Help... Quake music without CDs

[neg!ke]

[Baker]

[FrikaC]

[Urre]

[FrikaC]

[Spike]

[Urre]

Thought the extension system was work of the QSG, kudos to Tomaz and LordHavoc then.

Ultimately, it does feel like the extension system did work out very well. Lots of engines incorporate lots of various extensions and share extensions between eachother, and even implementation differs sometimes, which is cool as long as the result is as expected. My point was though, that a lot of features that are essential for certain mods aren't defined by any standards. Some engines incorporate changes to existing things which are perfectly compatible with Quake and (most) old mods, but you can use them in ways that were not possible before. To pick something from the top of my head, DarkPlaces lets intersecting solids move out of eachother. Quake did not, it made them stuck inside eachother, unable to move. I love the new behaviour, if you remove the telefrag code from your mod, you can make use of this great new feature. It did however break an old mod of mine, which contained a sort of grenade whose explosion was a mucus blob, which made you immobilized if you were in its radius, because it did a setsize on the mucus model ontop of yourself. Let's not go into the obviousness of how it could be better designed to work with the new DP feature and whatnot. Imagine instead if it was an old mod, which people liked to play every now and then. It would now be broken in DP, because it (to my knowledge) is not toggleable, nor does it say anywhere that this feature exists. Should a change such as this be part of the extensions system, or something else? Should one care? I know LH would, he tends to put compatibility first. (NOTE: I'm not saying that this should be "fixed", I love the way it works now).

Personally, I've come to believe that it really *is* better with the mod-per-engine deal. I do however not mean that everyone who makes a mod should make their own engine, but rather that people who make engines meant for modding (DarkPlaces, Telejano, Vengeance, FTE and more) shouldn't care about making their engines compatible with anything. They should just construct their engines with the goal of being good for modders, be it in the easy and fun way, or the feature-complete way. This because many mods are made this way nowadays anyway. Ever heard someone say "DP mod"? A mod like this could certainly be made to check extensions and work differently if not found or whatever. But most people don't seem to have the patience or time to do this, since they could just as well tell people that a certain engine is required, since it's accepted. Sometimes people refuse to play if they don't like the engine in question, but mostly they can overlook those kinds of things because of the simple fact that the mod was designed with this engine in mind, so it will have a consistent feel, which makes it okay even if you might not use the engine otherwise.

This would obviously not stop compatible engines from existing, as there is a place for them as well. People will want these as well, to get the most out of their Quake. Fitz is a very good example of an engine with a good balance between improvements and features and compatibility. But it doesn't provide very much features for modding, only a few basic ones, so to me it's a true "improved" Quake engine. Beasts like DarkPlaces or FTE are more like indecisive masters of everything, which generally speaking fail a little at everything. Most people don't like using them as their regular Quake engine since they feel so different. But they're also tough on modders because of the feature creep and the limitations of compatibility. I've heard DarkPlaces is close to impossible to maintain mainly due to the compatibility. Implementing new features constantly has to take good ol' Quake in mind. Now I'm gonna say something I'm not allowed to say, but if Tenebrae didn't suck so much, and if the author was more clear about his intentions with the engine, it would have been a good engine. Why? Because it wasn't compatible, it had its own feature set which it followed blindly. Thus it was popular, both for modders and players. It didn't suffer even close to as much from all the problems the "cool" engines of today do.

Just my thoughts

EDIT: *notices Spike posted as he was writing his post, reads...*

Yeah I figured my previous post would come across as such, that I support standardisation, which I don't, cause it will never work in the end, unless it's a closed group making the standards whos decisions can't be affected. That on the other hand works against the idea of a community. Not even OpenGL is free from this problem, both ATI and Nvidia make up their own extensions to show off new features and whatnot, and sometimes developers even end up using those. And if the game is popular, the opposing brands cards will be voted "crappy" cause they don't support the new features.

[FrikaC]

[FrikaC]

[LordHavoc]

[LordHavoc]

[LordHavoc]

[Urre]

Very interesting readings, certainly, this off-topickery.

Forgot to mention, but I think there's only two mods who really care about the checkextension system, Conquest and Prydon Gate. Even though very cool mods, doesn't that count as a failure? There are lots of mods that use all kinds of new features, without checking for the extension. In practice that becomes just using an engine of the modders choice.

On the opposite side, mappers often say that their new map only works in a certain engine, whereas in truth the map may also work in others. To be more specific, the hacky upped limits in arguires engine are incorporated in DP as well, unsure about FTE. Mappers say this either because they don't know, or because they don't like the way their map looks in a different engine. Often both. I'm not sure what to think about things such as this. I'm more leaning towards standardized approaches for these things, since it's not very special things they're up to, just increased limits, so why not let all engines take part of this map? Dunno...

[FrikaC]

[FrikaC]