maybe all of this disagreement is caused by people talking about two different things. When you say gl is better, are you saying that you like hardware rendering? Or are you saying that you think that glquake is a really swell implementation of quake? Becuase i agree that hardware rendering looks nice. I just think glquake is a shoddy hack job that breaks or worsens a bunch of quake features such as the lighting, water warp, underwater warp, fullbrights, sprite orientation, the sky projection, handling of odd-sized textures, etc. 

i'm starting to really like fitzquake!

two things though:
is it possible to have the mipmaps only with distance, and not angle?
how do you change the maximum vertical angle of the camera back to the normal angle in quake? (when looking up and down) 

as far as i know, you can't perfectly replicate software quake in opengl, because they do mipmapping differently -- quake did it based on distance only, and 3d hardware does it based on distance AND angle to the camera --which is why a wall or floor at a sharp angle to the camera has such a blurry texture on it.

regarding the looking up and down: yes. Read the manual about cl_minpitch and cl_maxpitch. 

is that like that old map called 'thefly'? 

no no... it's that map from Markus Klar... you know, back in 1997? The Fly or something.... 

as far as i know, you can't perfectly replicate software quake in opengl, because they do mipmapping differently -- quake did it based on distance only, and 3d hardware does it based on distance AND angle to the camera --which is why a wall or floor at a sharp angle to the camera has such a blurry texture on it.

well, ok, but it's impossible to stop it from mipmapping on the angle? 

you can stop it from mipmapping based on angle. Here's the step-by-step process:

1. turn off mipmapping. 

As Cybear said gl_texturemode gl_nearest_mipmap_nearest looks good & with r_particles 2 at 1600x1200x32 it looks pretty neat :)

The lighting is certainly better but doesn't really have all the characteristics of software. It looks like the same colours but brightened whereas software switches through that lurid palette. 

sounds really easy! thanks!
<rolleyes> 

gl_nearest_mipmap_nearest
is still mipmapping
gl_nearest is none

_mipmap_linear should be trilinear mipmapping, it looks pretty good, but might not work on some cards

go to drivers/tweakers and turn on anisotropic filtering in openGL (its slow on older cards tho)
or try to shift mipmap bias to like -2 ( it can be called textre lod, or mipmap lod)

software quake looks so special and ugly mostly cause it uses palette shift on the textures instead of lightmaps 

sorry, i thought you knew about gl_texturemode. 

I try to make the map look decent in both software and GL, but since the lighting models are so different, that can be difficult. I lean more towards tweaking it for software Quake though, since software has the superior lighting system.

In my own opinion/experience, its better to light levels for software (assuming you want it to look ok in both software and GL). Usually I find that if I tweak lighting to get it 'just right' in GL, its dark as fuck in software and I can't see enough to play properly. Whereas if I light it for software, its pretty decent in GL (although perhaps a little too bright or flat).

Standard GL lighting is so dodgy compared to software anyway, that it almost doesn't matter... you don't get the nice overbrighting and falloff that you do in software. Authords of engines like fuhquake/zquake (and Fitzquake now it seems!) seem to be making the lighting in GL a bit more 'software like' anyway, so I figure that eventually the levels will end up looking like they're supposed to once everyone is using GL engines with better lighting. 

I did a bit of experimenting a while back with texturemodes and stuff for glquake... in the end I found that it looked the best overall (to me) when using gl_texturemode gl_linear along with antialiasing and/or anisotropic filtering.