UQE Ultimate Quake Engine ?

[ceriux]

has anyone heard of this engine before? if so any thoughts on it? i happened to stumble across it a little while ago.

http://www.korvinkorax.com/category/gam ... ke-engine/

[revelator]

Yep using it with hexen2 looks good.

[Baker]

Has 74 pages of posts with many (most?) of the Hexen II engine authors and a number of Hexen II modders/enthusiasts talking about the various engines and what they/don't do, etc.

[goldenboy]

Weren't there more posts in here, or am I imagining things?

It feels weird if posts simply vanish. It should be handled better.

[revelator]

Not to my knowlegde or was the question rethorical

Not much interrest in Hexen2 it seems
personally i allways prefered heretic 2 but the source was newer released as far as i know which is kinda sad as it takes some hacking around to get it ot run on modern OS.

[Spike]

the way I see it, UQE Quake and UQE Hexen2 are completely separate engines with similar additions not unlike fuhquake and joequake were, just with even more differences in the code base.
Long term, that probably not ideal.
For now, the hexen2 version is relatively well established. Its a better choice than FTE if you want to actually finish hexen2's mission pack for instance (I'm not gonna implement things in a hacky buggy way grr)(I'd not compare against my own engine when commenting on a competing work, but its a favourable comparison in this situation, and I don't have enough experience with hexen2 engines to namedrop any others), but for quake (ignoring my own engine) you're probably better off with something like proquake, directq, or ezquake over uqe (depending on personal preferences).

Also, UQE's bloom effect appears to be just a blur effect instead. I don't know if that was intended but it certainly seems misnamed. :s
(I dislike bloom in general due to everything ending up blured, especially on hexen2 maps, even with my own engine).

[ceriux]

speaking of hexenII it seems very similar to quake, did it also use .qc? also is it just as easy to mod for as quake?

[revelator]

Its based on the quake engine so aye a few differences though i cant remember of the top of my head but yes it uses qc.

[revelator]

Looking at the code hmm the bloom is fragment shader based it seems, though aye it doesnt look like the bloom im used to either.
My personal favorite back in the days was jshexen2 but development sorta stopped allthough i hear rumors of a version 2 in the works.

[Spike]

hexen2 is based upon quake, yes.
it's gamecode is written in hexenc (ie: quakec with more instructions, more special case things like 'thinktime' and extra state opcodes, and read-only arrays). the hcc program has a greater capacity for large mods than qcc - because hexen2 is a huge mod (arrays can consume stuff fast, too). The only instructions which are not backwards compatible are the OP_CALL1-8 instructions. The rest of the format is directly compatible/extended.
The game has a different progdefs.h with added system fields, thus the gamecode itself is not directly compatible, however there are ways around that. I'm not aware of any builtins getting any different behaviour, only that it has additional builtins. HexenC is basically an upgrade from QuakeC, and so you can generally compile huge chunks of qc into a hexen2 mod (defining a builtin is slightly different, but builtins shouldn't normally need to be copied over anyway).
the released code/final versions have so many bugs all over the place. a huge chunk of hexen2 engine work is spent trying to work around those bugs and find ways to not cause them to be worse than they normally are. For instance, spawn players in too late and Death becomes invincible. While spiders become invincible if you shoot them too early.
the engine has lots and lots of special cases for all sorts of things, which presumably would make it a pain to add an additional episode/chapter to the same level of quality without modding the engine too.
For the most part, the engine is all extensions, but lacks protocol compatibility. the TE extensions are just extensions, but certain model flags got reused for other things (beware of spider gibs with rocket trails).
The console is iso8859-1 based, instead of ascii, and the game comes with replacable text files to translate the game between 4 european languages. Which of course means that eg french people can use accents in chat. So if you want red text, you'll need to find some other way.

I am kinda disapointed that UQE has two separate engines, rather than compiling one engine differently using preprocessor defines for the qc system global/field differences (or finding a good way around that like field remapping). But don't forget that this is what I did with FTE, hence I'm biased towards expecting others to take the same approach. I really wonder where the break-even point is, in regard to enhancements all over the place.
The h2mp engine is meant to incorporate many fixes from hexenworld, though I've not extensively looked at its deltaing protocol.

[ceriux]

does FTE Fully support HexenII? i read somewhere its not fully compatible?

[Spike]

Its not fully compatible, there's some omisions.
The original game should be fully completable.
For Portals, tibet5 (I think it was) has a rotatey thingie that 'ejects' a puzzle piece. In FTE, that item isn't ejected and you need to noclip into the wall to collect it in order to finish the map/game, it becomes visible but its not far out enough to be grabbable. Its next to a rotating cog type thing on the ground, noclipping anywhere else is cheating!
I know of no other fatal issues.
I generally don't play through hexen2 that often, and quake-related tweeks have a moderate chance of breaking hexen2 thus other issues are more likely to appear without getting spotted/fixed for a while.
There's some particle effect omisions still, fountains come to mind, as well as snow/rain regions.
Deathmatch isn't well tested at all.

For many people, just one show-stopper is enough to, urm, stop the show.

[ceriux]

i wish fte supported it fully. it would be an engine i'd play it on if it were my choice.

[leileilol]

I'd use Hammer of Thyrion for Hexen II

but unfortunately Hexen II is buggy and has a lot of bad design decisions that an engine can't solve





By the way, this engine isn't very "standard" - it has an even worse practice of needing to install a pak2.pak into id1/ which has a new progs.dat, a new pak into hipnotic/ with a progs.dat and a new pak into rogue/ with a progs.dat, calling it "patching Quake to UQE Quake". Apparently the only changes it makes to progs.dat (1.06 by the way) is a func_rotating function.

Jeff Epler this isn't.

also MESSY CRAPLOAD OF BATCH FILES! 24 of them!!!!!!!!!!!!

[goldenboy]

Hexen 2 is worth playing, but yes, I don't subscribe to some of their design decisions either.

Hammer of Thyrion is a very good, but also pretty fundamentalist port. Last time I tried it, I wanted to use inkub0's hi-res textures but couldn't. From what I gather, this is the intended behaviour. So I use FTE...

UQE: I want to try it, but there are no Linux and Mac binaries and I'm a lazy consumer pig.

Missing posts: ISTR a post by Leilei which is no longer there. So I was like wtf, invisible posts.