FW: [MacGLQuake] QuakeForge needs help porting Mac client!

[Joseph Carter]

On Wed, Aug 02, 2000 at 11:58:53PM -0700, Bennett Borofka wrote:
> ----------
> From: pOx <pox@planetquake.com>
> Reply-To: macglquake@indigita.com
> Date: Thu, 03 Aug 2000 01:00:24 -0400
> To: <macglquake@indigita.com>
> Subject: Re: [MacGLQuake] QuakeForge needs help porting Mac client!
> 
> QuakeForge is taking a different approach than most of the other teams. They
> are currently merging the Quake and QuakeWorld source trees, and although
> their latest builds are compatible with NetQuake/QuakeWorld they make it
> very clear that a unified protocol with much more clientside prediction is
> the final goal.

That is not quite true; your information is at least five months out of
date by now I think.  =)  It was investigated, but turned out to be
impractical.  So we started the "newtree" branch of the source and have
been working to make it the best QuakeWorld we can.  There is no NetQuake
support whatsoever in newtree, though a seperate NetQuake tree will spring
up and be developed at an insanely fast pace to catch it up to QuakeWorld
when we have a stable QuakeWorld to release.

We've decided to forgo any attempt to merge the trees this time around.
What we can merge will give us headaches later on and it's easier to
simply keep them seperate.

The half-merged tree is considered obsolete.  It is kept around simply
because we haven't done a newtree-tech NetQuake.  That whole codebase is
destined for the attic as soon as we can practically get rid of it.


> Point being, if someone were to work on a mac port, you wouldn't get a
> stable QuakeWorld client - you'd get a (possibly) stable Mac QuakeForge
> client.

I disagree with that opinion, especially considering that your conclusion
is based on information provided by the former QuakeForge project leader,
who is no longer with the project.


> Whether or not servers adopt the QuakeForge server is up in the air,
> and it's very likely that mods will require a recompile (at the very least)
> to be compatible with the new executables. It may be worth waiting a bit to
> see how well received QuakeForge becomes, and do a Mac port after the fact
> (and after the major bugs have been worked out).

The decided goal of the QuakeForge project at long last is simply to
maintain Quake.  The overwhelming majority of people involved have all
agreed that is what we should be doing.  Not everyone wants to do that of
course, but those people who have decided they want to go their own
direction have agreed that it was best to start fresh and work on
something completely new.  Since the project has little to do with Quake,
it's kinda split off into its own thing.

I have taken an interest in this project myself and plan to work on both
projects.  The Thirdspace engine will be very cool - but it's still not
Quake.  At this point Thirdspace is a pile of design notes, some irc logs,
a post or two on web boards describing what we'd like to do, and a
registered SourceForge project (empty at the moment, registered it now
only because someone told us a few people were planning to register the
project just to screw with us..  *shrug*  Better safe than sorry.)


> I'm more interested in single player myself, but if you have any specific
> bugs occuring in MacGLQW, please make them known on this list, so people can
> work on them - I've patched the PCX loader to fix the 'bad skin' errors, and
> didn't have a single crash while testing MacGLQW on various DM and QF
> servers. I'm also compiling with GUSI 211 which may fix some network
> problems found in the older GUSI distribution used in the last release.

I've always been better at single player games myself.  Prior to newtree,
most of my time was spent working on NetQuake and helping QW catch up with
the changes I'd made to NetQuake.  When Palisade "left" the project (very
long story), things were a bit chaotic and had to give up working on it
for awhile to help move the project forward to something we could actually
release.

We're getting close now, but our release at the moment doesn't support the
Mac.  That kinda sucks considering that we have a pretty good framework
for Mac support in place already (SDL is supported for software and OpenGL
now) and we really would like someone who can actually code on a Mac to
change that.  I don't have a Mac myself (yet - that cube is looking mighty
interesting to this NeXT fan..) and even if I did I don't have any
experience coding for it.

-- 
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org>               GnuPG key 1024D/DCF9DAB3
Debian GNU/Linux (http://www.debian.org/)         20F6 2261 F185 7A3E 79FC
The QuakeForge Project (http://quakeforge.net/)   44F9 8FF7 D7A3 DCF9 DAB3

* Knghtbrd notes he has mashed potatoes for brains tonight
<Valkyrie> yum, can I have some?
<Knghtbrd> um ...
* Knghtbrd hides from Valkyrie