Move OpenArena engine to Rend2?

[hairball]

Any thoughts on OA's renderer vs. the new ioquake3 rend2?

James Canete committed his rend2 (formerly renderergl2) renderer into ioquake3.  OpenArena is not compatible with it and crashes immediately.  Previously, James said he could help integrate any OA specific changes to rend2 but his first priority is Reaction Q3.  Now that rend2 is in ioquake3, it seems like a good time to start to move OpenArena to rend2 if you want.

The unofficial openarena_engine now includes rend2 but it is disabled by default.  You can uncomment BUILd_RENDERER_REND2=1 in the Makefile.local to build it.

https://github.com/undeadzy/openarena_engine

https://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4358#c67

[Neon_Knight]

Does it guarantee mod/map compatibility? It's still a main objective of OA.

[fromhell]

"Move" is a bad word.  RendererGL2 when I tried, wasn't very satisfactory. How it is now crashing immediately is a very bad sign.

Notably why not:

• Autosprites/tcMods are broken
• No RAVENMD4
• Shader syntax isn't very backward compatible leading to having to create new separate shader files for rend2 to maintain compatibility with the original renderer
• Not enough flexibility for lighting (exponent textures lacking)
• It's not going to solve the stiff animations problem
• I like my system requirements low. Going Rend2 exclusively won't help that.

[hairball]

"Move" is a bad word.  RendererGL2 when I tried, wasn't very satisfactory. How it is now crashing immediately is a very bad sign.

Oops, sorry.  I don't normally login most of the time so I forget to check the OA3 board.   s/move/support/

Notably why not:

• Autosprites/tcMods are broken
• No RAVENMD4
• Shader syntax isn't very backward compatible leading to having to create new separate shader files for rend2 to maintain compatibility with the original renderer
• Not enough flexibility for lighting (exponent textures lacking)
• It's not going to solve the stiff animations problem
• I like my system requirements low. Going Rend2 exclusively won't help that.

Fair enough.  Now that rend2 is in ioquake3, autosprites, RAVENMD4 and lighting flexibility are bugs or enhancements outside of OA.  Adding new shader files is impacted by OA's resources though.  Is it feasible to have new shader files?

[fromhell]

  Is it feasible to have new shader files?

If I don't like warnings on renderers that don't support them, yes.

[Suicizer]

"Move" is a bad word.  RendererGL2 when I tried, wasn't very satisfactory. How it is now crashing immediately is a very bad sign.

Notably why not:

• Autosprites/tcMods are broken
• No RAVENMD4
• Shader syntax isn't very backward compatible leading to having to create new separate shader files for rend2 to maintain compatibility with the original renderer
• Not enough flexibility for lighting (exponent textures lacking)
• It's not going to solve the stiff animations problem
• I like my system requirements low. Going Rend2 exclusively won't help that.

So any benefits when moving to rendergl2?

[pelya]

Also, I will not port Rend2 to Android, because I don't know how to program shaders, and there is one huge difference in GL ES 2 compared to OpenGL+shaders - there are no texture units, at all - you'll have to explicitly replace them with shaders. So it seems more complicated than porting from OpenGL with no shaders to GL ES 1.