On Mon, Oct 29, 2001 at 02:53:42AM -0800, Forest 'LordHavoc' Hale wrote:
> >We're a small development team from Argentina (my fellow coworker
> >Gerardo and me), and have had a lot of interest in the quake source code
> >since it was first released; So when we heard about Project Twilight, we
> >tryied it and really liked what we saw. if you don't mind, we'd like to
> >ask you some programming questions since you are already very familiar
> >with the codebase, and we think it's a great engine to build upon as a
> >base for future games (it's also great it is GPL).
With Quake, there really isn't a choice. Anything using Quake in any way
that is not GPL should be reported to Id Software.
> >We noticed you took out all (gas) .s files from the build (please
> >correct me if i'm wrong), was it because new hardware renderers won't
> >be affected because of the lack of assembly code?
>
> Minimal speed loss, and improved maintainability (no assembly to keep
> synchronized), less hassle when compiling (particularly less hassle in
> non-gcc based compilers).
Very minimal speed loss. Basically the hand-tooled vector math wasn't a
major loss in performance at all and without the software renderer to bog
down the system it had little effect overall. Combine that with Vic's
table-lookup math and everything is just very fast. Our engine is faster
than most engines which kept the asm. This is not something we're sorry
to hear. =)
> >We are using Borland's free compiler (and vide for the ide). Do you
> >know if there's a borland makefile to build the project, or any utility
> >to convert from Visual C++ project files to borland makefiles?
>
> Borland has some issues with the quake code, and I haven't seen anyone
> with interest in making twilight compile with it... But I think it just
> needs some minor code changes to work with it's slightly odd idea of
> syntax (particularly truth tests on pointers).
>
> DevC++ from Bloodshed Software ( http://www.bloodshed.net/ ) might be a
> better environment to try, it uses mingw which should compile twilight
> easily, although I'm not sure how/if mingw is supported in the twilight
> configuration system (someone else should answer this).
Might also consider using MingW. It's a port of gcc (the compiler many of
us use in unix) to Win32 native code. I don't know what IDEs exist for it
if any, but when combined with a few basics from the cygwin project you'll
have our full autoconf-based buildsystem at your disposal. This is
probably a bit more complex than Borland, but it is known to work, which
is not something we could otherwise say for Borland. It's possible to fix
the code for Borland, but you'll have to build a tool to build your
project files from the Makefile.am's most likely.
> >Where could we get more info about Quake's memory management (zones),
> >cvars, file i/o?
>
> Hmm, I'm not sure where you could get info about them, and twilight has
> changed them around a bit (for the better).
Anything we change in that manner gets documented. So far only the Cvars
have really changed, but they're documented. Changes to Zone, file
access, etc will be forthcoming.
--
Joseph Carter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Free software developer
<cesarb> Damn, every time I spawn, qf-client-x11 locks hard
<Zoid> Don't die?
<Knghtbrd> good incentive.
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