[quake2] quake2 eye candy question

[Mental]

On Wed, 2002-06-12 at 04:05, Ryan C. Gordon wrote:
> > However, always remember to clearly ask yourself before making every
> > single CVS commit with such changes: Am I changing the original feel
> > of the game ? Just thought I'd voice my opinion, not that it matters,
> > but still 8)
> 
> Well, again, changes should be optional. Ideally, they should be toggled
> with cvars, but that's not always reasonable, so they should at least be
> removable with #ifdefs at build time.
> 
> Then again, I'm talking out my butt, since I don't plan to offer those
> patches.  :)
> 
> (However, I _will_ throw together the initial autoconf stuff if Brendan
> expresses an interest.)

A lot of the stuff in quake2max is very expensive performance wise. It
wont matter on a reasonably fast geforce card, but voodoo users and
geforce1 users will certainly appreciate a way to turn off said
features. I plan on at least providing for compile time flags to
enable/disable things. That is, if I can actually do this port :)

That said, a couple other issues came up in this thread.

re: original look/feel. 
To some extent I agree with this. However it is subjective and I
actually like tomaz quake :)
Certainly a "make classic_quake2" target should be there. However, I'm a
strong proponent of choice and so long as the protocol stays compatible,
the effects on the client side dont concern me much so long as the
player likes them.

re: autoconf stuff
This will almost have to happen as the code grows. Or we're going to
have a lot of one off code. That said, we'll all have to motivate
ourselves and read the autoconf docs :) Or you can do what I do.
Shamelessly rip off code from other projects. 
The cvs version of quake2 in the quakeforge repository is already
autoconfified FYI. Quakeforge has been fairly conservative with eye
candy for quake1. Mainly due to the 'its not fair to software renderer
people' argument. However, they do have an excellent quake1 port. It
sort of seems a shame to see so much duplicate effort. Then again, their
primary focus seems to still be quake1, which is good as I still play
that too ;)


All this said, I'm slow at this stuff so dont expect miracles. I'll
probably take what time I have over this week/weekend to try and
familiarize myself with your codebase and get it imported into cvs/ready
to be hacked on :)


-- 
 
Mental (Mental at NeverLight.com)

In my house on the ceilings I have paintings of the rooms
above...  So I never have to go upstairs.
--Steven Wright

GPG public key: http://www.neverlight.com/Mental.asc