[quake3-bugzilla] [Bug 4962] Protocol version 69 + legacy support

[bugzilla-daemon at icculus.org]

https://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4962

Simon McVittie <smcv-ioquake3 at pseudorandom.co.uk> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |smcv-ioquake3 at pseudorandom.
                   |                            |co.uk

--- Comment #7 from Simon McVittie <smcv-ioquake3 at pseudorandom.co.uk> 2011-04-29 11:37:42 EDT ---
I like the idea of parallel support for an enhanced ioquake3 protocol, and
protocol 68 (aka the idquake3 protocol).

I'm not sure that this patchset does quite the right thing for OpenArena:
compatibility with historical OA versions would require that (with appropriate
cvars set) protocol "71" in demos/on the network is interpreted as equivalent
to the real protocol 68, so having the old/new protocol split be disabled for
STANDALONE games isn't really desirable? (It doesn't directly matter to me,
because Debian's ioquake3 engine build isn't STANDALONE anyway, but OA's
official binaries are.)

If you're making an incompatible network protocol anyway, would it be feasible
to have a separate indication of "content version" or "base game version" or
something? Obviously OA's "protocol 71" has to stay (in protocol-68 mode) for
compatibility, but it'd be great if when using Thilo's enhanced protocol,
standalone games like OA could get the same easy indication of "no, this server
is not compatible with you" without abusing the protocol field in this way.
Even better if there's enough information that the error message can be
something like "the server's base game is not compatible with yours (server
requires OpenArena 0.8, your base game is OpenArena 0.9)".

If the engine supports exactly two network protocols (protocol 68, and an
enhanced protocol) at any one time, will this cause problems for demos? For
instance, if we have:

ioquake3 1.37: supports protocol 68 and Thilo's protocol 69
ioquake3 1.42: supports protocol 68 and an even newer protocol 70

would ioquake3 1.42 still have a sane way to play back protocol-69 demos?

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