Sunday, November 30, 2008

More feature killing

I'm going to remove the smoking torches. Nothing personal against smoking torches, but I happened to run a map which had 50 or so (I'm just guessing the number here folks) torches illuminating an outdoor area, and it brought my PC to it's knees. Q1 shouldn't do that.

Thoughts and Things

I've started a "protocol extensions" discussion over on Inside3D, with the goal of at least getting some thoughts going on ways to allow the default Q1 protocol to be extended while at the same time maintaining compatibility and flexibility. Meantime, I'm almost certainly going to build a new SP-only protocol into MHQuake; just small things like increasing the message buffer size, writing true floats for origin and angles instead of the degraded versions, making a bit more info available to the client, and so on.

A thought occurs to me - with the ID1 maps now being GPL'ed, what's to stop someone from making a hub-like system; i.e. enabling revisiting of previous maps? And then releasing the entire package? The textures of course ain't GPL, so they will need to be replaced with something else, but almost everyone has external texture packs these days so it's not that big a deal, is it?

Speaking of which, I might rewrite parts of my external texture loader. It's fine enough for what it does, but it does use GDI+ for loading certain image types, which is a load of baggage I'd like to remove (it does make image type support so easy though, so I'm still in two minds about this...)

Lots more bugs in my resolution switching code too... Ugh. Thought I had that all sorted.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

WMI Support

I've just added WMI query support to the engine! This finally lets me get a reliable count of video RAM, so that I can use it as a guideline for scaling down large textures if video RAM is limited.

I'm amazed that OpenGL doesn't expose this property.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Playing Catch Up...

Well it's certainly been a while longer than I expected - almost 2 months! Life in MH world has been pretty good during that time, had a great holiday and then ended up moving house as well - something that was on the schedule but had to come forward a bit. So right now I'm sitting looking at my Quake code and scratching my head trying to figure where I was at, and even which copy of it was my most recent!

Also, my GeForce 6600 seems to be coming to it's last legs. Not too surprised here, it's had a good innings and has served me well; probably longer than any other 3D card I've ever owned. Right now I'm thinking of making the Great Switch to ATI, primarily because they still support AGP, which I'm stuck with until my next PC upgrade (a while off yet). I know their OpenGL support sucks, but I kinda like the idea of working on a sucky implementation, as it means that if I get MHQuake going good on that, it's only gonna do better on a decent one (hence the fact that I've also been working on Intel a lot...)

It'll probably be another while before I get things back up to speed, haven't even been checking in on the usual forums to see what's going on! I'll likely post on here a few times though just to keep something moving along...

Till then!