What things are worth listing about engines?

[Spirit]

[Entar]

[leileilol]

[Spirit]

[Spirit]

Added protocol, CSQC, resolution independant HUD and enhanced menu.
Anything else?

[mh]

Game changing.
Add "custom" to particle types.
Flag for external texture support on BSP only/BSP + some others/everything.
Custom HUD/Sbar (yes enforced|yes optional|no)

You've got Nehahra, but what about more general mod support? I reckon that it can be reasonably assumed that for any given engine there will be some mod out there somewhere that breaks. Maybe use a baseline of ID1/hipnotic/rogue?

[Spirit]

Added, thanks.

Compatibility is a huge issue. id1/hipnotic/rogue support is mandatory, otherwise the engine gets a big red "not compatible" note in specialfeatures. Apart from that it testing for compatibility would be too much work. Except of course for later reports that this or that does not work.
If you have certain "killer-mods" to suggest though it would be a good idea. But then I remember what I tested with the maps in my comparison and the very snappy reactions.

Maybe a "compatibility" list with mods and maps that the engine breaks (or possible workarounds like spprogs.dat for the missionpacks in quakeworld engines)?

The game changing ability is a touchy thing too, at least when it comes to hipnotic and rogue. In a perfect world any engine that supports the mission packs properly AND has an in-game game switching command would treat "game hipnotic" as "-hipnotic" instead of "-game hipnotic" (because of the specific engine code).

[frag.machine]

[mh]

That's a very good point, actually. I'd also not be in favour of using a map that was tied to specific backend engine features as a test. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it seems a clear case of sidetracking into testing which engines are compatible with a certain specific mod, rather than the other way round (testing which engines have the widest mod compatibility).

Bottom line: if a mod also breaks in regular GL/Win Quake, then a custom engine that it breaks in shouldn't get the red X.

I've thought a bit more about mod compatibilty, and I'm actually going to suggest a 3-tier ranking: breaks | runs (but not all features enabled) | works perfectly.

The second one deserves a bit further comment. The kind of "features" I'm referring to here are cosmetic features, rather than gameplay features. To use an example most of us would be familiar with, let's look at Hipnotic. Among other things it has moving water brushes which are used to simulate waves, bullet hole sprites and alpha-stippled "windows" (footnote 1). The water brushes could be used as a gameplay feature (move the brush to reveal a hidden area) so that's a "break" result (footnote 2). Absense of the bullet-hole sprites is a "run" result. The "windows" is an interesting one. I'd put them as a "work" result if they're not supported, as they're also not supported in GLQuake (and possibly also WinQuake - I haven't tested) (footnote 3).

_______________

(footnote 1): Most people don't know about these. If you go to the start map and look in the hall with the moving lights you'll see them. They're brush models with alpha (palette index 255) texels in, so they're clearly intended to be windows.

(footnote 2): Interestingly, that's also a "break" result for regular GLQuake (but not for WinQuake), as you just have to turn on r_wateralpha to break it. I don't know if the Hipnotic QC actually allows them to be used in this way, but a mod might (with the same "break" result for the custom engine and for GLQuake).

(footnote 3): Others might consider them a "run" or even a "break" (if you can't see what's through the window it affects gameplay). The important point is that the result for the custom engine is also the same as the result for regular GLQuake.

[Spirit]

That three level compatibility is a good idea. "Works" and "Runs" are way too hard to determine though I think. If one thing works, then maybe some other feature is broken. Testing everything would be a Sisyphus-task. So I would use "compatibility rating": "good", "problematic"(?) and "bad" rather.

Those three things you mention about Hipnotic are things I never really noticed, heh.

So, what things to test in which maps/mods (the engine's default settings will be used, unless the readme of the map/mod suggests something)?
-hipnotic: window alpha on start map (room with moving lights)
-hipnotic: bullet hole sprites
-hipnotic: moving water brushes (what map?)
-kinn_marcher: loads, runs in playable speed
- ?

Nehahra is "the" Quake mod, yet engine support is very limited. Thus it will not influence the "compatibility rating" but it will be a criteria in the infos (like "Nehahra Support: No").


frag.machine: Well, a bit of pressure sure was part of my intentions. But the warp map sure was a bit over the top. And the artificial lr map anyways. But then the focus was on singleplayer maps (which tend to grow out of proportion recently) and the "generic quaker" uses his favorite engine without caring what a readme says. "If a map or mod does not work then it sucks."

[mh]

[Spirit]

[mh]

[Spirit]

[metlslime]