Re: Huzzah fore ye Softwaere Renderyre

[Bob <ma...@mb...>]

>>	Yes I know software rendering is what folks might call "legacy" support and a good argument could be made for improving it as little as necessary, but I am curious to find out if anyone thinks it would be worthwhile to implement some of the basic software rendering enhancements found in Quake2 in the Quake1 based QuakeForge engine.

>>	Specifically I am thinking of transparent water and skyboxes, since these being OpenGL-only features complicates the art path of future games using the Quake engine (which is what I'm working on.)

>>	I can't dismiss the need for software rendering because I just happen to have one of those graphics cards which does not have freeware or open source 3d acceleration drivers (I think commercial drivers are more expensive than the card itself now and I don't know how well they work).

>>	Would the Quake2 source have any useful code for implementing these features, or are the engines just too different?



It's not just drivers but that so many Open Source GL projects (nobody
here though, surely... ahem) use methods that aren't supported by (and
can even cause serious problems with) many consumer level graphics
cards. So if you are sticking with the Q1 codebase (instead of
hybridizing the two engines or migrating your enhancements to the Q2
source foundation), I think it would be a pretty good idea to look at
the Q2 software renderer.

Merging features of Q2 is apparrently possible, since I see hybids like
MHQuake <http://mhquake.quakesrc.org> popping up already. I wouldn't
expect it to be a simple task, though, as both engines' software
rendering are primarily hand-optimized Assembly.

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