Want advice on Engines

[Mengmoshu]

[MauveBib]

There are three basic options. If you want to to stick with normal quake the best option is DarkPlaces. It's highly advanced, with real time lighting etc, and has several mods designed specifically for it. The network code is also very good.

If you want to go with QuakeWorld then the best choice is probably FTEQW. It has the great qw netcode, as well as most of the functions of DarkPlaces. It can also be used to play Quake 2 and Hexen 2, with Half Life support maybe coming soon...

If your PC is a little older you might want a less intensive engine, such as Tremor. It still looks pretty tasty but is designed for lower end PCs.


The choice, as they say, is yours.

[Sajt]

For the networking you would definitely be best with DarkPlaces, which has gone through a bunch of protocol updates, and now (currently on #7 I believe) it is pretty refined. You get much better general performance, things like angles are sent with more detail, it can handle more than 256 entities, models, sounds, etc, blabla. It also has client-side movement prediction (like QW and Q2) and can manage lots of stuff going on (for example I played a game with a few clients and 200 monsters with projectiles flying all over the place with no more ping than a usual game of Quake). Of course if you have a slightly older computer, the DarkPlaces renderer might be a bit chunky (but anything more than 1 GHz should be fine).

FTEQW is good too, but, although it has 4,000,000 random features, in my experience it has been slow, chunky, buggy, etc. Haven't tried Tremour (probably is spelled Tremor) but I hear stuff like JoeQuake and FitzQuake (two other engines I've never seen) are also good for no-frills engine enhancements.

[RenegadeC]

Oh and just incase anyone cares or finds this as useful information,
I've managed to get Winquake to work properly in XP by using these command line parameters:

-dibonly -wavonly

[Spike]