December's Public Release Plans (Patreon)

Been thinking about doing another public release in December.

While all public releases so far brought major features to the table, I'm thinking that for the next public release it's better to just focus on what's already implemented.

This means making everything more polished, fixing more bugs, optimizing things better, and increasing/removing some more limits.

All textures will have to be recompiled for the next public release, including the HD textures. After implementing HD texture support on MD5 models, I've found out that the engine is running out of RAM for some maps. The most sensible way to address that is to reduce the 8x resolution textures from the QRP pack to 4x resolution, which will free enough RAM to allow the engine to load HD textures for more things such as 2D sprites and the GUI.

The long term solution for memory usage is to port Retroquad to 64 bits, but this is not in the plans yet. Anyway, reducing the resolution of the HD textures also gives other benefits such as smaller download sizes, lower storage requirements, and faster rendering. My own plans for creating an indie game using Retroquad also includes using 4x resolution textures, because they look detailed enough in full HD.

Another reason why the next public release won't show any new major feature by default is because while Retroquad supports MD5 models now, all of the available MD5 models for Quake were only released commercially, in the Quake remaster by Nightdive Studios, so there's no way to include them in the public release of Retroquad. Players will have to manually copy the models from their Quake remaster installation.

Another new private version of Retroquad should also be coming up this week. I'm polishing the work that was done since the last version, adding a couple more autosave features, and fixing a few bugs.

For next year, I'm definitely going to implement HD GUI support and start developing a single player indie game using Retroquad. This means development will eventually shift more to gameplay features and asset creation.

I've also been doing some changes to the QuakeC gamecode used in the public releases of Retroquad, improving some visual effects. Among other changes, the lightning gun now produces particle-based sparks when hitting solid walls, a bug that caused jumping enemies to become invulnerable was fixed, and negative lighting shadows will be removed from enemies in water.