Formats/Known regressions since Tremulous

As a mapper or someone creating assets for the game, you may be aware of those pitfalls that can be considered as regressions when comparing with Tremulous or Quake Ⅲ.

See also the Limitations that are not regressions page for things that are not regressions.

Regressions that may make the game look broken

Missing portal blending

Portal blending is not implemented yet in the renderer.

What happens is that the renderer that was used in Quake Ⅲ and Tremulous were OpenGL 1 renderers, and the Dæmon engine renderer is an OpenGL 3+ renderer. The difference between OpenGL 1 and OpenGL 3+ is similar to the difference between OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan. Those renderers are different software. Everything from the OpenGL 1 renderer had to be re-implemented in OpenGL 3+ renderer with new code.

So the lack of portable blending is not technically a regression as the code never existed in the renderer to begin with. It also means there is no bug in our code.

Though, we fully agree this means a map ported from Tremulous that was using that feature will look broken and that then can be considered as a regression from a player or mapper point of view.

From the code point of view, this is a feature request and we need someone to implement it. We are looking for renderer developers and OpenGL 3+ specialist to implement the feature in our engine.

"Autosprite" shaders don't work

See Daemon#322.

Regressions that may make the game look broken, but with workaround

Stereo sound effect not being positional

Currently only mono sound files are played properly as positional audio, stereo sound files are played in your face. We need to fix this.

A simple workaround can be applied when repackaging the files: just convert the positional stereo sound as mono, this would make no difference to the player (stereo positional sound is meaningless anyway).

Regressions that don't make the game look broken

Missing alphaGen lightingSpecular

The alphaGen lightingSpecular was a subtle effect applied on some textures. This feature being missing doesn't break the rendering of the texture and if you look at the surface you may not notice something is wrong, unless you do comparative screenshots with Tremulous and Unvanquished. Github issue

Implementing this feature has very low priority as there is no impact on gameplay and textures don't look bad without it. The game doesn't look broken without it and one cannot know the feature is missing just by playing the game, unless some warning tells it in log.