Engine standards for mod compatibility

[LordHavoc]

[Urre]

[frag.machine]

[LordHavoc]

[mh]

[Urre]

[frag.machine]

The problem we are facing with fog may apply to other gameplay aspects (for example, sliding while standing on top of non-BSP entities - this behavior can change depending the engine, and since this affects gameplay I believe it's a candidate to be standardized by QSB). I suggest that we should have a general on/off key to QSB defined features: let's create a cvar, say "qsb", if it's 1, then is expected that any QSB feature - fog, alpha, fullbrights, etc - will behave exactly as described in the QSB standard. If 0, the developer is free to make it behave as desired - including NOT having a different behavior at all.

[Baker]

I just want to point out there are at least a few established defacto standards already:

1. WinQuake: Standard Quake. MAX_EDICTS = 600 without transparent water.

Quake for DOS, WinQuake, GLQuake. Think "Day of Lords" version without transparent water http://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/gmsp3.html

2. Fitz 0.80/JoeQuake: Standard Quake plus more entities skybox, colored lits, fog, transparent water. MAX_EDICTS = 2048. Every modern engine already is expected to be able to load these maps and FitzQuake 0.80 and JoeQuake can run them all.

3. Fitz 0.85: Giant maps standard plus alpha support. FitzQuake 0.85 represents the baseline standard, especially since protocol 666 can reasonably be implemented since the changes between FitzQuake 0.80 and FitzQuake 0.85 are easy to determine (I ported the differences to the FitzQuake SDL in 6 hours --- it's not hard). aguirReQuake can load huge maps and had alpha support first, but due to the gradual limit busting, it would be difficult to isolate the changes.

[LordHavoc]

[Baker]

[frag.machine]

[Baker]

[mh]

[LordHavoc]

[Spike]