What things are worth listing about engines?

[mh]

I can support infinite lightmaps.

Just some thoughts...

A comment on an engine like "supports 128 lightmaps" is not really useful out-of-context. An engine coder might well be aware that the hard limit on lightmaps is 64, a modder might have that information as a result of trial and error, but a general player would not really have any reason to be aware of it. If a given engine supports higher limits, then it would be more generally useful to provide some descriptive info on it. This could be as simple as a matrix comparing engine limits with regular GL/Win Quake limits.

The "target audience" point is interesting to me - just who is the Q1 general audience today anyway? Identifying a target audience of "blah" might be useful to pin things down, but it's not really worth a damn if said audience consists of a grand total of two people.

I'd support a target audience of "engine coders" and "modders", with no real preference being given to either, as I think both audiences are in need of a good kick up the butt which this exercise could provide: (a) engine coders need to start being consistent and standardising things better, and (b) modders need to be prepared to constructively feed back to coders on what is good or bad for them.

[frag.machine]

I don't see why this list should be restricted to coders, modders, or gamers. Split the list in sections, and you can be more concise and direct to players, add a bit more of detail to modders and finally show all the technical stuff to coders, if available.

[metlslime]

i don't mean to imply it should be restricted to one type of audience, just that thinking about who the audience is should help clarify what sort of information is best.

[Spirit]

I don't really have a target audience in mind. Surely, my love, the singleplayer maps are important. But I'd like to make it as versatile and broad as possible (which is why I posted here). So if you want to say so the target audience are "engine coders", "modders", "mappers", "players".

For the limits I agree with metl. Also it is less work than trying to find out how many whatevers exactly the engine can load/run. I will create/pick 2-3 maps with non-standard/dangerous limits and see how the engine performs. Masque is a good one I think. Marcher will be in again as it turned out to catch some engines (this time I will test on proper hardware though, so the results will probably be better). Based on that it will get some "modern limits" "rating".
Are there any modding specific limits? I would feel a bit stupid only testing maps again.

-skybox, fog, gamedir: agree, will be: worldspawn and "command"
-transparency: Will be listed as "brush (func_), entity, sprite" and whatever else can have transparency. So, what else can have transparency?

-custom hud: Is only meant as "do i get my faithful 1996 hud (maybe optional) or does the engine force me to use its own custom one?". It is not meant as "can i use my custom hud" (as afaik only the QW engines, most mentionable ezQuake, allow that).

-enhanced menu: rather useless indeed when I think about it.

-anaglyph rendering will be a special feature. Mostly because I don't think it is that great. :p
Yes, step by step for sure. Just how the map archive did grow.

[Spirit]

[frag.machine]

[Spirit]

All this limits stuff gives me such an headache and the testmap I built (which exceeds clipnodes, visleafs and another something) crashes all but two engines. So I have decided to leave the limits/compatibility stuff for later.

[Urre]

I don't think DP can run into packet overflows in the newer protocols, no matter the amount of entities.

[frag.machine]

[Spirit]