I'm fine with Q3BSP for Quake as long as is just a new, better data structure for level geometry and lighting. If people insist on packaging that with new particle explosions and glinty water and hideous 24-bit textures then they can fuck off. 

For some odd reason I couldn't find the 'I won't use darkplaces as it is a crap, bloated, sluggish pig of an engine with a bunch of wank effects' option, so I couldn't vote. 

The people whining that Darkplaces doesn't look like GLQuake should take a look at the console variables.

No.

The person/s coding the engine should

1. disable all of the new shit by default,

2. provide detailed documentation of cvars etc,

and now that I think of it, even better,

3. provide configs to quickly switch between vanilla quake mode and 'all fancy new shit' modes. That way everyone can easily try both extremes and then tweak their preferred config from there.

Petition LordHavoc to make the future releases of Darplaces look as close to vanilla GLQuake as possible by default (by turning off all the new / "improved" custom gfx) and write proper console variable documentation so that people will be able to figure out things they could possibly want to enable by themselves?

You may recall that this issue has come up before in the past, probably more than once on this board. LordHavoc read and posted at the time so I can safely assume he understands our thoughts on the matter.

If nothing has been done to address these issues in recent releases, I can only assume that he doesn't give a shit. 

http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/

Frib: you are purist then? Or just want to use some other engine

Mindcrime: the point was stated several times, (maybe it not obviuos for non-mappers) compiling to q3 .bsp you can make thigs that are not possible within q1 map format.
Also its funny to hear such things from a man who built TC on a custom engine with many new effects. 'Soul of Quake' is not engine dependant

metlslime: whats the big difference of q3 lighting? Overbrights is engine stuff, color and falloff can be set whatever you want 

Speeds, is you really want to know... for me, there is no real need or desire to use any engine other than FitzQuake.

It is the only engine which seeks to enhance Quake and maintain the spirit of the original game. Metlslime understands stuff. This is why he created FQ. It is a thing of joy to be able to play in this engine. 

i don't know what the big difference is. that's why i said it was a question. I know from my q3 experiments that the falloff is inverse or inverse squared instead of linear. I also remember that the sane light values were much different for ordinary lights than they were in quake 1. Beyond this, I don't know, and I don't know how much control/flexibility there really is. Since you seem to know, can you emulate light.exe style lighting in q3map? 

Beware dedicating your work to a single engine. We know not what Quake engines will be in fashion 10 years from now. 3 years ago, Tenebrae-only works were in fashion and who uses those now? Seemed like the smart money bet at that time. Today those works are an obscurity.

And beware marrying an OpenGL only engine. An engine without a non-OpenGL build simply cannot be run on the same wide array of computers.

Even some computers with the prerequisite hardware to run OpenGL Quake engines cannot: video card driver problems.

And also, there are the Mac users. An engine "having" a Mac build doesn't mean it is as good and supported as the Windows build. I haven't run across a Mac user that uses anything except for Mac GLQuake or the Fruitz of Dojo port.

Small tweaks like edict counts and other simple changes to an engine to allow larger sized maps to avoid packet overflow are one thing.

But marrying an engine is another matter entirely. Get married to an engine and your work's future is married to the engine too. 

OpenGL is a competitor to Microsoft's Direct3D (DirectX).

There is a headline on the OpenGL site ( http://www.opengl.org ) about some sort of performance-impairing implementation of OpenGL in the Windows Vista, the next version of Windows shipping in December they say.

The headline has been there over a month, so it has to be a concern. 

You forgot console kiddies - they cant run quake at all, what a pity

BTW, speaking of Tenebrae, there was Tiger`s project Industry, wonder how many skipped it just cause they didnt want to play in Tenebrae, even if they could (at that time I had a puter that could barely run Tenebrae at 5-10 fps)

metlslime: I`v been tyrlite guy almost from the start, and using inverse square falloff mostly. Never liked original light.exe

I think overbrights is the most important difference of q3 lighting, the textures get very washed out if the light is bright. But Im not q3 mapper, really 

I'm fine with Q3BSP for Quake as long as is just a new, better data structure for level geometry and lighting. If people insist on packaging that with new particle explosions and glinty water and hideous 24-bit textures then they can fuck off.

