0.6.4 Almost There (Patreon)

Fixed a couple other bugs now, including one where regular skyboxes would be lacking their top face if a hybrid skybox had been loaded before.

As far as I'm seeing, the only must-have change before the release is to make the video mode selection menu a little more user-friendly by making the test screen stand out more and adding a windowed 1280x720 option.

In the next days I'll be working on updating the asset pack and preparing stuff for the release.

Today I've reinstalled Unreal Tournament '99 to take another look at its software renderer. With all quality options maxed out, it performs nearly twice as fast as Retroquad in full HD resolution, but has a 50% drop in framerate when multiple color blending effects fills the screen. For today's computers, it's a very acceptable performance.

The UT99 software renderer is the best realtime software renderer I know of, and I'm sure that Retroquad will only start gaining traction when it surpasses that. The minimum additional requirements for Retroquad to surpass the UT99 Pixomatic software renderer, as I see it, are pretty much what I described before:

• Multicore rendering.
• Colored lighting.
• Fog.
• HD GUI.

On the other hand, Retroquad does have many improvements that the UT99 software renderer doesn't have:

• Smoother dithering (16 levels versus 4 levels).
• Dithering on all polygons (UT99 only dithers opaque world surfaces).
• Underwater screen warping.
• Dynamic per-pixel turbulent liquids with melt mapping and wavy shorelines.
• Soft depth.
• Interpolated texture frames.
• Trilinear mipmapping.
• Anisotropic texturemapping.
• Scrolling textures.
• HD texture support (not sure if UT99 supports this).
• Actual procedural particles (UT99 uses sprites instead).

There certainly are some features I'm forgetting to list in both engines, but the point remains that it shouldn't be too difficult to surpass the quality of UT99 now.