Engine X 5.50 Beta

[MH]

Some brief thoughts about this.

I'd junk VC6. If you're going to use Visual C++ at all you should be using 2008 at least; 6 is only going to give you problems on modern machines and the longer you keep using it the more likely you are to hit one of those problems.

Likewise I'd junk the DX8 stuff. It's nice to have for sure, but it will hold you back as you move things forward with this. Trying to keep a balance between legacy support and forward-thinking stuff will only end up giving you ulcers; it's not worth it and it can't be done and you need to decide a cutoff point. Your GL renderer can get about a billion percent better if you don't have the constraint of having to maintain compatibility with the old stuff.

In summary the balance between moving forward and keeping legacy support is key. Which is more important to you? Which is your goal? You can't have both; you can have bits and pieces of each for sure, but each will compromise the other. It's not a nice decision to have to make, some people will get noses out of joint, but it has to be made.

[Spirit]

Many thanks Baker!

Seems incredible that just because it is compiled property rights go out the window.

Property rights? The GPL and other FOSS licenses protect the rights of the end-user to freely alter and modify. it also enables others to learn from the code. That is so much more important than ego/money. Baker (just as the nearest example ) would not have been able to do a fraction of his works without relying on and learning from the free and open-source works of others.

Security is almost impossible if you keep giving out the source right?

Security is impossible if you are NOT open-source.

[vegetous]

Hey if you could type "fastest" in the console, and then type "pq_maxfps 9999" in the console and type "timedemo demo1" in the console what FPS do you get? Maybe post a screenshot? [When you get time ... ]

I'm asking because you have an extremely fast graphics card and want to know versus DirectQ and ProQuake results you've posted in the past.

[Dumb question: why is your screenshot so ugly? Do have a gamma modifier/brightener or something?]

~765fps with Direct3D and ~800fps with OpenGL @ 1080p on Windows XP
System - Phenom 1090T - Radeon HD5750 1GB - 4GB RAM

I'll do the same test using Windows 7 64bits!

--//--

Nice engine Baker, feels almost like QuakeWorld when bunning jump (and that's awesome). I perceived some excessive friction when touching walls, this can bother a little sometimes. And I also noticed that apparently you can jump higher than QW, even higher than vb's Jawn Mode. This is not something that bugs me at all, but I'm not sure what players more used to NQ game style will think of it!

Anyway, congrats for the nice work you've done!

[Baker]

And I also noticed that apparently you can jump higher than QW, even higher than vb's Jawn Mode.

I'll take that as a compliment, my Brazilian friend.

[It is due to the ultra-high frames-per-second of Engine X. I take do credit for this, but mostly I am just taking credit for listening intently whenever Spike or MH gives me engine advice. I know when to listen and take notes.]

[Baker]

Some brief thoughts about this.

I'd junk VC6. If you're going to use Visual C++ at all you should be using 2008 at least; 6 is only going to give you problems on modern machines and the longer you keep using it the more likely you are to hit one of those problems

I do spend time thinking about this, and trying to figure out exactly how to handle this in the future. And I'm still trying to sort out a course of action in my head.

At the same time, isn't it "haha" funny the super-frame-per-second I got out your Direct3D wrapper.

I made your Direct3D wrapper --- the wrapper! -- smoke even other *fast* OpenGL engines. I was hoping you'd find some comic relief in that.

Fastest Engine: DirectQ by 5 to 10%. Then Engine X Open GL. Cloesly followed by the Direct3D wrapper version of Engine X --- which is outright comical. There isn't an OpenGL Quake engine that can come close to matching the speed of the Direct3D wrapper version of Engine X.

Yes, the future does have a lot of questions to be sorted out and at times I hesitate to think of them. But at the same time, maybe take a moment to laugh and get satisfaction out what I did with your work from 3 years ago

I'm sure tomorrow sorts itself out. But fuck tomorrow, I'm going to have a beer.

Besides, we get to write this "tomorrow". The short version of my decision: Today, I'm going to drink the beer(s), and tomorrow I'll assist kicking this "tomorrow's ass". If "this tomorrow" has questions about this, I'll do it -- yes --- "tomorrow,"

Ok then!

[PapaSmurf]

I'll take that as a compliment, my Brazilian friend.

[It is due to the ultra-high frames-per-second of Engine X. I take do credit for this, but mostly I am just taking credit for listening intently whenever Spike or MH gives me engine advice. I know when to listen and take notes.]

Shouldn't you normalize this, so jumping is not dependent on the frames-per-second one can achieve with their setup?