At the end of the day, if I could pick only one feature, it would be the ability to use mesh models as proper world geometry with collision and all, as q3map2 does with .ASE models. 

Speed: The Nehahra engine barely added a thing comparitively... Doubly so when you look at Bengt's new engine, which is the best quake engine in existence (not too much, not too little, and it doesn't choke on epolys.. even when there's an orgy of them. It is hands-down the best enhancement of GL there is, and I don't mind saying that categorically).

All in all, how many "effects" are we talking about here? A couple flags for dynamic colored lighting, a colored flash of light if desired, transparency, global fog, skyboxes, model interpolation? A few extra cvars and some upped limits here or there?

Whoop-dee-do-shit. The way people talk they make the Nehahra engine sound like Tenebrae. Christ. The problem is of course.. the people who balk.. are the people who haven't gone to Bengt's site and DLed it.. and probably never gave nehahra.exe a chance to begin with.

Even with Ender's original engine... It is no fault of mine that so many opted to use dpnehahra.exe instead, which had a plethora of other bells and whistles (that they could bitch about of course!).

Or is it all about Nehahra being the first to do any of it? Or is it because the Neh engine only sought to enhance the GL experience rather than try to emulate software Quake? (which I have/had no interest in).

And I'm afraid the "soul of quake" *is* engine dependent. In some engines, it remains victoriously. In some, certain aspects of its feel are enhanced while others remain the same.

But yes.. in some.. the feeling is LOST. And it's blatant when this is so. You might lie to yourself and say it had no effect. But it does. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it, yet some won't admit it (because ooh-ah look at that new particle effect.. or this new lighting effect.. or oooh a different map format... yay whoop-de-do-shit).

In the end, when Quake is stripped of its feel and atmospheric charm ... it's just fucking embarassing. 

need to be mappers themselves.

Just like fitzquake is successful because of metlslime's gentle hands and fuhquake because of fuh's dm and tf background. 

Just like fitzquake is successful because of metlslime's gentle hands and fuhquake because of fuh's dm and tf background.

I only use fuhquake for qw because of a winxp/driver issue when I first installed that OS - screen flashes in glquake engines halved my frame rate for some odd reason - and fuhquake was the first client I could find that allowed me to disable damage flashes, pickup flashes etc.

If I had not had that particular issue, I would have never switched from Zquake. Fuquake suffers from the same thing most other modified engines do - it seeks to change too much. Zquake was (at least at the time) the quakeworld equivalent of FitzQuake - bugfixes, small enhancements, etc - lots of stuff to improve the user experience without detracting from it.

FuhQuake is (or at least, was) just Zquake with added fluff.

Here's the important point though: I could tolerate and use FuhQuake, even though I don't necessarily like it or appreciate the author's direction on it, because all of the dodgy shit can be turned off, and there's documentation telling me how to do it. 

veering off topic, but I have to answer.
Fuhquake is based on zquake, but adds a lot of very useful teamplay stuff that is essential for real 2on2 and 4on4 play. (ezquake is based on fuhquake and has most graphics stuff easily configurable from menu)

I couldn't care less about most of the fuh graphics improvements. Although a couple ones are such that they allow bypassing having to edit pak files / gfx.wad etc., so they are effort savers (use command line -no24bit to toggle this kind of stuff).

All the goodness in fuhquake is precisely because fuh himself was at least a somewhat serious player. Which was my original point. (He was/is not a mapper I think, so you get... stuff) 

Frib, you forgot to mention FuhQuake used to be pre-packaged with dozens of MBs of crap (new textures and shit ...colored light files?)
Not sure if it changed.
Im still playing Elecro`s version of FQ that I got from him directly (just exe) :)

Mind: wow, some overreaction there.
1) I wasnt bashing Neh (I recon you got alot of shit for having own engine). It really benifited from the new features, like fog and skyboxes, despite those making Neh differ from standard quake significantly.

