leileilol wrote:
Quake2, apart from the software renderer only had hardware accelerated output to OpenGL. It provided MiniGLs for 3dfx and PowerVR cards to wrap to their Glide and SGL APIs respectively since they lack a full ICD as a complimentary. It did not support Direct3D at all. Ever. Just like Quake3's renderer.lib, ref_gl.dll only ever outputs to OpenGL. You don't see a ref_d3d.dll, ref_sgl.dll or a ref_glide.dll do you?
well... okay, so you say that quake2 supports these apis. it would been shorter if you simply would have sayd ..yes. quake2 supports all these apis''.
deal with it.
leileilol wrote:
It's very well known and is no secret in the 90s that John Carmack absofuckinglutely loathed Direct3D. He attempted to code D3DQuake in late 1996 and cancelled it due to how horrid the API was. Do you really expect him to actually put in fully functional "secret" D3D wrappers in his games after that stint?
you just actually proofed this a few lines before in the case of quake2. cognitive dissonance is a very serious thing in psychology. lets deal with this too.
leileilol wrote:
It wasn't until DirectX 10 that John Carmack found appreciation for the API and that, like Quake3 is to Quake2, a complete redux about stripping legacy baggage.
carmack would be actually happy if the whole api would be stripped down, and he would be able to utilize the graphics card directly. basically he prefers software renderers, but he needs the power of gpu-s.
leileilol wrote:
Quake3 made sure up front that it absolutely requires a "100% OpenGL Compliant" 3D accelerator - in the install, on the box, in advertising, etc. There was also an old .plan update that specified what 3D accelerators were not going to run his renderer properly. The year was 1999, the Pentium III and Athlons just launched. What business do you have entitling full support of a new 1999 game for your 486DX4 or school computer? Quake3's minimum requirements were 1997 technology - and the game does run okay on a P2 233 with a Riva128 or Voodoo Graphics. That's pretty much their target system. So sorry they didn't target unaccelerated 486s or computers with hardware intended for schoolwork.
sorry, but the fact is that unreal tournament seriously had won this competition, mostly due to its compatibility. the history judged, and he is a bigger judge than you or me.
lets deal with this too.
leileilol wrote:
The only thing the UnrealEngine has got going over Q3A are working flares and detail textures.
i dont really can point anything in favour of quake3, i am sorry.
leileilol wrote:
It has fractals too but that's just inefficient considering texture upload congestion.
its really entertaining to play with fractals. but maybe not in an fps.
leileilol wrote:
Quake3 actually does have a detail textures subsystem, but use of it was scrapped in development, but still leaving behind the fast detailtexture multitexturing code (lightmap, detail, then the texture). Some licensees use it however (Elite Force, Alice). Licensees fixed the flare code too, which read from a depth test, rather than a traceline that Unreal does so it's much more accurate (though rather expensive).
a game's success does not depends on what experimental technologies they can put together. the engine must provide the higest compatibility, somewhat recent graphics, high performance, technology to enable cheap game development in it. in other words, lightmaps are useless if it decrases the functionality of the engine. however, lightmap generation are a very separate module from the renderer engine itself - or at least, in a modular, properly coded engine, it should be very separated, and it should not affect compatibility. if it affects, thats a technological disaster.
leileilol wrote:
A reason why Q3 ditched having a software renderer is to keep the renderer lean, and the texture detail higher - it ain't going to be fast making a span driver that works lightmaps with variable sized textures that don't align to every 16 texels on a lightmap. It would also be HELL to have the Quake/Quake2 surfacecache drawing system in Q3A. So much memory and CPU would be wasted to get huge 256x256/512x512's blended with lightmaps in memory with 32-bit data. This would be slow, so why bother?
research shows that 90% of the users do not even bother to play with graphics settings.
becouse the people do not really care about the graphics detial. if somebody throws a large slice of the market just to have his engine looking nice with blended lightmaps everywhere, deserves loosing against the competitiors, whose are more open-minded.
leileilol wrote:
History of engines and renderers isn't going to be rewritten in front of those who have lived through those times with the proper hardware, in some cases back then wishing there was a D3D wrapper, such as PowerVR, Matrox, Rage Pro and Rendition users... The only companies I know that did Direct3D wrappers at the time were Matrox (for Matrox cards only), SciTech (GLDirect), Alt Software (altoGL) and Techland (Crimecities TCD3D wrapper). None of them were bundled with Quake3 or Quake2 - the closest has been Heretic II's shipping of the Matrox-specific D3D wrapper (only runs on Matrox hardware), and that was that
history of engines and renderers isnt goint to be rewritten, maybe this is why epic games still in market, and id software fallen out, and was acquired by zenimax 4 years ago.