[quake3] Greetings

[Chris Bunting]

Hello,

I've seen the code for Xreal and although they are great enhancements for a Q3 based engine, breaking Q3 out of the box to have a simular feel to newer games with large outdoor scenes is not simply a modification to the original rendering system.

I know that a lot of people want to see something new when it comes to the renderer and if this new fork of ioq3 is meant to also serve this purpose, then you will need to realize that a new map format, if you use an existing system, is going to break 80% of quake 3's features. You almost need to remove all bsp, entity, model and whatever code is used when maps / levels are loaded and then you need to start completely from scratch. It's not easy to do and it WILL break all compatibility for any previous mods. All mods or addons that will work for your new engine will be whatever you specifically write for it. 

Out of all the engine changes that I've made, I've only been able to keep a simular menu system, in game statusbar hud, (based on Xreal/Evolution) and the scrolling credits. The status bar is the only code from an esiting project that I had used.

Reason for my changes... I love the way Crytek / FarCry one renders outdoor scenes. So when I started looking around the web, I came across Grome, http://www.quadsoftware.com/index.php?m=section&sec=product&subsec=editor

Gathering Ideas from the Grome SDK about thier uses of OpenGL along with using Nvidia's OpenGL 10 SDK and Scene Graph, I've somewhat finally been able to render outdoor scenes. My new scene manager also has support for water, fog, snow, wind, rain ect. But these changes and the use of another editor broke support for 80% of Q3's features because the models are different, not entities ect. So once I get a stable level system complete using Atlas, I'll have to base the next addition of features around a physics system. Possible Havok since it's going to have a free non-commercial version and they say it will be available in May 2008. 

Honestly though, Most days I feel like this was all just a waste of time because in the end, there is very little left of the original quake 3 engine. As all of the additional tools that I use are all from a 3rd party. So all that is left is the shell of Q3 and some network code that I am saving because I also have the gamespy sdk. Ghoul2 which I had used in original Q3 engine was changed to use bullet physics from the NVidia SDK, and some maps were based around Cal3d. All were earlier changes before I started trying to replicate some CryTek features and using Nvidia and Quake Software's SDK to start implementing more advanced OpenGL rendering and such.

Here are some earlier shots from the beggining of the conversion. I will grab some more once I get some other instabilities out of the way.
http://picasaweb.google.com/cbunting99/Q3Engine

Much like Xreal, I am not longer working with ioQ3 as a base either as SDL, OpenAL were all things that were not needed for my project so it was reworked for be nothing more than a q3 version with bug fixes.

Chris
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Robert Beckebans 
  To: quake3 at icculus.org 
  Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2008 3:42 PM
  Subject: Re: [quake3] Greetings


  I would like to clearify a few things about XreaL because many people complain about the incompatibility with existing mods assets:

  XreaL was not initially based on the IOQuake 3 project at all. I merged it later with IOQuake 3 because I don't want to maintain so much platform dependent code. It is a different project with complete different project goals.
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