DirectQ Update - 30th January 2012

External textures are almost done. Right now I'm left with trying to work out a solution for cases where textures have the same name but different images. Trouble here is that there are two standards for handling this that have evolved over the years, and ideally I'd like to support them both (previously I'd only supported the QRP standard, currently I only support "textures/mapname/", both are needed as the player could be using a texture pack that uses either). I guess I should be grateful that in this case it stopped at two standards...

Today I brought on RMQ BSP2 support and it works quite nicely. I seem to have lost fence texture support somewhere in a code transition, and I need to add IQM support to DirectQ as well, but my intention is to continue with a fairly minimal set of RMQ features - enough to run it without crashing, but you won't get the full effect.

I've also been doing a lot of code cleanup in some places. This has meant a dropping of some features once again, but overall it's getting good. About those features that were dropped...

Full Kurok support is one. In the end implementing full support was too invasive and I'm thinking that for mods that need more radical engine changes such as this an approach similar to that which I'm taking for RMQ is wiser - bare minimum to run it OK and point people at the dedicated engine that it's meant to be run with if they want the full thing. A large part of this is motivated by the suffering I endured with Nehahra support, by the way.

The ability to load external textures from any directory is gone. Instead there are certain well-defined paths which must be used, and for the most part these are the same as what you'll find in engines such as DarkPlaces, FitzQuake and Qrack (in some cases I've added a few extra, and I'm sticking to my guns by only supporting the DarkPlaces MDL/SPR naming convention - which model does "progs/s_light.tga" get loaded for otherwise?)

There's another I can't remember right now, but I do know that it'll be back with D3D11. Should I hold a contest? First to guess it?