[Spike]

vegetous, don't run it above 500 (perhaps even 250) fps, or it'll go all weird. Which is annoying when moving between rooms where you get 1000fps in one and 2000fps in the next, it enters some sort of buggy double-speed mode. If I recall correctly, mh rate-throttled directq's server for similar reasons (just make sure you throttle packet sending too! I don't want another engine spamming 2 megabytes a second at the server).
if vegetous hasn't boosted pq_maxfps (default 72) then chances are its that the other nq engines he's used have vsync on.

connecting to 127.0.0.1 doesn't work, neither as client nor server, despite 'inaddr_any' being the address shown in the menu.

performance when timedemoing bigass1 is kinda low for some reason. I'm getting twice the framerates in my local checkout of FTE (exd3d=664 exgl=760 vs directq=1200 vs fted3d=1000 ftegl=1430).
bigass1 with r_drawentities 0. exgl=942 ftegl=1920. :s
not sure if you're optimising for heavier geometry, but enginex+marcher's fortress got about 150 fps vs fte's 350 (mh's directq builds don't run on account of the directx setup crashing on my computer for some apparently undiagnosable reason, and my private optimised builds of it have a tendancy to crash and don't seem to want to run marcher besides, mh posted lots of stuff about doubling/quadroupling directq's framerate in marcher's fortress after the version I did bother getting to run, so it wouldn't be fair, going by what mh claims more recent builds should be getting a nice chunk higher framerates).

menu doesn't remember everything, like desired effect quality, and the delay at load time is annoying - is that calibration thing meant to occur only once or something?

regarding d3d8, you're basically choosing between a fallback and higher framerates+more modern features. FTE has a lot of kludge for all sorts of things that hurts cpu cache and burns extra instructions, an equivelent q1-only renderer should be _at least_ 5% faster in any other engine(read: later versions of directq that I've not bothered to recompile myself), but enginex only seems to be achieving that in really simple scenes. Ditching the d3d8 renderer and going for glsl would allow at least faster skies and water.
For me, there is only one advantage of d3d9 over gl, and that's that the video buffer swaps are faster resulting in 4k fps in empty scenes instead of gl's 3k max (on my computer), although Linux gets 4k with opengl on the same machine so really its just ms crippleware. Assuming of course that people can avoid buggy-as-heck gl drivers.
I wish I still had that fun every-surface-is-an-overscaled-warping-surface map still. That map was fiendish! almost q3-style scrolling textures in glquake. it obliterates framerates in pretty much every other engine (read: 15fps on my box). glsl/hlsl/arbfp is the only way to get that map beyond 72fps. Its such a special case that its otherwise pointless, but does drive the point - water and skies are slow!

Edit: I should point out that any timedemo results against other engines are engines that I've built privately, which include changes and stuff that makes it somewhat crashy in too many places for a release - both fte and directq. EngineX was the only one I didn't compile myself and didn't manage to crash.

[Spirit]

Using Wine:

Starting up I chose OpenGL, saw some checkerboard pulsating, then I got the console. Entering "timedemo demo1" told me it was running it but it stood at the console. I started a "new game", then I could timedemo just fine.

Those textures are hideous. mouse2 as +forward is seriously weird.

The DirectX renderer is locked to 60hz and I don't know why. vid_vsync is 0 and vsync is off in my drivers.

I would need to test it natively of course, but at least in Wine it is slow on bigass1.dem (250fps. zquake, twilight, quakeforge are faster) and on demo3 it is not "the fastest" either (409fps vs tw's 420 and qf's 512). With native engines I get >1000 fps in tyrquake, fteqw.gl and quakeforge. Close to 1000fps with twilight.

Using 1024x768 windowed mode and the engines' default settings.

PS: No readme.

[Spiney]

Noticed a little bug:
With the D3D renderer emissive textures use point filtering rather than bilinear.
I'm running Geforce GT240 with Driver 296.10. Win7 64bit.

The detail mapping is cool, gives a very Unreal Engine 1 vibe

Everything is a bit dark though. Adjusting gamma works but washes out the colors and introduces banding everywhere

[Solecord]

How do I "install" it on Mac OS X? I put it in my quake folder and ran it and nothing happens, just the icon hops up and down on the dock. When I click it, it disappears. I'm running OS X 10.7.3

[Polarite]

Good job Baker , if u where a girl I would kiss you


Runs so smooth and in my opinion the smoothes glquake client I ever have run.
My mouse behaves even better then in proquake now.
My gamepad seems faster too..

Some minor thing's , like mention before displaying 3x score of player in bar.
Not all settings are saved after exit.

[Polarite]

Ah another thing , I wanted to record the games in FFA9 but that did not work enginex crashed everytime I used record ffa9_demo1.

So I had to play on good old proquake again to record it

[vegetous]

Me again, found some bugs while testing the new engine!

First of all, I was making some performance tests on my netbook powered by a AMD E350 and Windows 7 64 bits, when I notice that my screen would become all messy, if I changed the game resolution in the GL mode. I also noticed that the engine would always crash if the screen resolution was set to 1366x768 the last time I ran the game (1366x768 is the default screen resolution of my netbook's screen).

I made a little video so you can check out the problem - LINK


Later playing insomnia in my desktop I found some other bugs. The friction thing is really very different from the behavior of ezquake (for example). While in ezquake there's like no friction, engine X has a lot of it, what is not cool when you're trying to move through small spaces.



I got stuck in this corner of the map and had to use noclip to free myself. I don't know if it was caused by a bug in the map or the enginex's friction.

After some minutes playing I also noticed that my mouse was not responding very well to my commands. Signals from buttons 1 and 2 where getting stuck constantly.

Well, tha's all for now!

[MH]

If you're playing a single player map, you NEED to keep your maxfps at 72, otherwise you WILL get these kind of weird physics bugs.

[ellisgl]

I'm unable to input an IP under multiplayer. Using the Windows client under Win 7 X64