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SotC update

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Joseph Carter 2000-03-19 07:38:22 +00:00
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<P>Palisade's away for a bit. He should be back sooner or later but
until then things are a bit muddled---sometimes life doesn't leave
us with the opportunity to prepare for a need to become scarce for
awhile. Since the show must go on regardless, the project's core
coders have been picking up some of the administrative tasks 'till
he gets back. Bear with us, it ain't exactly our department.
<P>The State of the Code address is a not-frequenetly-enough updated
article written by <a href="mailto:knghtbrd@debian.org">Knghtbrd</a>
primarily for QuakeForge developers and other people who consider
themselves to be knee deep in the code, whether they happen to be
writing it or just testing it. What you won't find here is a lot of
the fluff news that tells the casual onlooker that the project is
actually doing stuff without really telling you what the state of
things are.
<P>This update will probably not be as frequent as many of you might
want. I'm going to stick to development issues mostly, but I'll
cover them in detail. Usually after the fact. But it will be
updated.
<P>No attempt will be made to soften technical issues so anyone can
understand them. If you want to really know what's going on, you
probably don't want details left out because they might not make a
whole lot of sense to a non-coder. Feedback is always welcome. So
are corrections if they're necessary - contrary popular (with him)
belief, Knghtbrd has in fact been known to be wrong sometimes. He
isn't afraid to admit it either (most of the time..)
<H2>How stable is stable?</H2>
<P>Pretty damned stable from what I'm hearing, unless you run win32.
Sorry about that, I don't do windoze so it didn't get tested. I
have and will apply pretty soon a fix for that. Look for 0.1.2 to
be released. Want a release date? Tough, I know better than to
offer you one. We'll make sure it gets spammed to the usual sites
when it's ready believe me.
<H2>How are things going? Your SotC update is late again.</H2>
<P>Yeah yeah, I know. Okay, first the quick news: Palisade is
back. The website is still under construction but it got a lot
easier to construct since now it updates immediately after a CVS
commit. With Palisade back, it seems that everyone who planned to
vote on the logos has now done so and we should hopefully have a
result soon.
<P>If you have a patch for something you want to go in to stable,
send it to me! Now's the time to do it. I have patches for the
cache mismatch bug planned. Our newest win32 coder, Tonik, has a
fix for the win32 stuff in my inbox right now.
<P>I promised I would keep the crap not related to the technical
aspects of the project short and at the top where they were easy to
skip, but a very important issue needs to be discussed whether it
fits the usual content of this page or not. Here it is:
<H2>Will QuakeForge be able to run Mega2k?</H2>
<P>How many poeple can ask that in two weeks' time? I lost count,
but there were a lot of inquiries. Unfortunately, I have bad news
for you. MegaTF says they're quite loyal to QuakeLives, despite any
legal or other problems the engine team has had or may have in the
future. Ambush says on his radio show that he hopes all of the
engines will support MegaTF though, so we didn't really expect any
problems.
<P>I've been trying for several weeks now to establish a regular
dialogue with Ambush, but people close to the project have told me
that most likely my emails wouldn't be seen, much less answered. So
I mentioned something about trying to connect with him durring or
after the 17 March 2000 MegaPhone show. Several other people from
the team as well as from other teams came as well to help show the
players of MegaTF that indeed we are serious about supporting the
mod fully.
<P>Things remained civil until some of the QuakeLives guys came in,
and things started falling apart then. Attempts to calm the fires
weren't terribly successful until not long before the show's start.
Things remained sane throughout most of the show. Ambush asked for
another small feature to be added durring the show (the console
version string gets in the way and he'd like to get rid of it) and I
wrote and committed the feature he asked for on the spot.
<P>Fires started burning again shortly after the show ended. I'm
not unsurprised, but eventually I did manage to wind up talking with
DyerMaker out of the view of the main channel so there was actually
a chance of talking. The results? I am now aware that MegaTF's
loyalty to QuakeLives extends as far as deliberately shutting out
any engine but QuakeLives from being able to run Mega2k. They've
decided that since Slade will not take part in creating an open and
secure standard for all engines, they can only support his. In
order to do that and do it well, they have to ensure that we can't
run Mega2k. Nothing personal against QuakeForge or anything, it's
just how the politics have played out.
<P>So from where I'm sitting, it looks like Ambush isn't interested
in other projects and engines supporting MegaTF. Or at least, he's
only interested in seeing QuakeLives-endorsed projects support
MegaTF. Nothing personal and no offense intended toward us, but
they seem to be intending whether they say so or not to be
exclusively QuakeLives.
