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Re: Migration of all ioquake3 based games to a shared ioquake3 engine.



Unfortunately this plan isn't going to work, however it will still be
partially implemented, outline of issues and plans are as follows:

Upstream developer of UrbanTerror has expressed extreme dislike for this
plan, to the point of not wishing it to be included unless it uses
ioUrbanTerror (slightly modified ioQuake3). This game has been reverted
to using its own engine, because, although it is compatible with
ioquake3, there are minor things that do not work as intended.

World of Padman has been reverted to using its own modified ioquake3
based engine, to fix issues regarding the master server, and server
connection/verification issues.

OpenArena has been reverted (well the changes were never committed to
SVN, so I simply disregard the old changes I had yet to commit) to using
its own modified ioQuake3 engine, due to checksum verification issues of
pak0.pk3 (with normal ioQuake3 it tries to validate against the checksum
of baseq3's pak0.pk3, which obviously fails and causes the game to exit
on joining a pure server). Also, changes to rendering are planned for
OpenArena 0.8.0 which ioQuake3 states will not be accepted back into the
main engine.

Quake 3, will remain using the independently packaged ioQuake3 as baseq3
obviously works perfectly with ioQuake3.

ioQuake3 itself will remain packaged and this will allow new mods a way
to be quickly packaged (only requiring a launcher script + menu entry +
man page), and for the above to be migrated if the issues are ever
resolved. Also, ioQuake3 has been patched to compile against Debian's
libspeex and libspeexdsp.

All these packages are on SVN ready for new inclusion (or upgrade in the
case of OpenArena).

As a final note, the core issue here is the unreceptive nature of the
ioQuake3 team, to new changes. They have refused to accept the
auto-downloader tweaks of UrbanTerror, and state they will accept no
rendering modifications from any other project. World of Padman and
OpenArena could likely work with the shared engine if two minor issues
were fixed: Both packages need to set the appropriate sv_master1, and
fs_homepath in their default.cfg in their main pk3 (rather than hard
coding into their respective engines, although this could be temporarily
worked around by setting these cvars in the launcher script). The main
issue however is the apparent broken nature of the com_standalone cvar.
What I believe this cvar *should* do is as follows:

 - Disable prompt for CD Key
 - Disable connection to ID's authorisation/verification server.
 - Disable checksum verification of pk3's.

What it currently seems to do is only disable the reading and writing of
fs_homepath/fs_game/q3key. I've spoken to upstream about this and they
seem unwilling to change it, preferring that standalone games compile
their own engine with the STANDALONE define set.


Regards,
Jack Coulter

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