It's a really tough one to call and ultimately we should be grateful that QS is curated by people who have sensible opinions on what is "quakey" and what is "not quakey ahhhh my fucking eyes".

I do not agree in having a "not in fitzquake therefore we shouldn't do it", cut-off because there's loads of really good potential future things that would benefit quake and still be quakey.

For example, I would looove at some point to see proper static meshes with lightmaps that integrate with the rest of the world lightmaps (to avoid nasty obj2map abuse).

But it's all down to the QS coders and as I said we're lucky that these chaps tend to be on the same page as us. 

no one here will say fog or coloured lighting shouldn't be in QuakeSpasm.

Fog shouldn't be in QuakeSpasm. It's not featured in any of the official versions of Quake (Quake, GLQuake, QW, GLQW, Saturn Quake, Quake 64, and the obscure official ports to dead hardware accelerators). Coloured lighting, however, is present on both Saturn Quake and Quake 64. The Saturn port doesn't use the Quake engine but still is an official port of the game.

That said, community-made maps uses non-Quake features such as fog and skyboxes in too many maps for these features to be ignored. I don't remember a single AD map not using fog. So, they shouldn't be, but they need to be. 

 

Fitzquake isn't just an engine for playing id maps. It is also for playing custom maps. Those features were added so you can play most custom maps as mappers intended. When mappers added fog, colored light, external textures, entity alpha, extended entity limits to their maps, I wanted to be able to experience those maps correctly. I think fence textures and bsp2 support (which QS added) are in line with this philosophy. They don't make existing maps look wrong, they only allow new maps to look/work the way the mapper wants. 

Go map! 

They don't make existing maps look wrong, they only allow new maps to look/work the way the mapper wants.

This is why I am more interested in QSS than FTE or DP. From a mapper's POV anyway. 

Fog is perhaps the single greatest feature ever added to these source ports. No better way to instantly create a beautiful atmosphere.

https://i.imgur.com/cwakFVt.jpg 

Oh absolutely.

BTW - it's possible to make FTE look really, really like Quake - more like Quake than QuakeSpasm currently does actually, because you can enable a lovely 8-bit colormap lighting mode, and mdl lighting that's almost identical to WinQuake (the Fitz/QS mdl lighting is still too bright).

But "out of the box" it has a load of silly stuff turned on (as does DP), so I understand why people are instinctively turned off by it. 

The destruction of my config.cfg file is what REALLY turns me off about FTE. 

@Kinn
depends which preset the user picks when they first run it.

Note that you can force cvars to some specific value in FTE using worldspawn keys, eg: _cvar_r_shadow_realtime_world 0 to cripple any attempt by the user to use rtlights on your map.
Whether it works properly with cvars that need a vid_reload is a different matter, but disabling world lights is fine, and probably needed if your map has lots of lights that use the delay field.

@dumptruck_ds
Destruction?!?
FTE does NOT write a config.cfg - it writes an fte.cfg instead. And it usually writes it to your home dir somewhere too (although you can disable that part with -nohome if you really want). 

Note that you can force cvars to some specific value in FTE using worldspawn keys, eg: _cvar_r_shadow_realtime_world 0 to cripple any attempt by the user to use rtlights on your map.

Ooh, that's pretty good to know.... >:} 

Sorry if I am getting confused but I recall my configs and settings being borked the last time I tried FTE and then went back to another engine. I was a while ago. For recent testing I have an isolated FTE install.

So does FTE keep all my video settings and key bindings untouched if I switch between engines? 

that's the idea yes - so long as you use the cfg_save command (or quit via the menu and pick 'yes' to save, or set cfg_save_auto 1). 

Thanks for that tip, I'll definitely need it for my maps.

I really should spend more time with FTE. It was by far the easiest solution when trying to set up LAN coop on short notice when I was at a friend's house - other engines had socket errors - and I enjoyed my time with it, as brief as it was.