[Engine Standard] Water Alpha

[mh]

[goldenboy]

[Baker]

[scar3crow]

[mankrip]

[Baker]

[mankrip]

[frag.machine]

[ceriux]

[Baker]

[scar3crow]

[frag.machine]

@scar3crow: r_wateralpha 2 would be an evil hack IMHO.

@Baker: this is more a philosophical discussion than anything. As a (mediocre) mapper I understand when one wants to make people play, see and feel their work as they envisioned (and frequently, worked hard to reach the desired result). But ultimately, everything we do - mappers, modders, engine coders - should always respect our "customers" (read: the tiny remaining Quake player community) desires. Without them, all our work is pointless. That's why any worldspawn info setting water alpha and such should be only recommended defaults - if the player explicitly uses "r_wateralpha 0.3", then this value must be used instead my "wateralpha 0.3166666666" optimal default.

Yeah, I know that by now many people in the Quake mapping community wants to know where I live so they can hunt me with torchs and pitchforks, but this is just my $0.02 on the discussion.

[Baker]

[scar3crow]

[Baker]

After thinking about things a bit, your r_wateralpha 2 is a fine idea.

Here is why it is "ok". But first I need to explain why I wasn't sure it was "ok" so something that sounds obvious, I had a complicated non-obvious concern .... so I'll explain that ...

[short version: I was worried about the changing of a default value that has historically existed in Quake. Long version of why ...]

A good engine honors the defaults specified in quake.rc on load ... now there are not many engines that actually do this. DarkPlaces does. FitzQuake either mostly does or completely does (I can't recall why at the moment why I'm not just saying completely does.) ProQuake long ago, I changed it to be like DarkPlaces and honor default values that should be set when quake.rc is executed (a couple insignificant exceptions exist).

Failure to do this causes unpredictable results when doing Options -> Reset to defaults. This is not user friendly. And then the user can be stuck with super-weird settings and the only way to fix is to actually delete his/her config.cfg.

Engine default values have to be secondary to whatever gets run in quake.rc.

NOW, r_wateralpha isn't going to be changed by anything in quake.rc for Quake. As a GLQUAKE feature, it was added AFTER the fact and isn't set in Quake.

Likewise, for a proper mod they would have put the default settings in quake.rc and you just can't worry about improper mods (much) if the feature isn't going to lethal and this wouldn't.

So an engine default of r_wateralpha 2 isn't going to interfere with anything ever.

I know this was a long explanation, but I was thinking of both backwards and forwards compatibility.

The r_wateralpha 2 thing is a very good idea. Would not interfere with anything.