Quake 3 Engine
Things are progressing reasonably well on the Quake 3 engine.
Not being limited to supporting a 320*240 256 color screen is
very, very nice, and will make everyone’s lives a lot easier.
All of our new source artwork is being done in 24 bit TGA files,
but the engine will continue to load .wal files and .pcx files
for developer’s convenience. Each pcx can have its own palette
now though, because it is just converted to 24 bit at load time.
Q3 is going to have a fixed virtual screen coordinate system,
independant of resolution. I tried that back in the original
glquake, but the fixed coordinate system was only 320*200, which
was excessively low. Q2 went with a dynamic layout at different
resolutions, which was a pain, and won’t scale to the high resolutions
that very fast cards will be capable of running at next year.
All screen drawing is now done assuming the screen is 640*480, and
everything is just scaled as you go higher or lower. This makes
laying out status bars and HUDs a ton easier, and will let us
do a lot cooler looking screens.
There will be an interface to let game dlls draw whatever they want
on the screen, precisely where they want it. You can suck up a lot
of network bandwidth doing that though, so some care will be needed.
–
Going to the completely opposite end of the hardware spectrum from
quake 3…
I have been very pleased with the fallout from the release of the
DOOM source code.
At any given spot in design space, there are different paths you
can take to move forward. I have usually chosen to try to make a
large step to a completely new area, but the temptation is there
to just clean up and improve in the same area, continuously
polishing the same program.
I am enjoying seeing several groups pouring over DOOM, fixing it
up and enhancing it. Cleaning up long standing bugs. Removing
internal limitations. Orthogonalizing feature sets. Etc.
The two that I have been following closest are Team TNT’s BOOM
engine project, which is a clear headed, well engineered
improvement on the basic DOOM technical decisions, and Bruce Lewis’
glDoom project.
Any quakers feeling nostalgic should browse around:
http://www.doomworld.com/