Suggestions for LordHavoc's Darkplaces

[behind_you]

[mankrip]

[LordHavoc]

[mh]

Just like to add some thoughts on this.

Engine development is not a democratic process, and not all engine feature requests are born equal. If you're developing or maintaining an engine, it's inevitable that you're going to get feature requests, and everybody has their own set of favourites. It would be fair to guess that among any random selection of two people, their feature requests will have an average crossover of maybe 50%.

Even if time was an infinite resource (it isn't but let's pretend) there are other factors that influence whether or not an engine developer will implement a feature. For me, and in no particular order of priority.

Stability and compatibility with ID1

These two override everything else. Breaking the original game is not an option. And it not only must work, but it must work with the rest of your code (which may be radically different to the original code).

Compatibility with your vision of what your engine is

Every engine developer has a clear idea of what they want their engine to do or be. If a feature request goes outside of this vision the chances of it being taken up get reduced.

Doesn't fight against other features

If you have two new features and they conflict with each other then one of them will have to go. This means letting someone down, and that sucks, but it's also very real.

Reasonably popular/populist

If a given new feature is only ever going to be used by one person then it's of quite limited value. This is a bit of a grey area - the developer might think it's a cool idea despite that, or whatever.

Easy for others to implement

Every new feature has a chance of becoming a future standard. If it's not easy enough for other engines to also take up, that chance becomes lower.

Works the way mod authors/mappers/etc expect

If not, then it won't be used by the wider community. Take the interpolating alpha example - nice idea, but no engine supports interpolating alpha. If a mod author switches alpha from 1 to 0, the mod author therefore expects the change to happen immediately. Break that and you'll piss off the mod author.

Works the way players expect

Quake is a known factor, if you play it then you expect it to behave in a certain manner, and if a new feature causes it to not do so, then the feature becomes of dubious value.

Can't be reasonably implemented elsewhere

Some engine features are better off being done in QC (SS or CS), some are better off being part of model/map formats, and so on. Quake already has too much in the engine that really should be elsewhere, let's not add to it.

Not an exhaustive list, but comprehensive enough to think about when requesting new features. Let's get back to time. The last feature request I got that was claimed to be "so simple and will only take you 5 seconds" took two days. It was something I wanted to do, otherwise I would have junked it after half an hour, but it could so easily have been the other way around.

Enough. Derail over.

[Seven]

Hello LordHavoc and MH,

I recently found the great possibilities of QC modding.
Before, I only worked on mods outside QC (effectinfo, shaders, textures, ...)

Working with QC the last couple of month very intense and using the functions in dpextensions.qc very much,
makes me very happy. The existing "special features" of dpextensions.qc are already really nice.
The recently implemented DP_ENT_TRAILEFFECTNUM is a very welcome feature (thank you again LH !).


Though I have one request, that has been mentioned by behind_you, too.
And not only from behind_you. Many other raising very talented modders (like Nahuel, ..) also have this wish:
We talked about it many times at quakeone.com and via chat:
Interpolation of scale.

DP_ENT_SCALE gives the possibility to scale every model you want. That is a superb feature.
Unfortunately, even when I shrink it in very small steps:
1 --> 0.9 --> 0.8 --> 0.7 --> ...
It is still very jerky. Far away from fluent.

Modders have such a great interest in DP_ENT_SCALE, because so many amazing things can be done with it.
Unfortunately I can only use it, giving it fixed values from beginning and dont change them.
So this feature has a limited usage.


I feel very sad, reading that you dont have much interest in implementing a improved DP_ENT_SCALE at the moment.
MH mentioned it: A new feature should not be implemented just because 1 person wants it. I totally agree with him !
But this is something, that I know many modders will love.

Please think about it again LordHavoc.
Maybe you can change your mind (of course depending on how difficult the implementation is) ?

Kind regards,
Seven


PS: The mentioned interpolation of DP_ENT_ALPHA is in my eyes already working quite good today.
I use this feature regularly in my mods (changing alpha in small or big steps). It is fluent enough for me.

[frag.machine]

[behind_you]

[Seven]

[ceriux]

[behind_you]

[frag.machine]

[ooppee]

[sp4x0r]

[behind_you]

[LordHavoc]