I didn't suggest it. Personally I think there are reasons to rather make TC:E completely hardcoded rather then just switching engines. Switching engines is reasonable however I agree ET with source code available is powerful enough. Now TC:E or CQB doesn't need a graphics overhaul, what it needs is to become more competitive. Look at UrbanTerror, years without an update and it has much, much more players then TC:E and CQB together. The upcoming HD version is just so little better then it was before. It's still mostly BSP based, unlike any modern previously BSP based games.
I think CQB rather needs to start using static meshes even more often. I support shaders as well, but only a tight list of shaders that are welcome in 75FPS combat:
- DOF, mainly while aiming
- Very subtle bloom
- Volumetric lighting, subtle too
- Sophisticated particles, real-life looking, so not subtle but small and sharp.
- Tessalation, yup there is a tessalation shader for opengl. Where I want it to see is to enhance normal maps to become real geometry on close-up, as well as getting damaged by bullets(temporarily)
- Shutter based, weight-biased supersample subtle motionblur with limited range. This way it won't be disorienting so it won't change the combat for people with it off
- (Ray-traced) pre-computed reflections. This would enable night combat(which would be AWESOME) but shouldn't be able to be turned off, just lower resolution.
- Multi-resolution screen space ambient occlusion with wider FOV. That's the best one so far. Not only it's the fastest one (around 1ms on X360 I think, that's more then twice as fast) it completely removes the noise problem as well as it is actually more realistic and removes the problem when clipping through polygons and z-fighting(sometimes). And it's source code is available for free!
- Volumetric particles. This includes: volumetric clouds(they look nice, and the same technique can be used on smoke), volumetric blood(enables low-cost sub-surface scattering)(though I highly doubt this would be implented) and volumetric explosions.
- Sharpening, all these shaders will *i-need-a-broader-vocab* up a lot of pixels on the screen, you need to adjust this.
- Screen space eye assimilation simulation. Basically simulating adjusting retina based on the environment, or in other words automatic color shader. There were some papers on this but I can't remember what's it's called like ((
- I won't even mention normal maps because that's so obvious, I will however mention detail maps as that's IMO the biggest pit between ET and newest engines in terms of, well, detail.
Also you need to remove all of the limitations in the engine. Like max polycount, max texture size, max sounds at once etc. The characters can live with some extra detail.
Also I suggest some advertisement. Because the word-to-word sharing didn't really work well did it. Though that was mainly fault of the pro-longed updates and "beta" status. Remove the "alpha" status, say it's "experimental". And go with revision numbering. So not CQB 0.1.1 0.1.2 alpha and so on but CQB r12 CQB r20 etc. It's much more appealing to newcomers and will lead to a greater community. And I think more support and more good, talented people willing to help is what you need at the top priority now.
What can I say... I don't want to sound like a smartass, I'm sure in the past a lot of people came by telling you what to do or not.
But I think I've listed just some rather obvious suggestions, and some worth a discussion. Though based on how often anyone from the team and Coroner visit the forum lately, I doubt anyone actually read this. On the topic, iD Tech 4 source code has the super fast stencil shadows and generally fancy lighting implementation. Why not some copypasta.