<P>Well, nothing personal, but I have no intention of playing these
silly one-must-win-and-everyone-else-must-lose games. I'm quite
sick of them by now - but I'm surprised nobody else seems to be.
We'll do the best we can to support Mega2k whether they want it or
not. Why? For one, some of us play it. For another, and more
importantly, many of <EM>YOU</EM> play it. I lost count somewhere
not far before 150 people who have asked in recent weeks if
QuakeForge intended to support Mega2k's new features because you
don't run win32 and aren't interested in starting. <I>Yes</I> we
will. It may not happen until after Mega2k's release if the needed
information to do so is going to be withheld from us, but you better
believe it will happen.
<P>Am I being a bit harsh here? Quite possibly. As I write this,
it is now merely 24 hours after what we can all agree was a rough
night for a lot of people. From my perspective, it looks like
MegaTF is refusing to allow Mega2k to run on anything but QL dispite
Ambush saying he wants all the engines to be able to run it and to
work together or interoperability standards.
<H2>How unstable is unstable?</H2>
<P>It seems that's what's going on here, but that doesn't mean it is
what's happening. Chances for misunderstandings have not been
infrequent and it's not unlikely that MegaTF would be absolutely
thrilled to see a project dedicated to compatibility and open
standards like QuakeForge working to make sure not only that we
support Mega2k, but that every project out there can. And even more
importantly, that the user doesn't have to worry about whether or
not project foo's client is going to work with project bar's server.
<P>Well, dispite some problems with COM_Parse() that are screwing
with QW, unstable works rather nicely. taniwha is working on it,
should be fixed soon.
<P>raptor has been playing with volfog again and has it replacing
the water brush for testing purposes. Give Necropolis a very nifty
effect by grabbing yourself a watervis'd map and trying it out.
raptor recommends r_wateralpha .3, r_volfog .0009, and r_waterripple
5. Be forewarned that the volfog code currently uses the stencil
buffer which is almost guaranteed to not be hardware accellerated.
Expect a FPS drop. Using the stencil buffer is really not a good
idea and raptor will fix it if I don't first. He's got other visual
toys in mind too.
<P>If that's the case, then all of the above is essentially moot.
We'll do our best to make sure we support Mega2k right out of the
archive the moment it and that whatever it takes to make sure it
does work has already been made available for and incorporated into
every single project we can find, whether they're affiliated with us
or with QSG or MegaTF or the abominable snowman or not. Lack of
standards can only hurt the game. Since that's obviously a very bad
thing, hell yeah we'll do everything we can to keep it from
happening.
<P>We've decided it's time to kill the UQUAKE and QUAKEWORLD defines
in common. Some of them won't go away, but many of them will. And
soon. This brings us one step closer to a single unified game.
Before that can happen though, we need to be able to build a UQuake
dedicated server. Remember unixded? Of course you don't, it's
ancient and it sucked. Well anyway, it needs to be able to be built
and used once again so we have a point of reference for putting a
server inside the QW clients. These two things are the last major
hurtles to a unified game and tree. Everyone is encouraged to help,
whether they're actually part of the project or not.
<H2>Standardize this!</H2>
<P>QuakeForge has joined the QE.. uh, right. QuakeForge has joined
the QSG mailing list to hash out standards with other projects.
We've generally agreed that we've all gotten a few nifty features
implemented while we've been getting used to the new codebase (and
in QF's case, rewriting it in the process!) We're just about at the
point that we're starting to talk about where to go from this point
to establish and maintain working standards. More news on that will
become available as soon as we figure it out for ourselves.
<P>So what are you, the players of MegaTF who don't want to be tied
to a single engine and a single operating system, supposed to do
about any of this? Make some noise! And I don't mean go around
accusing MegaTF and QuakeLives of trying to quash all the other
engines either---that's the wrong kind noise to be making. It also
is quite likely not true. The noise you should be making is for
Mega2k to run on your preferred engine. And I do realize for a lot
of you, the engine you prefer happens to be the only one that even
runs on your platform. If that's the case, make sure you're heard!
You can write to me until the cows come home but I'm not the one who
needs to hear from you!
<H2>The actual technical stuff</H2>
<P>If you're still here after all of that, I'm impressed. Release
of 0.1.2 hasn't happened yet, but could really anytime now. Mostly
I have just had other issues on my mind. Plus I don't want to give
too much false hope here, but I really think a release of 0.2.0
isn't all that far off. I've been focusing my efforts in that
direction.