Trying out clients

[DogSpydr66]

Hi,I have been trying out all of the clients,but I have not tried out fitzquake markIV,directQ,or quake spasm,what are the big differences,what runs better for BSP2 maps? Also suggestions on other engines would be great.Thanks

[talisa]

afaik currently only the 2013 DP builds and the RMQ engine support bsp2
so id suggest either of those if you wanna play maps which use bsp2 format

my preference would be DP cuz it allows for HD replacements of stuffs and such, whereas RMQ doesnt (not much at least, only very basic)
and i love being able to have shinies in my quake <3

[golden_boy]

DirectQ and FTE also support BSP2.

There are two versions of BSP2 with minor differences between them, depending what they were compiled with; to my knowledge, only FTE accepts both, though DP might as well.

RMQe supports replacement textures, but has no realtime lighting and no support for deluxemapping / normal / specular maps. It does support lumas though.

FTE supports pretty much anything in that regard.

[Spike]

FTE, QuakeForge, and supposedly DirectQ also support various forms of BSP2. Possibly also super8 but not sure about that.

fitzquake is a fairly 'pure' engine popular amongst the mapping community known for its map sizes (without bsp2 support) etc.
baker's markv or whatever it is focuses on making it a little more userfriendly.
quakespasm is a fork of fitzquake, intended to run using sdl libraries instead of system-specific stuff giving greater portability.
RMQe is a fork of quakespasm. MH likes rewriting rendering code it seems, and rmqe benefits from quite a lot of performance tweeking for large maps.
DirectQ is MH's other engine, but this time using a different hardware interface. This engine gives fantastic framerates on crappy intel cards, and presumably has the edge on ATI/AMD gpus too. It tries to be more faithful than RMQe.
QuakeForge is too linux centric in my experience (on the other hand, it integrates perfectly with it). It supports a whole load of features and much of it rewritten, though I can't really comment on it beyond that. One thing worth mentioning is that it has a gl-based software-rendering emulation (including colormapping!), so potentially more faithful that pretty much every other gl/d3d engine out there.

different engines have different performance characteristics.
I've seen esoteric maps get 20 fps in most engines, 65 fps in dp, and 200 fps in fte for instance. That map was crazy.
in win7, opengl seems crippled somewhat in that d3d and linux-gl get 4000 fps on my box, while win7-gl only gets 3000 fps, giving a nice lead for directq in certain situations.
when it comes to performance, don't forget load times... there's a certain engine that takes long enough to load maps for me to get bored, alt+tab out, check for new posts, not find any, tab back in, and its still loading the startup demo... :s

my preference would be FTE as its versatile and fast... plus by some amazing coincidence, its set up exactly how I want it... *cough*.

[golden_boy]

RMQe is heavily optimized for unusually large, but still somewhat faithful looking, Q1 singleplayer maps, since it's the engine of the defunct RMQ project whose maps were quite gigantic.

That is really where that engine shines. The other way to look at it is as a Fitzquake/Quakespasm fork with some added niceties, which a few people also like.

For adding eyecandy to vanilla Quake (aka Quake pimping), look no further than FTE / Darkplaces though. Most such projects are made with DP in mind. Those engines are also quite modding friendly, with feature sets that easily outclass e.g. the free version of Unity.

[DogSpydr66]

@golden_boy,and Talisa,thanks for the infos.