gl_win_swap_hint
gl_ext_bgra
gl_ext_paletted_texture


For now i suppose i'll stick with MArk V. It is a relief, i thought i wouldn't be able to map for the next half a year. Yeah, i know i could still amp, but mapping without checking from time to time is asking for trouble and for ending with an impossible to fix map. 

"Baker: About Fitz Mark V on Direct3d, yes, it works, thanks."

The Mark V Direct3D version can run on a 1990s clunker because it uses Direct3D's 8 API.

In fact, the only reason I made a Mark V Direct3D version was because I encountered a machine that wouldn't run the OpenGL version but was otherwise an "ok" business-like computer running Windows 7. 

I should have posted here before. 

I've changed the description of the Retroquad engine in my Patreon profile, and I need to know if it's good enough for me to spread the word around now. Suggestions are welcome.

https://www.patreon.com/mankrip 

The most exciting thing about the RQ engine is the 4-player splitscreen and controller support. Everything else is simply the icing on the cake.