Monday, August 31, 2009

More Nehahra Thoughts

I was wondering if maybe I was a little unfair in my previous comments about Nehahra, but I've decided in the end to let them stand. For a mod that is viewed as groundbreaking, it's certainly a strange and clunky beast. OK, it achieves a lot, and that's good, but the grief is with the way it achieves it.

I believe that it leans a little too much towards being a slave to the Great God of QC. There are so many situations where alternative solutions should have been pursued, but the designers instead chose a QC solution, with the inevitable hackery and fooling around required to support it. Examples: instead of using proper coloured light and LIT files in the engine, it spawns persistent dynamic light entities; instead of setting a new cl.intermission state and selectively showing/hiding on-screen content based on that, it stomps over user cvars to get the result.

Full credit is deserved for an imaginative approach to a problem, but there is a limit. In the days before the engine source was available this kind of thing might be acceptable, but these guys released an engine too. There really is no excuse.

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