[MacGLQuake] I'm back

[Owen Greenwood]

OK I'm back after at least a month of not having email, and a lot of stuff has happened around here I'm sure.

Compile tools, source ports, etc, are great - but what I care about these days is the level editor.  We all love Quiver for sure, but it has it's shortcomings.  Here's the options for the future that I see:

 - Keep on using good old Quiver - does it even run in Classic under OS X?  This option is becoming increasingly dated.

 - Ask Scott to open source Quiver.  I mentioned that briefly about a month ago.  Maybe he'd do it if we gave him a monetary kickback of some sort.

 - Port the original QuakEd to OS X.  Possible but hard, and it sounds like some people are working on that already. After the port is done, some feature touch-up may be necessary; it's very rough around the edges as I understand. (btw, anyone know if the QuakeED source will compile on a NeXT slab?  I'd like to see how slow it runs ;).

 - I think that both QuArK and Quest (good PC editors) are open sourced. Qoole is semi-opensourced, I think.  Actually, Quark 6 isn't opensource, only the older, crappier Quark 4 is, it looks like.
 Which pretty much leaves Quest (try http://quest-ed.sourceforge.net/).  It looks feature-rich, it's GPL'ed and geared towards UNIX, but the only problem is that it's written in GTK+.  A rewrite for Quartz would probably not be feasible, but I'll bet that sooner or later, someone ports GTK+ to OS X, which would make so many UNIX ports so much easier.  Regardless, that's a long way off.

After analyzing the possibilities, asking Scott Kevill to release doesn't sound like all that bad of an idea.  If anybody does approach him, it's important that we NOT plead with, because then we just sound dumb (and we know how far pleading got trying to get him to release a Quiver 2).  We would need to show him a coherent design doc, with the bugs we would fix, the features we would add, and the migration path to new technology (ie OpenGL, carbon).  Conveniently, I've been pondering this for the past day or so.

(I've been using "we" very loosely to mean the members of this mailing list - though Giles and p0x seem to be the most competent coders.  I would give an arm and a leg to help, but I have little free time, and my coding experience is limited to rudimentary C++.  I could learn, though.)


Bugs to be fixed:

mainly that memory leak one - where if you're messing around in Quiver, then go back to the finder, you have basically no memory left to do anything.  It makes mp3's stop playing too.


Features:

more robust texture management - how about variable as well as fixed size texture browsing?
Variable sized: full size, 1/2 size, 1/4 size, etc
fixed size: 64*64 (like it is now), 128*128, 256*256

more robust texture grouping - have all texture wads listed in the browser by default, and be able to group multiple wads into groups from there (not having to manually add every wad to the list).  If .wal support was added, those could be grouped by folder (ie put some .wal's into a folder, put folder into Quiver's Textures folder, and Quiver sees it as just another texture pack)

Multiple palette loading - especially usleful now that Hexen II (almost) has a Mac port.

vertex editing.  It shouldn't be all that hard.

maybe a Worldcraft-style clipping tool?

support for external compiling utils (tyrlite is what I need)


New Technology Integration

carbonization - sooner or later, this will be necessary.  Cocoa would need a total rewite (not fun), so we'll leave Cocoa to the QuakeEd porters.

OpenGL - it would seem necessary in conjunction with a move to OS X, but I saw a website with some kind of Quickdraw/RAVE library for OpenGL.  Really weird; I lost the url tho.  Regardless, RAVE is pretty much unsupported by Apple now, and OpenGL is quite nice.

Q2/Q3 support - many people want it, I'm sure.  From the looks of Scott's website, he has Quake 2 support already in a beta form.  Personally, I don't need it (I don't even have Quake 2), but transparent .wal support would be nice.  Quake 3 support would be even nicer, but would require a lot more work.

Extensible, Radiant-style plugin architecture. Maybe support for radiant plugins?  If not that, then maybe a terrain generator.  I think I'm just dreaming.

What would be really crazy, would be to integrate Quiver with PakRat, and write in Quake 1 bsp navigating, so you could basically do anything related to any Quake engined game in one place.  That would kick so much ass... OK now I'm *really* dreaming.


about the Hexen II stuff: that just rules, I've always wanted to play that game.  I'm pretty sure Starcraft uses Smacker too, and I think Smacker released a Mac player for their video.  That probably doesn't help a wink for getting video support *in* the app, but the opening movie can be played separately I guess.


On a totally separate note, does anyone know why Nehahra either crashes or has no textures mapped after the opening movie?  Sometimes it crashes after the first level though. (the actual game, not the movie)

Grahf, a.k.a. Owen Greenwood

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