Doom-Ed

I’m sure you have all heard about the 3drealms / quake deal by now. It took a long time to get everything nailed down, but it should be worth it.

The “quake 2″ terminology is a little confusing. They have all the quake / glquake / quakeworld stuff right now, but they will be picking up the quake 2 codebase after we finish it.

I’m quite excited about this — it should be a very complimentary arrangement. We would never have done a game like Duke at id, but there are many valid styles of design that are mutually exclusive. Todd and the rest of the Duke team are hard working developers with a pretty clear vision of what they want. It happens to be different than our vision, but the market is plenty big enough for both of them.

The consolidated QuakeWorld client has been working pretty well. I’ve been playing deathmatch with it in GL mode for the past week. There are still a number of things to do on it, and I haven’t been working on it for a while due to higher priority tasks. A lot of other non-graphics things have changed in the new architecture as well.

It is really cool to be able to switch between software and gl without even restarting the game. We will be testing Quake 2 extensively in GL and even doing some specific development for it. My current wild guess is that about 15% of quake 2 customers will run the OpenGL version (there will be several cards coming out this year that are fast enough, besides just 3dfx), so it is definately a factor in our decisions.

The verite renderer will still be supported in quake 2, but it won’t have the special features of glquake. (it will still have it’s own custom features like anti-aliasing, though)

There is a very cool new surprise feature for you in the next gl release

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For the past several days I have been working on a new version of qbsp that should be dramatically more robust for “crazy” maps. Raven is aproaching completion on Hexen 2, and they have a couple problems in their maps, so this is my top priority.

I figured out something about CSG / BSP operations that had been kicking around in the back of my head for almost two years now. The seperate (and epsilon issue prone) CSG phase is not needed at all if you directly contruct a BSP tree from volumes instead of from polygons. I have that part working, but there is just so much work in the tools that getting the rest of the stuff working again is taking quite a lot of effort.

I will make another tool release when things calm down, but understandably that is about at the bottom of my priority list.

Ok, the current OpenGL code no longer scales the status bar and console. You can stop complainng now. The next release will be the consolidated rendering code for quakeworld. I’m not sure when I will be able to make a standalone version.

The consolidated quake will also be available on NT-alpha as well as x86. If you have a powerstorm-T card, glquake works pretty good. Glint and oxygen cards don’t work well enough, but the normal quake software version should work fine. We may get a little bit of asm code written for the software version.

The second generation QuakeWorld is out and live now. We will probably release a couple bug fix versions over the next week or so as problems are reported.

Overall, I’m pleased with the results — I think I have delivered very solid improvements in game play. I certainly learned a lot along the way. If you have anything resembling a decent connection, you should be able to play a good game. A server with a 400+ ms ping and 10% packet loss is still not going to play all that great, but you should just avoid those.

The packet size is about as small as it is going to get for the general cases. Any more shrinkage will have to be game-specific compression, like the specialized nail update.

I can make doors and plats move smoothly, but it will take a good chunk more development. This will probably be done for quake 2.

I have it all set up to clip movement against other players during prediction, but I probably need a day or two to finish it. I’m not confidant that I’ll get to that anytime soon, though.

I really want to get client side demo recording and more spectator mode options (see through player’s eyes, chase cam, etc), but I just don’t have the time right now.

The next major upgrade will be a quakeworld that can run in software and OpenGL modes. A verite module will come later.

This combination (QW networking and switchable rendering) will be the base that we move all of our Quake 2 work over to.