This is of particular interest to me, because my next map will certainly require a custom engine; at least one with increased capacity, and preferably one with skybox support and tga sprite replacement textures.

I'd like to get a good idea of what engines most people here find acceptable. 

standard glquake properly on my setup, dont know why.

Instead I use mhquake with all 'enhancements' turned off except for model interpolation. So it looks and runs exactly like glquake would but with smoother animation.

For levels like nesp09 which need higher edict counts, I use the nehahra version of darkplaces.

Fitzquake would be my preferred engine if it had model interpolation and was capable of handling levels like nesp09. The software emulated lighting it can do is wonderful.

As for darkplaces, I liked earlier versions but havent tried it lately because I ran into big problems with it when bumpmapping was introduced, mainly due to lack of documentation to turn off stuff. 

For my part I'm currently mapping using FitzQuake 0.75 as a "Quake test" engine (it support colored lightning, transparent water, for example, and have a better capacity ,in term of resolution and performances than a standard WinQuake for example)
Furthermore I suppose this is the most used engine by many of us here... let me know if I'm wrong !!

Regarding custom Quake engine, I don't know if an engine like the one you required exists today... Many custom engine features are really specific to a map (or pack) and thus are developed especially for a precise project...
If you want a special custoom engine, I think you'd rather modify existing Quake C code by yourself.. or be helped by a good software "Quake" engineer ;P 

seems good, but it won't load my current map, which exceeds a number of limits. 

Yes, darkplaces used to be very nice, but as more and more features were added, it just moved further and further from quake. It's not really a glquake replacement anymore - OK I guess if you are making a completely new TC, but that's narrowing the user base a bit IMO. 

Your latest map seems to be a very huge map if FitzQuake is not able to load it !! BTW, what are the number of limits you exceed ?? 

Fitzquake would be my preferred engine if it had model interpolation and was capable of handling levels like nesp09. The software emulated lighting it can do is wonderful.

You realise that the software-emulated lighting was first written by LordHavoc for Darkplaces and that other Quake engines are mostly using parts of his code to archieve the same? :) 

Well, just edict limits really. Static entities, that sort of thing. Also, unless it has a higher tolerance for packet overflows, I'm sure it would cause chokeage in the final battle(s) too. 

I'd just like to say that AguirRe's Win/GlQuake replacements are pretty much spot-on for my needs in terms of map capacity. These are a great choice if you want an ultra-conservative single-player engine, for use in huge maps. 

You realise that the software-emulated lighting was first written by LordHavoc for Darkplaces and that other Quake engines are mostly using parts of his code to archieve the same? :)

That may be true - LordHavoc is an extremely talented coder and I love a lot of what he's done with DarkPlaces.

The problem most people have though is with all the extraneous bloat that comes with it. 

. 

Glxpro+ (ver 1.01). It was a hacked of a version of GL ProQuake by Trujen that cause a bit of a fuss because Trujen refused to release the source (instant GPL issue). Nice client that has all the ProQuake stuff, plus 24bit texture support and some other eyecandy stuff. This client is probably concidered old hat now, but it as good as I want it.

Anyway, lets start a list.

Quake1 Clients (excluding QW clients)
=====================================

DarkPlaces (LordHavoc) : http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/

FitzQuake v0.75 (John Fitzgibbons) :
http://celephais.net/fitzquake/

GLQuake v0.97 (author?) :
http://www.quaketerminus.com/nqexes/glq1114.exe

GQ Quake v1.07 (Matthew 'Gleeb' Garnett-Frizelle) :
http://www.fileplanet.com/dl/dl.asp?/planetquake/gzone/gq_1.07.zip

ProQuake v350 (jp grossman) :
http://www.planetquake.com/proquake/

Telejano version 8.03 (Tei) :
http://telejano.berlios.de/

Tenebrae (Charles Hollemeersch?)
http://tenebrae.sourceforge.net/

TomazQuake v1.46(Tomaz) :
http://www.fileplanet.com/files/80000/82161.shtml

XQuake v1.01 GL (Trujen) :
http://stormzero.com/rune/files/glxpro+101.zip 

I dont know much about who coded what but fitzquake's implementation of it looks better on my setup than darkplaces. And it runs a lot faster.

Like I said, the newer versions of DP may have fixed all that but I stopped using it after I couldnt work out how to turn off a lot of the new features. 

There is also Twilight at http://twilight.sourceforge.net/info/about.php and QuakeForge (website seems to be down). 

While I do have some issues with newer versions of DP (for example the Shambler lightning thing Kinn has mentioned), I have actually switched from using FitzQuake for testing my maps to DarkPlaces. I am not sure which version you were using, but the latest ones have definately much better lighting than any other NQ/QW engine I�ve seen to date. 

