[quake2] Starting out questions

[Brendan Burns]

On Sep 18, 2004, at 7:36 PM, Asfand Yar Qazi wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm about to start tinkering with the Q2 sources, having chosen 
> icculus-quake2 over quake2forge for several reasons.  I was wondering 
> if you could confirm some things for me:
>
> - The build system is better to me (I hate all that autoconf/automake 
> stuff.)  Any plans to revamp it? (I hope no move to autoconf / 
> automake!)

Well, I think that's the first time anyone has called the build system 
"better" but no, there are no current plans to move to autoconf.  We 
should probably split the Makefile into a bunch of smaller makefiles 
and start using suffix rules. (anyone? anyone?) but I'm not going to do 
it anytime soon.

> - It seems to me icculus-quake2 supports higher resolution textures 
> than the original.  Is this so?

Yes, it should support the retexturing effort of others.

> - Depending on how I feel, I mightadd a few things to the engine just 
> to see if it is feasible for a game I'm thinking of.  What do you 
> think?  Are these features trivial to implement with the current 
> code-base, or demand a bit more work?
>     + An isometric-style 3rd person camera angle

I think this should be relatively easy.

>     + Mouse-click control with path-finding ala Diablo II

I have no idea,  I think the tricky thing would be shooting a ray out 
into the world and figuring out where it hits a wall or whatever.

>     + Gameplay pausing while still allowing user-input to continue 
> (ala BioWare games like Baldurs Gate.)
> - Also, is it possible to modify the source so that .zip files are 
> used instead of .pak files?  Do any patches exist for this purpose?

Again, these should be easy.

--brendan