Hey jitspoe,
I might take a stab at helping you out with some feature additions for Build 17, I just wanted to pick your brain on a few things first.
In terms of context menus(right-click) would it be best to push a menu(those widget ones) drawn at the x/y of the mouse or just manually draw the sub menu?
Probably push them, but I may be doing a complete overhaul of the GUI, so it may be a moot point.
I'll take a look at the HUD code whenever I get a chance but I was wondering if it would be worthwhile giving clients the ability to customize their huds with hud files. However, that could just open up another bag of nasty bugs.
I started making the HUD customizeable with cl_hudstyle. There's only 1 style now, though, and it's hard coded. Having some kind of scriptable HUD's might be nice, as everybody seems to have different preferences. Some like it big so they can see it without looking down. Some like it microscopic so it doesn't take up any of the viewable area.
Branching off from the HUD topic, I find it very neat to see that status/location of teammates in Q3/Q4 TDM games as part of the hud. Was thinking that it could be possible to check for an existing .loc on the client and if one exists periodically poll the server for the coordinates of the teammates and make the location checks locally on the client. I'm sure the lookup code is fast and efficient enough to prevent any slowness issues.
This could be very complicated and cheat-prone. It would probably require modifying the network protocol to do it right.
What's preventing vweps from being implemented like you had outlined in your Q2 vwep tutorial on jitspoe's joint? Were you planning on creating new ground models for all the markers and hadn't gotten around to doing it, or are you just waiting to make sure everything is solid with the new player model?
There was no point in doing the old-style vweps since we're redoing the player models. They should be a lot easier to implement now, as the weapon is just attached to the hands instead of requiring all of the player animations.
In terms of sound system improvements I don't think that there is much worth doing to Q2's sound and more players should be taking advantage of the a3d sound if their hardware allows. I've been using using the 3d sound on my SB Audigy Gamer card with the new creative beta drivers(that unlock the OpenAL support) and everything is going great with a couple minor issues here and there (I've been sitting on a draft post on some of the issues I've encountered with it).
I was planning to branch the sound system out kind of like the rendering system and have different libraries that could be loaded: DirectX 2D (fast) sound, OpenAL, Direct3D, OSS, ALSA, SDL, etc.
I cannot locate the surface footsteps you had defined and recorded. Could you post a list and maybe myself of someone else can start categorizing existing textures to them. Had you planned on making something similar for paintball hitting these surfaces?
I have footsteps on just about every surface, but the snow one may not be very good. I have not created a list, but off the top of my head:
Cement (this would be the generic sound for anything not defined), dirt, grass, sand, metal, wood, snow, loose rock, gravel. I haven't gotten around to editing them and may kind of mix and match a bit, ie: mix sand + gravel to make it a little more audible and gritty sounding.
One last thing. Have you seen any Q2 engine mods which mimicked the Q3/D3/Q4 level loading/pre-fetching screens that appear while loading maps? I think I had seen one a while back on one of the Q2 engine dev forums, but I'd never be able to find it. Thought it might be an interesting addition.
There are plenty like that. I'm not sure if I like that or not - it's nice to just be at the console so you can quickly execute commands if you need to. Eventually I'll probably beef up the loading screens, but it's not a very high priority to me.
