Asset Pack notes (Patreon)

Working on the asset pack for the Power User Edition today. This release will be very similar to what came with the Retroquad 0.1.0 release, but will be constantly revised and updated over time.

For vanilla Quake (ID1), no batch file will be provided; it's not necessary anymore.

The batch files for mission packs and mods have been simplified to this:
@start /affinity 2 Retrquad.exe -game hipnotic

Quake uses -hipnotic and -rogue to configure the mission packs, but Retroquad automatically detects and configures the mission packs when they're started with -game.
The -hipnotic and -rogue commandline arguments may be completely eliminated in the future. Using -game for everything simplifies engine usage.

start /affinity 2 is used to restrict the engine to the second CPU core. This reduces the chances of cache issues due to the operational system switching the engine around in the CPU, but only makes a significant difference when hyperthreading is disabled. I've selected the second core because I guess the operational system will likely assign other high priority tasks to the first core more often, but you're free to change that to another core, or eliminate this part completely.

Once multicore rendering is implemented, start /affinity 2 will be irrelevant because the engine will automatically define the affinity.

The -game commandline option will also become irrelevant once a mod menu is implemented. Ideally, most commandline options should be eliminated and replaced with more user-friendly configuration methods.

I still haven't defined exactly how the mod menu will be implemented. It should work like a launcher, and use internal graphics instead of operational system interface elements, for better portability and perfect consistency accross sytems.

Compiled textures will probably be released in a separated archive. This way I can update the asset pack more often, instead of uploading over 1GB every time.

I am not sure if I'll include recompiled BSP maps or just VIS patches for the original ID1 maps. Recompiling the maps is the only way to get lightmapped liquids, but for all releases done through Patreon I want to avoid potential issues with files containing Quake's registered version textures (which weren't released through GPL).

For music files, I'll likely just link to MP3 files hosted in Quaketastic or Quaddicted.

I won't place any restrictions on Retroquad's asset pack files, because it also has lots of community content. And even the external textures, which I've taken days to compile, were mostly created by other people (there are only some textures which I've edited). My work in the Retroquad's asset pack is mostly to curate, test, adjust, configure and package their contents.

I'm also adjusting the custom progs.dat file included in Retroquad for vanilla Quake. Engine parameters for the emitter shading were modified, so I have to update the qc source to match that. And there are a couple other changes to do as well.

Contents for more mods will be added over time.