To be honest, qbism looks a lot more like how I remember Quake looking when I first played it compared to a modern OpenGL engine in high resolution. 

Pi"Quake"sso is the 1996 best game ! 

Why Would I Want To Store Clouds

For the same reason that you have a locker for your own personal rain of course. Because you can.

(rain locker = shower in case you didn't know that) 

when it comes to "purist" engines we already have several that do an excellent job

super8 does software rendering tho - this is important.

That said, if Quakespasm were to introduce some shader magic that truly emulated the look of software Quake...droooooooool 

Theres an engine for doom called Chocolate Doom that's very much a "pure" engine, we could do with a Chocolate Quake 

It's called Winquake. 

well obviously WinQuake doesn't run maps with modern limits, bsp2 and all that bojangles. 

Hahaha... yeah I guess it does. :) 

Chocolate Doom also doesn't run maps with modern levels of detail. 

 

I wonder if there's an argument going on right now on the Chocolate Doom forums where people are saying "Over in the Quake community they've got this whole engine family called Fitzquake that plays modern maps with raised limits and levels of detail but visually stays true to the original aesthetic, why can't we have that?" 

I ripped-off the trendy adjective 'meta-nostalgic' from a news post to differentiate from pure retro. Time candy-coats past game memory and dilutes it with MW3.

Kinn: No offence taken, candid first impressions are valuable. Sustaining the genuine feel of classic Quake while removing the burrs and sharp edges is a major historical preservation/ UI project on it's own.

Aside: The Requeim engine includes deep and subtle tweaks to improve gameplay of older maps and nasty old progs. This is code worth stealing. For example, the 'impulse 12' hack gives weapprev support to mods like Mexx.

Magic 8-bit shader: Everyone wants it. Is it even possible? Can the palette be shoved far enough upstream not to look like a downsampled fake? 

...is a limit-removing fork of Choco Doom, but demo recording is disabled.

Doomsday can be set up for classic aesthetic. The slick GUI provides amazing fine grain control but feels more like Doom3 than Doom. 

@qbism:
Regarding 8-bit gl shaders, try quakeforge's gles renderer which uses the colourmap and everything. 

Fitzquake renders in OpenGL, so I doubt that it would be considered true to the original aesthetic by Doom community's standarts.

There are plenty of different Doom source ports out there. Most of them have increased limits, a lot of them have at least some additional modding capabilities, and it's not uncommon for them to preserve the software renderer. 

Well tickle my ptarmigan - that's the first I've heard of quakeforge, and that looks awesome. Ok, we need that in quakespasm. 

Doing it requires bumping the hardware requirements to something that supports fragment shaders and dependent texture reads, with good performance. Broadly equivalent to something that can run Doom 3.

Since this is something that the Quake community as a whole seems incredibly reluctant to accept, it's unlikely to happen in an engine like QS. 

Broadly equivalent to something that can run Doom 3.

So, my laptop from 2006. cool beans.

Anyway, I was only suggesting it as an optional option, not the default or anything. 

A source port like Fitzquake/QS shouldn't turn into bloatware, IMO. Although forking it may be an option. 

True, but I think anything that moves the visuals closer to the original game is a worthy change. 

I'm entirely uncertain how such added functionality could be called "bloatware". 

One of the definitions of bloatware is that it has "higher hardware requirements than the previous version whilst making only dubious user-perceptible improvements". 

quakeforge is probably the most overlooked yet impressive engine out there. taniwha put a lot of work into it (and its tools) the last years. 

dwere

So, explain how adding a new shader to bring the hardware rendering more inline with the software rendering is bloat. That's a great goal to shoot for in many people's eyes. 

Emulating software mode using hardware rendering with fancy shader tricks seems like too much hackiness for such a "practical" engine. Even if the hardware requirements will stay the same.

Especially considering that the difference between software and relatively simple hardware rendering is not that big in Quake compared to Doom. You really need shaders to emulate Doom's light diminishing feature, because it can't be properly emulated with regular hardware fog, which affects the picture big time. On the other hand, shoehorning the picture into the palette is a purely cosmetic feature.