It's crazy how many features FTE has. It feels like a general purpose engine that happens to run Quake. The lack of documentation on the functionality might be really holding it back.

Congrats, Spike. There's a lot of good stuff in there. 

Doing FTE research, I found this: http://triptohell.info/moodles/junk/onedraw.zip

It's like a micro-engine by Spike. This is just awesome. Minimal, effective, perfect. 

TyrQuake 0.65 is out:
https://disenchant.net/tyrquake/

Pretty good performance with Arcane Dimensions on old hardware. 

I didn't realize Tyrann was back at it. :^) 

that is awesome, by far my favorite quake engine. it works everywhere. 

I've never looked at TyrQuake tbh.

I assume it's an engine that is designed to play quake, as opposed to one of these engines designed to play some "ate-a-block-of-stilton-before-bed-fever-dream programmer-art" version of quake? 

very fast, efficient engine, no bullshit. runs the game very well on 64-bit linux. just a joy to play with it 

Neat. Changelog is viewable here BTW: https://disenchant.net/git/tyrquake.git/tree/changelog.txt 

does quakespam have a software renderer version? can't find anything to play quake on software mode under wayland 64bit 

No.

FTE runs on Linux and has a software-ish rendering mode. If you just care about the end results rather than the tech used, this may do it for you.

Also TyrQuake got some surprise updates recently, does have a software renderer, and you can compile-it-yourself for Linux. Haven't tried that yet though. 

TyrQuake it is. Works flawlessly. Beautiful. 

I've been coming back to Q1 after playing the remake on Xbox and it has been a lot of fun. QuakeSpasm works perfectly on Linux and just runs very smoothly even on crappy old hardware on crappy old distros.

Since my singleplayer urge is starting to go down, I've been playing more online maps with friends, but the overall experience sucks. Tweaking router, opening up ports, then trying to find ourselves, get IP, etc... only to get in game and then have stuttering, lag, etc. The MP experience did not age well and there is zero nostalgia for all that crap.

Is there any engine focused on fixing those problems? Adding input prediction, lag compensation, entity interpolation? Basically, having the features that CS 1.5 has that keep it playable and enjoyable. 

You want QuakeWorld for that. The standard Quake protocol and networking are really poorly suited to internet multiplayer. 

Well, there's also the Quake remaster on Steam. 

I just found out that DarkPlaces has all those tasty features: https://github.com/DarkPlacesEngine/darkplaces/blob/bfd441930916e7a29200ea42d5d8edfcc2baa806/cl_input.c#L377

I'll be playing around with those configs to find the sweet spot. 

You will find that DP isn't the universal tool if you play mods. Sure, it should play vanilla Quake and addons just fine, but forget it with many modern entries like AD. I have stopped using it years ago. 

Further however, there are mods that require DP to run like Quake 1.5 and WolfenQ. Know what is needed for which engine you use, and you will have a good time. 

Most mods that are not DP-compatible are single-player, so, doesn't really affect much our experience. So far, DP has been a huge improvement. NAT still sucks.

How does Quake remaster handle NAT? Do they just have dedicated servers everywhere and, when lobbying with friends, it just points to an empty and available server? 

Does any engine do authentic-looking "software rendering" (so a pixel-peeping comparison between it and Winquake, of the same scene, would be the same), and also runs AD generally well?

Btw - I don't mind if it's "fake software rendering" done on the GPU, as long as it is properly emulating the way WinQuake does it with the colormap and whatnot.

I've tried a few engines that fake the software look as a sort of post-process thing (e.g. Ironwail), and it always looks wrong and gross.

I tried Mark V WinQuake but it seems to crash in AD. 

I vaguely remember FTE might do...... 

Try ChadQuake :)

https://github.com/adolfintel/ChadQuake 

Interesting - hadn't heard of that one!

Meanwhile, I've been quite pleased with how Ironwail does it.

I actually get a really nice vibe when playing in 1080p, with render scale set to 1/2, and 8-bit mode set to "balanced". Good stuff! 

It seems then that I was mistaken and Ironwail is NOT one of those "wrong and gross" solutions to the software rendering problem. Not sure which engines I was remembering but I guess it wasn't Ironwail, at least not the version I'm now using.

The more I look at Ironwail's "balanced" mode, the more I am impressed by it. It somehow, using arcane wizard magic, even gives perfect extra grit to badly-converted textures. This is my favourite way to view Quake I think. 

Haha, someone made a port of Mark V WinQuake.

Nice! 

When you're not around to take care of your own projects. :P Lesson learned, I hope?