Native Glide Port of Quake
I have gotten several emails speculating that there will now be a native glide port of quake. Here is the straight answer:
I have considered a glide port many times (especially now that the rendering code is in a dll), but I allways reach the conclusion that it wouldn’t be justified.
On the plus side, it could get a 10%-15% speedup over the OpenGL driver without going through too many contortions. Primarily by saving transforms for the lightmap pass and doing tightly packed vertex arrays for the enemy models.
The big drawback is that every codepath that gets added holds back future innovation. Just having software and gl is a lot of work, and I have allready commited to verite support. This is a difficult point for some people to understand, but it is crucially important. The more places I need to rewrite a feature, the less likely I am to put it in. If I only had the opengl version to worry about, Quake 2 would be so much cooler…