Wednesday, May 4, 2011

MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU

Just some small sanity checking and fine-tuning to be done before releasing; think we're almost there.

Marcher Fortress performance on the Intel 945 is now up to 170 FPS; close to a doubling as a result of recent work on reducing CPU load.

As well as raw performance, there are a few extra features coming through in this version which are worth mentioning.

Gamma adjusted lightmaps, via the lm_gamma cvar. This defaults to 1.0 (no adjustment), and may be useful for tweaking brightness in cases where you don't want to adjust your global gamma (e.g. if running in a windowed mode). Note that it only affects lit objects (solid surfaces and MDLs); sky and liquids are not gamma adjusted using this method, and nor are 2D GUI textures. Try it and see.

Mousewheel support in the menus and console. Pretty rudimentary, but all the same. The mousewheel now scrolls the console properly (a long-outstanding request) and will also scroll through menu options.

FitzQuake-compatible menu/console/status bar scaling. (Updated) - this is now more or less fully compatible with Fitz for peaceful engine coexistence (which is very important). DirectQ's old gl_conscale cvar still exists and still maintains the old behaviour if you prefer that. For layout reasons DirectQ doesn't allow a virtual size below 640x480 using either method.

Crappy edges around textboxes have been fixed. ;)

More news as it happens.

4 comments:

=peg= said...

Sounds great!

*waits patiently for the next release*

MichealS said...

The menu/ui textures in the item texture pack from QRP don't (seem to) scale in DirectQ. I think I remember seeing something about those not being supported in one of your posts, but I'm not sure. Any chance of seeing an update with support for these?

mhquake said...

Hmm, another one for the list of things to check.

It's not gonna happen for the upcoming release, mainly because I've delayed the release and want to get it out now, but I'll look into it for the next one.

MichealS said...

it's cool either way... it's only a minor annoyance, not a game breaker =P Can't wait to see how much better the next release runs on my netbook =D