Saturday, March 20, 2010

Updates for 20th March 2010

Not too much done today, but some important fixes made it in.

Firstly the non-standard alias model skin name fix has been extended to include sprites too. This was important as sprites also included the extension in the default external texture name (to distinguish between s_light.mdl and s_light.spr, as mentioned before).

Secondly I've fixed the "always run doesn't increase back speed" bug. For a while there I had convinced myself that this wasn't actually a bug, but was the way ID Quake behaved. Going back to ID Quake source told me it was otherwise. I believe this bug has been present in DirectQ for over a year now.

While doing that I made some subtle changes to the behaviour that I think you'll like. With ID Quake you had choices between a speed of 200 or 400, and if you set your cl_forwardspeed or cl_backspeed variables to anything lower or higher, using the menu would stomp over them.

Now in DirectQ setting always run on will only stomp over the variable if it's less than 400, and likewise setting it off will only stomp if greater than 200. That means that there's still a range between 200 and 400 that's going to be effectively off-limits from the menu, but it's an improvement all the same.

Thirdly I fixed a bug in end.bsp where the spiked ball movement was quite weird. This came in as a result of physics code to handle brush rotation, and I guess that the new code wasn't happy with that particular entity. Ooops. For now, end.bsp is quite unfinishable in DirectQ 1.8.1, so the fix is to run that map in 1.8.0 - at least until I get 1.8.2 out.

There's been lots of little fixes and tightening up like that being done for 1.8.2, and while none of them are anything radical on their own, taken together they are going to give an end-result that's just a much much more polished and overall nicer engine.

Looking at my to-do list now, there's not really much left. The big one that I've been putting off is fog; it's sometimes broken, sometimes it works fine, and I honestly don't know what's going on. I might just defer it to the next next release.

More (hopefully) tomorrow.

0 comments: