I sense great change on the wind

New host

RMQ moved to icculus.org. We’re now hosted there along with projects such as Alien Arena, ioquake3 and Darkplaces.

Thank you, Ryan, for having us. It’s an honour to be at icculus.

Public forum

There is a public section of our development forum; you’re welcome to drop by and talk directly to the team in their own hideout.

RMQ Forum

We don’t have a proper web frontend yet, but I think our downloads, mapping guide etc. will move there in the future.

 

Arms Race

Enforcers have been seen sporting new gear. The arms dealer is said to be gnounc.

September update

BSP2 has arrived. This is an extension of the old format for compiled maps, BSP files. It raises a few limits such as the permitted maximum vertices and clipnodes for a Quake level. There is a new set of tools for this, based on “Bengt Jardrup’s tools”.

TxQBSP2; WVisBSP2; and LightBSP2. There are currently Windows versions being tested inside RMQ. The format requires engine support, for which MH wrote a document that should help engine coders implement BSP2 support.

The limits have been raised to about double their old values, IIRC, but I think MH isn’t announcing any exact values yet because the stuff is still being field tested.

The entire stuff will be released when it matures some. The person who did the splendid job was MH, author of DirectQ and RMQ engine coder.

Skip support has been integrated into TxQBSP2 (no more extra skip tool needed). A fix that makes origin-rotating bmodels work properly was ported from hmap2, with the friendly help of Lord Havoc (Darkplaces author).

Thus the new TxQBSP2 also supports RMQ rotating entities (ie proper rotating brushes with working collision, using a point entity to mark the origin). The mapping guide has been updated with a graphical example of a rotating door using the “new method”.

From the department of “credit where credit is due”: Gnounc has made some cool assets for RMQ, like this pretty boat. We’re already using quite a few map models. This is something that will increase a lot in the future.

Boats? Yes, water should also become a lot more interesting in RMQ.

Late summer update

All hail the Goat-Mother, Shub-Niggurath.

Here’s the scoop:

The RMQengine is going all-shaders. This was remarkably painless so far, I thought it would lead to more complications but it seems to work fine.

Mapping continues. As far as the BSP format holdup goes, that will hopefully be resolved soon.

A new group of “former human” enemies resulted from a collective design brainstorm on IRC.  This should close the gap between “base monsters” and the rest. The dimensions will become a more dangerous place.

Our current dev cycle lasts until the end of September. I heard talk of multi-map releases. Let’s hope the BSP limit falls in time for that.

New team members: digs (level design) and =peg= (playtesting).

As a reminder, our IRC channel is #rmq at irc.anynet.org.

gb

Videos

Video page updated with the QExpo clips.

2 vids of Monster and Bloodshot playing Demo 2 forthcoming.

Summer Update

1. Ijed and RickyT23 released two RMQ speedmaps. You can run those either with the SP Demo 2 (create a new folder “maps” next to the pak file, and copy the .bsp files there) or with a newer progs etc. (170 MB download).

Here’s the thread at func_.

2. SP Demo 3 is on a hiatus induced by technical obstacles and RL requirements. There is no release date atm.

3. There is continuing work on new enemies, weapons, a really nice new monster roaming system, textures, maps, and a few technical issues.

Status: IQM

mh added support for the new version 2 of the IQM format to the RMQ engine. Since the demo was postponed for a bit, IQM should definitely be part of it.

There’s a new IQM devkit. The new Blender 2.56/2.57 exporters have a toggle to save the material in simple image format, which is great. There are also fixes and a new GPU accelerated demo. Check that stuff out at the IQM page.

Schedule, postponed

SP Demo 3 has been postponed because of technical issues. I can’t go into detail about that, sorry.

There will still be an RMQ booth with new content at QExpo. The demo will be released at a later date.

Stay tuned for updates.

IQM; grass

mh on Inter-Quake model (IQM) support in RMQ:

“more complete support than both Darkplaces and Alien Arena.”

mh’s IQM notes, part 1

mh’s IQM notes, part 2

gb on grass:

 

Schedule, even more updated

We’re on the track towards a triple-map single player demo release during QExpo 2011. That’s around the 20th of June.

Hi-res textures are being phased in at the moment, even though it is a Pandora’s box of unfinished work, and as is usual by now, no one can agree on a common set. But who else should open Pandora’s boxes in Quake if not us?

gb intends to do a full set of new normal maps for the QRP, since the existing ones are often really over the top. This’ll not kick in until after the demo though.

Schedule, updated

The changes of the planned point release will be rolled into the next demo.

SP demo 3 will be released on June 22nd, 2011, for Quake’s 15th birthday. Yes, that is pretty soon.

It will contain maps from episode 1, 2 and 3.

Is anyone willing to try and get the RMQ engine compiling under Mac OSX? Inofficially of course, I’d just be interested to see if it works.