A lot of these seem to be running in tandem with, or even coming from vkQuake which was exactly what I had hoped would happen. It may not be possible for ID to open source the Kex engine, but vkQuake is a great platform to give the new stuff to the community. 

I guess vkQuake would also be more likely to receive realtime lighting/shadows as a feature than any of the sister ports, for this will be needed to get the full visual experience in DOTM. Tried it in FTE already and it looks great. 

i love realtime lighting/shadows, i wish it became a feature in all ports (i know some people don't like it, but like any other feature it can be turned off) 

I really like how it looks in the Quake Ex. I think it shows some restraint since it's not every where. 

Kex Quake uses a mixture of static lightmaps (with lightstyle animations done on the GPU) and clustered for it's dynamic lights and shadows. It's by no means a fully realtime engine, and maybe 90% of the lighting is just good old-fashioned static lightmaps. The lightmap resolution is the same, so it's one-sixteenth the texture resolution, but the GPU animation method gives it more bits of precision.

The maps were relit with bounce lighting and coloured lighting. The coloured lighting seems to have been done properly rather than using my hacky tool, which is very nice to see. It's still using LIT files though, for BSP 29 compatibility.

I personally find the mixture of low-resolution lightmaps and high-resolution shadows to be quite jarring, but I guess different people are different. 

Version 0.94.0 of QuakeSpasm is released.

Downloads:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/quakespasm/files/
http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/download.htm

Changes since the previous version:
https://sf.net/p/quakespasm/news/2021/09/quakespasm-0940/

- Initial support for playing the 'Quake 2021 re-release' content
(thanks to Andrei Drexler for bulk of the work, Guillaume Plourde
for Q64 bsp format support.)
- Fix rendering bug when cl_bobcycle was set to zero (sf.net bug/41)
- Fixed buffer overflow with large char skybox names (sf.net bug/38)
- Fixed a missing MAXALIASFRAMES bounds check (sf.net bug/37)
- OpenGL: workaround Intel UHD 600 driver bug (sf.net bug/39)
- OpenGL: merged surface mark & cull optimizations from vkQuake.
- Compensate viewmodel distortion at fov > 90 (based on code from
Qrack, thanks to Andrei Drexler for the patch.)
- Raised MAX_GLTEXTURES limit from 2048 to 4096 for now.
- Changed 'model has a skin taller than 480' error into a warning
- Reject lit files if they're the wrong size (eg hipnotic/start.bsp
vs id1/start.lit or just a bsp that no longer has any coloured
lits, etc)
- External ent files are now versioned using 4 digit crc of the
original map's ents, like e1m1@c49d.ent, which is much safer. The
old method (e.g. e1m1.ent) still works but isn't recommended.
- Support for external vis files.
- Save: remove CR/LFs from level name to avoids broken saves, e.g.
with autumn_sp map.
- Music: improvements to mp3 tag detection / skipping.
- Music: umx loader fix for malformed / crafted files.
- New console command music_jump: Jump to given order in music, like
Unreal's music change - only for module (tracker) music.
- Updated third-party libraries (music codecs, SDL, etc.) Other minor
fixes, tidy-ups and protability tweaks.
- Source repository moved to git. 

I just noticed that we could use a custom console background with QS. How can I add a custom picture background? What custom background are there for the console? 

Console background is 320x200 and taken from conback.lmp in id1\gfx directory. In case of the standard game, it sits in pak0.pak file. Quakespasm has it in quakespasm.pak file 

So we can't use our own background? 

What do you mean? If you don't like Quakespasm's console background, you can just either delete conback.lmp from quakespasm.pak file or remove the whole quakespasm.pak file, it only has default.cfg, conback.lmp and six .ent file to fix a couple of entities on maps.

If mod has it's own conback.lmp, then it takes priority over Quakespasm's background, just check Arcane Dimensions or Alkaline for example. 

Thanks gila. 

switch back from QSS to the official branch for this version, at least for now. Lots of interesting changes! 

