RTCW and Enemy Territory GPL source release

[leileilol]

[mh]

GPL 3 I see.

[leileilol]

One thing I can see good out of this, is optimization. RTCW/ET somehow bloated the engine so much for some mysterious reasons causing it to be slow while not looking all that much better than Q3. Perhaps a drop-in D3D renderer would help?


And in case anyone is ever wondering, I lack lots of time so I probably won't be able to do a content project on the RTCWMP code (the mp game that isn't free), and if I did, the fans probably wouldn't like it or care anyway because of me dropping the ww2/nazi themes if I did one... though if I did one i'd have a more optimal technical direction without the infamous long load times.

[mh]

Well I'm not certain myself if I have much interest in doing an RTCW-based project at the moment, and I definitely don't have the time, but I am reasonably certain from some previous playing around with Q3A that there are a few things that can be done right now to improve performance. Top of the list should be switching it's vertex arrays from using 32-bit indexes to 16-bit indexes. If memory serves that alone got me maybe 25% extra from Q3A.

I don't subscribe to the "bloated == slow" theory, by the way. In fact it's weenix loony bullshit. Sometimes more code is needed for a faster path or a special case that just causes the exe to be larger as a consequence. DirectQ can weigh in at over 2 MB in some builds and nobody could call it slow (but yet I had to pull miracles out of the hat to get the size down just so that I could dispel the "bloat" crap, and all for zero performance difference). If ET is slow it's on account of something else.

[Lardarse]

ET also has issues where certain things (I forget what exactly, as it's been a while, but I think that uniform changing is one of them) happen at the wrong speed if sv_fps isn't 20.

[JasonX]