Wednesday, July 1, 2009

1.6.3 is OUT; DirectQ goes to "Stable"

Just released 1.6.3; if you don't see it in the menu to the right just yet, it's because you've visited here in the time interval between when I posted this update and when I added the link. Be patient!

The big news for this one is that I've switched the "Development Status" to "Stable". It's gotten some very extensive testing courtesy of the demos available at http://speeddemosarchive.com/quake/ - in particular the "100% Secrets 100% Kills all of ID1 on Easy" demo set. There may still be some esoteric mods that crash the engine in unlikely or contrived circumstances, or where they do something completely unexpected and in an unintended manner, but the same applies to any Quake engine out there (although the circumstances may differ).

I won't post the full feature list here as most of it was given a coupla days back. Three other things that you should be aware of are:

  1. Release 1.6.3 is about 20% faster than the previous release. Some of it came from fine-tuning parts of the code, but most of it is from using compressed textures. I really like the extra degree of finer control D3D gives you and this is a good example. OpenGL just has a hint mechanism which implementations are free to honour or not as they see fit, whereas with D3D you can specify exactly what's done and how it's done. It does mean more code and more checking, but you get the precise result you want at the end of it all. It just feels closer to the metal.
  2. Release 1.6.3 has an integrated QC debugger! Yes! It's fairly simple in that it just logs QC related info (function calls, commands and cvars, crashes, etc) to either console or file (or both), but it should be useful for anyone who wants to use it (or port it to their own engines).
  3. The importance of a good test suite has really come home to me here. The SDA demos helped me catch a bug that I would likely never have been able to reproduce otherwise. I'll be using these more in future.