Clients / 3 Apr 2007, 16:23
Renewing QuakeWorld?
Sorry about carrying such a negative tone in this blog, but I have to get this out of my system. Why aren't CRC checksums of alternative models, textures and maps being added to ezQuake? We can make QuakeWorld look good during tournaments right now. We can make QuakeWorld completely free (multiplayer wise) right now. We have the means to do this, but for some reason, nothing is being done.
PrimeviL has been working on making alternative textures for the original Quake models. These textures are very faithful, and holds very high quality. The g_models and v_models (world weapon models and first person weapon models respectively) have been debugged (how come nobody has done this until now?). To put it short, we have pretty much everything we need concerning alternative textures and models except for a certain player model which is cursed and will never be finished by anybody anyway.
These things need to be validated, their CRC checksums need to be included in ezQuake. People have been screaming for alternative models/textures to be accepted in the big clients (before ezQuake it was FuhQuake) for years. Yet nobody is doing anything about it. Nobody is listening to the outcry of the community. We don't want to be limited to having nice graphics only on certain models, we want consistency. We want QuakeWorld to evolve.
Then we have the pak1 maps, recently released under the GPL. Here we have all the possibilities of making Quake free yet nobody is doing anything about it. We have the textures required to replace at least the most played pak1 maps (which is a great start), so why don't we? Compile new maps, rename them, and throw in some nasty hacks to make playing on new as well as old servers possible with these open source maps.
Here are some suggestions / thoughts:
* Make ezQuake detect the GPL maps and emulate the original ones (i.e. send the CRC checksum of the original dm6.bsp eventhough you only have dm6_gpl.bsp).
* Make ezQuake detect the GPL map textures and "translate" them so the GPL maps will use the same 24-bit textures as the original maps. This will remove the need of having double 24-bit textures, or having two different texture packs available for download.
* Make MVDSV accept the dm6_gpl.bsp CRC checksum, so clients other than ezQuake can play with the free maps at least on new servers.
Perhaps these suggestions are not possible to realize. However, my point is simple: the ezQuake security module either needs to be updated with new CRC checksums, or removed altogether. It's keeping QuakeWorld from evolving - which paradoxically is ezQuake's main goal.