2) " how many "effects" are we talking about here?" - thats the thing. As many as mapper wants to have. Usage of q3 bsp doesnt mean the map will automaticly look like q3.
DP doesnt even support half the shaders, so you cant make everything shiny.
And most engine effects can be turned off. 

No overreaction. The inherent problem with communicating on-line is you can't see the other person's expression or hear their vocal tone. I didn't take offense. I just meant that I do indeed get a fair amount of crap about Neh, when really it is quite light in features compared to many other engines.

As for the Q3 BSP... well, I went off-topic a bit ... but as I said earlier... Q3 map format is fine. Format shmormat. I said so long as it doesn't also bring along that plastic bubblegum feel from the q3 engine renderer, or one risks contaminating the Quake atmosphere with Q3 bleghery. 

No overreaction. The inherent problem with communicating on-line is you can't see the other person's expression or hear their vocal tone. I didn't take offense. I just meant that I do indeed get a fair amount of crap about Neh, when really it is quite light in features compared to many other engines.

As for the Q3 BSP... well, I went off-topic a bit ... but as I said earlier... Q3 map format is fine. Format shmormat. I said so long as it doesn't also bring along that plastic bubblegum feel from the q3 engine renderer, or one risks contaminating the Quake atmosphere with Q3 bleghery. 

Frib, you forgot to mention FuhQuake used to be pre-packaged with dozens of MBs of crap (new textures and shit ...colored light files?)
Not sure if it changed.

This, of course, was eQuake, a package designed to be a one-step-install for new quakeworld players. It came with fuhquake.exe, new graphics, and maps, etc.

Also, fuhquake is honestly a godsend for serious qw players. As bambuz mentioned, the benefits of a logical and easy to use .cfg system, to the graphical optimizations, are astounding. Lastly, its so nice to have developers who are *still* working on the engine (in the form of ezquake), a decade after quake was released! Makes it feel special, in a way.

metl: I love fitzquake for sp play. I think, though, that it would be quite beneficial for you to take fitzquake one step farther and include UI improvements, such as fuhquake configs and such. Just my 2 cents of course :) 

<inertia> do you find yourself feeling that q1sp is too limiting?
<distrans> inertia: no, I find limitations quite enabling/liberating.
<inertia> philosophically what are the implications of that?
<distrans> the engine and it's limitations serve to both mark and de-limit the play of QSP mapping, they act as transcendental signifier if you like
<inertia> hm, go on
<distrans> infinite extension in the play of QSP mapping is both impossible and unwanted
<inertia> distrans: because neither our imaginations nor capabilities are infinite? Thus we dont feel we will be maximizing the possibility of the things we are creating?
<distrans> rather, the mapper must work to re-instill jouissance at each reconfiguration that the transcendental signifier both enables and limits
* misc_ELEK has joined #terrafusion
<distrans> infinite extension in the play of QSP mapping is unwanted because opening up to this possibility is opening up to mapping for something other than QSP
<distrans> CHIVES! 

tf is dumb until we talk about moms and dicks 

sweet 

from fuhquake.net -> download -> installer
"a cross-platform installer that not only installs FuhQuake executables but also 24bit map textures, hud elements and menu graphics required to take advantage of FuhQuake's features." So it's not just equake that included extras.

But usually people just got the fuh zips which had the executables, dlls (needed for ex png screenshots), some progfiles and a 3 meg pakfile containing something, dunno what, maybe just the alt hud.

And updating usually needs just the exe.

Btw, would the physics stay exactly the same if some new fancy engine was used? So that all old speedrunning records would stand? Does darkplaces do that? What about FTE? 

they are no allowed to use 

Who's gonna convert a couple old q1 .maps to q3 (via q3map2 and/or something) and have a test run in darkplaces?
Ant at least had a .map... :) 

to do that -- I imagine everyone who is interested in that sort of thing has already done it. If you want to compile a bunch of old maps to test q2bsp2 with, grab the bspc tool for Quake3 Arena, set for decompile, target to a Q1 bsp. If it decompiles correctly, recompiling with q3bsp2 presents no problems.