The entire community coalescing around a single engine is ultimately a good thing; there's still room for the maverick outliers, but so long as you do-what-Quakespasm-does you'll get support for pretty much anything released.

The obvious con is that the quirks and idiosyncracies of that single engine become enshrined as part of a standard. That can cause harm - e.g. FitzQuake and earlier versions of Quakespasm had very poor performance with dynamic lights. That can hold back content authors from using dynamic lights, and at one point led to the ridiculous situation where disabling multitexture was touted as a performance tweak.

Fortunately Quakespasm these days is really rather good. 

Regardless of the largely unfounded criticism for Arcane, it has done a lot to reignite interest in this game, arguably alongside some other big releases like Orl's Ter Shib and jam9. On the mapping side, Trenchbroom 2 and dumptruck's tutorials have done wonders in terms of drawing in new mappers. They even got community veterans to finally map after 20 years.

I don't know if the scene is better than ever because I don't know what it was like before. It still seems quite niche to me but it's also doing considerably better than most other classics out there. The number of mappers who turn everything that they touch to gold is still quite small. I'm worried that when they retire, there won't be many people to carry the torch. Many of them already seldom post here or elsewhere.

On the other hand, this has resulted in mappers whom I greatly admire being more accessible. I've gotten tons of advice and insights directly from mappers whom I aspire to match in skill even if only in the smallest capacity.

Targeting a single engine is not a good thing. There are still a bunch of source ports that are actively maintained, and the devs each have different goals. Some of those goals might align with more with specific users. Even if most people are using Quakespasm, there are still a great many who might prefer using Mark V, QSS, Qrack, FTE, and others. There should be some effort made towards supporting multiple ports to a reasonable extent, and there are more reasons in addition to users simply preferring the features of one port over another. 

 

 

AND TOOLS! 

A teleporter, who shows me how he played with a blurry screen in the earthquake in the nineties, threw me into the limelight with quadro-sound grenades and missed voreballs.

Uhm, my old 486 still does it, but I mean the surprise that such a comic strip film can mesmerize me like that.
What else would I like to improve? 

hey guys, been away for a while, not 20 years but a while.

never heard of Quakespasm, what's it do better than the other engines? and who is the whole community that's now using it? can you name some names?

qmaster mentioned tools, what tools are you guys using?

darkplaces and fte are my preferred engines, but fitz is still good for the classic look.

tenebrae was all set to be a great engine, I don't know why they quit developing that one or nobody picked up its source to continue it. 

Is practically Fitz v1.5. 

Tools::
==================
Mapping:
Trenchbroom level editor(fantastic)
JACK level editor (upgraded Worldcraft clone)
ericw's utils for compiking maps with cool lighting, {fence texture transparent support, water alpha, bsp2 oversized, the works

Code (QC):
fteqccgui.exe latest version with lots of great features, arrays, better checks for warnings, support for GIANT progs.dat, csqc support, etc.

Modeling:
Blender 3D with qmdl exporter
Preach's qmdl java applet for adding skins, Skingroups, framegroups, etc.

Textures:
Oh sorry, still stuck with Wally and Adquedit here.
Texmex is alright depending who you ask.
Gimp 2.10 if you like going back and forth a lot into Wally or Texmex and like to fight pallet conversions.

Sprites:
Fimg
Wally plus Adquedit

Lumps (e.g. colormaps, hud icons in gfx.wad):
Fimg
Adquedit 

Quakespasm is a continuation of Fitz that's been heavily adopted by the SP mapping community. Namely on this website but also Quaddicted, which has promoted it as their recommended engine over the past seven years. It has some new features, but it's primarily a faster, cleaner, cross-platfrom version of Fitz/GLQuake with increased limits.

Quakespasm-Spiked is awesome if you want an updated version of Fitz with enhanced networking, modding and mapping capabilities. 

Quakespasm = bog standards plus fence texture support, alpha on any entity, bsp2 map size support, fog, skyboxes, colored lighting.

QuakespasmSpiked (QSS) = Quakespasm plus awesome features Spike added plus support for high framerates above 72fps, e.g. for 144hz monitors.

MarkV = same as Quakespasm for the most part but with better HUD options, cool map and mod loading features, excellent coop support, mirrors

FTE = you know better than I. As far as I know it is DarkPlaces plus the stuff Quakespasm has and a few extra awesome things Spike came up with that I don't understand yet :P

DarkPlaces = cool graphics options. TERRIBLE WATER!! Buggy physics outside of standard hulls. Loads of mod features. 

If you want anyone to play your map, target Quakespasm, otherwise GLWT. 

the main reason is frogbot support, not sure why , but sometimes QS refuses to properly launch that mod

i like the MV fancy features, tool_ etc, qmb

the FOV adjusting feature 

cannot recall any significant release this year, other than sham1m1 

a concern of mine is that with quakespasm it means you have to use the BSP2 map format, and not FBSP or a Q3 or even newer format which has more features.

FBSP has higher res lightmaps and lightstyles support, maybe some other differences that i can't remember.

from mh:
The objective of BSP2 is to address some limits in the stock BSP29 format. -- BSP2 is not a radical revision of the format. You won't find RGB lightmaps, detail brushes, 32-bit textures
or any such major overhaul here. These are left for other already standardised ways of providing such
content.

i'm interested to know if detail hint and skip brushes can indeed be used for BSP2. also how to create these RGB lightmaps? i thought colored light was only done with rtlights. can q3 style bezier patchmesh be used? can high-res lightmaps be created for BSP2 which are as big as FBSP? are we talking 2k maps or 4k or ?

another benefit to FTE (and i believe also dp) is it supports IQM/IQE model format, i can't find any document saying if quakespasm supports it or not.