I think pretty much all of DarkPlaces' graphical "enhancements" can be controlled via cvars, but I agree, the documentation is pretty poor. What's turned me off recently though, is that I can't get any build of DarkPlaces after the 21may04 build to run properly on my system. Dunno why. Up-to-date vid drivers and all that. 

Shambler lightning has been fixed in latest DP build I believe. The player lightning is still bolloxed though. 

Do you mean the player shadow with r_shadow_realtime_world "1" ? If that's what you mean, the player shadow IS in the correct place. If you don't like the player shadow (I know I don't), you can disable it, leaving on everything else. 

I tried "The Abandon" with Darkplaces, and it skipped the grenadelauncher in "Facade".
Strange, because FitzQuake or Telejanos didn't.

Could there be a reason for it, ie. bouncing box to big for the used surounding space? 

One of my main design focuses in DarkPlaces is keeping down bloat, this is why all the features are integrated in the core of the engine, rather than just tutorials tacked on like some other engines, serving specific features with little consistency.

DarkPlaces was created for modders, that is its primary reason for existence, I made a promise to the quake community more than a year ago to maintain DarkPlaces to support the community for years to come, it delivers a consistent user and modding experience, rather than needing a custom engine for every mod, which was fragmenting the community (for example Tenebrae).

It's the only engine that tries to support every mod in one engine so that users don't have to deal with different hardware compatibility issues and different missing features in each mod, and that developers don't have to write their own engine for each mod.

This is why it greatly puzzles me that some modders want to use less featureful engines, often maintained by people who are less than appreciative of modding feature requests.

The worst part of this is that the released quake source is quite honestly outdated, it works (barely) on windows (for example too many GL extensions crashes glquake), not at all on Linux and MacOSX, and lacks multiplayer - nq borders on unusable for multiplayer due to incompatibility with the NAT routers most people use for broadband, combined with using too much bandwidth for dialup to be playable.

When I rewrote the networking it made all supported mods playable online, a rewrite that would not have been worth the trouble for just one mod's custom engine.

It seems many people just complain about darkplaces on forums I can't read regularly (it takes too much time to keep an eye on several forums just combing for complaints and suggestions).

Could people please email me about these things before they get upset?

P.S. What ever happened to extensions? If a minimal engine is really desired, make your own, with support for the specific extensions your mod uses, and darkplaces will have these same extensions, thus the users who can run your engine can use it instead of darkplaces if they wish. 

Player *lightning* - note the "n" ;)

I'm talking about the lightning gun beam. 

LordHavoc - like I say, I love what you did with DarkPlaces but, well, as I've mentioned before, my system has serious problems running all versions since the 21may04 build.

I've since been checking out FitzQuake, with the intention of using this as my "engine of choice". It's a fantastic engine that emulates Quake's original look and feel, whilst still providing the most important extra features to meet the demands of modern maps. If FitzQuake would allow me to replace my sprite frames with external .tga textures, it would be the perfect engine IMHO. 

Does it really have increased map/entity limits? I tried FitzQuake 0.75 in my spawning test map, and it hit "no free edicts" at about the same time as standard quake. 

well, if anyone cares, my ideal engine would be somewhere halfway between fitzquake and DP.

i need to try DP with sv_jump thing disabled and detail textures off though, i don't have the means to do that atm.

anyway, taking FQ as a base, i'd like to add:

-q3bsp format support
-any sized bounding box
-controllable particle effects, ie customizable TempEntity effects, not just the built in ones.
For example, TE_EXPLOSION2 has limited customizability in that you can specify the colours that it will use, but, you can't change the speed, duration, or behaviour of the particles at all.
-NOT have r_exp3.wav automatically played with explosion tempentities. sure, it makes sense, but it's also bad if you want to use the particle effects with a different explosion sound.
-Flying Monster BugFix
-TGA Sprites
-Model Interpolation
-Larger Edict Limit
-Larger BModel limit(or whatever it is) (i know this breaks compatibility for netplay, but i am talking from a purely SP pov. maybe have this setting optional via command line, so that you could still use the engine for netplay on maps that don't need the high limit, but on SP maps that require it, you turn it on)
-Stop Packet Overflows

..that's it for right now... writing this all down on the fly, so i might have missed something...

i'm starting to get the feeling that DP could be used with everything except what i'm talking about disabled... but i won't be able to tell until i can see a cvar list.

...hm, maybe the real reason people dislike DP is because there isn't any documentation to let people know that they can turn things off (like Nitin who couldn't turn off the bump mapping) 

ie: when i said "any sized bounding box" what i really mean is "no hulls"