... still needs an update. 

https://sourceforge.net/projects/quakespasm/files/Mac/ 

The Spiked version has more features in its menu, especially the ability to switch mode directly from within the app, which is very usefull.

The OSX version needs an update. 

DOH ! 

the console command "game" should work in QS. 

There was some lightmap issues introduced in 0.94.0:
https://sourceforge.net/p/quakespasm/bugs/50/
Fixed in the git repository, will post a 0.94.1 bugfix release in a
few days (I hope.) 

What prompted this sudden update? The rerelease or was that a coincidence?

QS dev has been silent (dead?) for some time. Would love to know a bit of the backstory on the new release and future plans.

Don't get me wrong, it's great news to see an update. I literally was planning out a Quakespasm RIP video for my YouTube channel and now I can skip it. :) 

asked by dumptruck_ds. As common Quake player I abandoned QS for few years ago and shifted to QSS. But we must pay tribute to the enthusiasm of the developers, that as on QS code based [lovely] QSS with same performance but with HUGE superiority in features and visual quality, and now VkQ. Since my hardware do support vulkan I finally can play TerShib without freezes, it runs twice(!) faster (may be it is time to implement Vk into QSS?) But I wonder why .pk3 support still not implemented neither in VkQ nor in QS?
One more time: Thanks to developers for thier hard vork and the opportunity to choose. 

I had already requested PK3 support for vkQuake on Github, but the author rejected it since he "didn't want to encourage mods not compatible with vanilla QS". Basically you are not supposed to use mods with large textures and lots of assets. Which is, plainly said, just wrong. You can save a lot of disk space with pk3. DOTM's pak0.pak shrinks from 700+ MB to under 300 if you save it as pk3, for example. TGA skyboxes get compressed particularly well.

Anyway, vkQ now supports reading QuakeEX.kpf from Quake Enhanced, which is also a zip file, so I don't know what's the problem now still with officially supporting the format. 

If you track commits to the QuakeSpasm code you'll have seen that development never really stopped, but also that most recent changes have been relatively minor nips & tucks moreso than anything else.

This signifies to me that the codebase is now mature and stable. It might not be as full-featured as QSS or as highly performant as vkQuake, but in the scope of what it sets out to do, further radical changes would result in it becoming something else.

There are certainly under-the-hood changes that I'd make if it were me, but it's not me, and for most of them it's likely really only the type of person who cares about that kind of thing who would notice.

The Quake 2021 release is a new set of content that people would like to run in their favourite sourceport. Again, going to the various Githubs, you can see QS and vkQuake picking up a common set of code for supporting it.

This is exactly what I'd hoped would happen. Like it or not, the probability is that the new content is going to become the standard that new players get going forward, and supporting it in sourceports is required to prevent the community becoming fragmented and niche.

I'm obviously only on the outside looking in so far as QS development is concerned, but that does indeed seem to have been what prompted this latest release. Hopefully there will be more to come; I'd love to see QS picking up MD5 support, for example, now that we have an officially sanctioned MDL replacement format with a set of ID1 models. 

Splitting QS into three main branches feels kinda needless to me at this point, anyway. Why not have QSS's enhanced features and vkQ's renderer in the official build? Often, the branches copy features from each other, anyway, depending on dubious limitations authors choose to impose on their branch for reasons I can't understand.

Also, QSS has fallen a bit behind feature-wise right now. It lacks support for QuakeEX and external .vis files, for example, which are important features. It would really be time to bring all important QS branches to the same development level. 

Not everybody wants or needs the new features from QSS, and not everybody runs Vulkan (there are even people having difficulty with it in the 2021 engine). Stock QuakeSpasm is a good, solid baseline with most of the barriers to entry from the old ID engines removed. People can just grab the files, drop them in their Quake folder, and get a good game of Quake that plays quite faithfully to the original but that can run on a wide variety of devices and without much in the way of tweaking or config required. That's reason to exist on it's own. 

Well, at least all projects share the same dlls, so all executables can co-exist in the same folder if you want them to.

Personally, I need pk3 and vis support plus accurate underwater warp. There's still no QS variant out there which has all of that.