🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3441bc8...@nntp.netcomuk.co.uk>,
Felix Harris <fel...@netcomuk.co.uk> wrote:
>
>About 15-20 different magazines say that it uses the Q2 engine. And
>mostly the Q2 engine is finished, there working on levels and models.

OK; I won't ask you to name the 20 magazines, especially since I have little
faith in them "getting it right".

So, I looked this up in Raven's Hexen2 FAQ.  This below is the way it is as
of whenever the FAQ was last updated.


> Rick Johnson: As far as I know, id has only given quake2 codebase
> updates to Raven - For the most part, we are still based upon the
> original quake 1 engine (though this will be changing shortly) -
> all rendering changes (except for rotational brushes) were made
> by myself/ben gokey. The statement I made about not using much q2
> code, though this will be changing soon, did refer to a big id
> update they were going to send us (i.e. new map/bsp format,
> integrated rendering, quakeworld network base, etc), and I was
> going to re-implement all of the game-c changes we made into this
> new codebase.


Whether or not they ever got said "big id update" I don't know.  The .plan
file entry that Rick is referring to is this one:

> 6/23/97
> OK, have to get this cleared up - all of the new rendering features
> (translucency, dynamic scaling, etc) in hexen 2 (with the exception
> of rotating brushes) were developed by Ben and myself - these were not
> taken from the quake2 engine. John Carmack independently added
> translucency to quake2. Very little of the codebase is from quake2,
> though this will be changing shortly.
> Hacked in *something* over the weekend - looks ok, but I'm not sure if I
> will take the time to finalize it - got way too much to do, and
> a big black cloud floating (i.e. large ugly task) over my head as well.
> As of right now, I'm only planning on supporting software rendering and
> gl rendering - I've only seen quake effectively run on a 3dfx based
> board, which is supported by the gl stuff.


As for your claim that the Quake2 engine is mostly finished, and has been
for a while now, that's not the case I don't think.  Check the .plan files
of the id guys.  The map/model/art development has been proceeding in
parallel with the engine development.  And the .plan files of Cash and
(especially) Carmack make it clear that significant work on the engine is
still going on.

_But_ apparently, according to the above text snippets, some Quake2 features
did find their way into Hexen2; how many is not clear (since I suspect the
FAQ is at least a little outdated).  If that's enough to say that Hexen2 is
"using the Quake2 engine", OK.  *shrug*  As long as that terminology isn't
misleading people about Hexen2's capabilities.

Anyway my interest in this topic has expired. :-)


--
Joel Baxter   jba...@lemur.stanford.edu   http://lemur.stanford.edu/~jbaxter/
aka lemurboy  Clan 9 From Outer Space      http://lemur.stanford.edu/clan9/