OA486

[jute]

fromhell, I noticed a post on FreeGameDev where you mentioned working on a version of Open Arena that could run on minimal hardware.  I'm very interested in this.  Some questions:  Is it still being worked on?  Does it preserve OA's style or go for something different?  What kind of texture sizes are you working with (I assume quite small)?  Are there any screenshots?  I'm picturing this lovely gouraud-shaded world but I have no idea if that's accurate.

[fromhell]

8x8 texture size. That is not a joke. The textures planned would actually be .shader files with $whitemap and rgbGen constant.
There's no screenshots

Another goal of the project is to be able to play it on very, VERY old 3d cards that could never run Quake3, and that means i'd also have to restrict the blend modes to alpha-blend only (no additive, multiply or subtractive blend anywhere)

The game would look like a very flatshaded, 'pro competitive gamer's dream world'.

[jute]

That aesthetic sounds great.  Do you plan to reuse OA maps or make new simpler maps?  It seems like you could use some OQ+ resources for hud weapons.  Do you plan on using low-quality audio files?

[andrewj]

Another goal of the project is to be able to play it on very, VERY old 3d cards that could never run Quake3, and that means i'd also have to restrict the blend modes to alpha-blend only (no additive, multiply or subtractive blend anywhere)

Software rendering would make it truly universal.

Anybody added S/W to Quake3?

Maybe Quake2 engine is better on such old hardware (lower memory usage), and MD3 models could be added, but the bot code from Quake3 would be the biggest thing missing.

FWIW I'm going to make my own Quake2 port sometime soon, one which doesn't throw away the software renderer and one which focusses on the single player game [so many other ports kill the single player game, ugh!].

[fromhell]

Anybody added S/W to Quake3?

Nope, there's no interest, and it wouldn't be able to use lightmaps anyway since they're not really friendly for a performance rasterizer with independent pixel sizes versus the textures.

I wouldn't recommend Quake2 engine for anything tbh.

[fufinha]

\:-D/

[andrewj]

it wouldn't be able to use lightmaps anyway since they're not really friendly for a performance rasterizer with independent pixel sizes versus the textures.

I doubt the performance loss would be large seeing that surfaces are cached, hence mixing the lightmap into the surface is done a lot less often than actual rendering of the (mixed) surface.