Q2X

[Brian Hook]

After talking to Ryan a bit and looking over my big fat list of
things I'd like to do, it seems that the smart thing is to fork the
code base instead of trying to overhaul the existing one.  He's
offered to host it, I just need to get it into a rev 0.01 state,
which will be done after I get all the major file reshuffling done.

Quake2 i.o. is really intended to be a conservative, stable and
robust "Quake2 that runs on other platforms, especially Linux".  Easy
integration of third party patches such as Q2MAX and Q2ACE are higher
priorities than they are with me.

What I'm trying to do is basically make a Quake 2.5.  I'd like to
position these two forks as the "stable, clean, compatible,
mergeable" one and the "new, improved, revamped" one.

My goal is still to retain backwards compatibility, but I'm also
trying to achieve some higher level goals, which I've outlined before
but which I'll review here:

- a "learning code base", which means that the code should be
consistent and reasonably well documented

- a portable code base

- a clean code base.  Rarely used code will be removed, and code
paths that can be unified will be.

- backwards compatibility with existing assets

- encourage a mod community on all platforms.  This is probably an
uphill battle, but if it's pushed in the Lua community + Quake
community I think it has a chance to succeed.

I've discussed a couple of the steps required to get this going, but
here's a more fleshed out list of what I have done and will do.

- try to make a free reference PK2/ZIP file so that people can start
playing without owning Q2.  Ideally you can just download and run the
game without any problems and no licensing restrictions.  This is
going to be time consuming and tedious, but I think in the end it
will be worthwhile.

- rename/cleanup all game and core function and variable names to
make everything consistent

- retrofit const and static correctness

- move q_shared.* into qcommon/

- integrate Lua 5 as the scripting language of choice, convert
existing game and mods to Lua

- integrate PhysicsFS so that we can use ZIP files instead of PK2
files

- 64-bit clean and possibly get a hammer build going

- refactoring qcommon into multiple files

- more comments

- move image support into qcommon and out of the refs

- add support for JPG

- possibly add support for Ogg Vorbis

- cleaner hardware acceleration paths, similar to the work done from
Q2 to Q3

- integration of POSH, the Portable Open Source Harness
(www.poshlib.org).  This will allow removal of all the hardcoded
_WIN32, __linux__ etc. checks, and will provided portable sized types
that will likely be mapped into a set of qu32_t, qi32_t, qu16_t, etc.
types

- remove IPX code

- remove Glide, SST_GAMMA, Rendition and PowerVR references

- remove the majority of cross-platform specific files and try to
migrate towards SDL as a unifying abstraction.  There will
undoubtedly be problems with this, but they will hopefully be
addressed by fixing the core SDL concerns instead of forking
per-platform implementation issues.

- add Quake3 style client side presentation mods (cgame/) in Lua.  
This is a pretty major architectural upgrade, but I think it can be
structured so as not to break compatibility (since Q2 has no cgame
equiv, by default everything would continue to work)

Brian