Main features:
* New Mission Pack! (The Unofficial but commercially-released Abyss of Pandemonium)
* 400% faster average level-loading speed (down from 48 seconds on an average computer + average level to 12 seconds)
* Better quality map textures (compared with originals using darkplaces texture compression)
* Many texture updates for MP2
* Slightly faster
* 30% smaller download for main build
* Corrected linux and mac launcher scripts so they can be run from the GUI and from within folders with spaces in their names
* Corrections and texture updates for third party expansion packs
* Level-names in-game + 16:9 ratio HUD fixed, courtesy of Nahuel/Smith/Dresk's fantastic in-game HUD
* Many small fixes for various bits and pieces
* Unzipping problems fixed
The new main build is dedicated to d1554573r from quakeone who originated the idea for converting the rygel textures to dds format - this kills load time, is slightly faster in-game and gives better quality than the regular textures (once they've gone through darkplace's own mipmapping and real-time texture compression). And of course it makes download size much smaller too (down from 2.3GB for main build to 1.45gb). I'd love to compress this with 7zip and make it 1GB to download, but unfortunately 7zip doesn't support the file permissions required to run the game under Mac or Linux. I re-did d1554573r's work to correct some specular highlight and detail issues I was seeing and also to fix some rygel textures, but all credit for the idea goes to him.
For those of you who just want to play Abyss of Pandemonium, all you need is the main epsilon build, the commercial .pak files for Quake, the epsilon MP2 addon and the MP3 (Abyss) addon.
There've been fixes for small things in each of the addons, including doing the same .dds transformations for the mp1 and mp2 map textures. Unfortunately I couldn't do the same for monster textures, as darkplaces doesn't presently work correctly with dds + scripts.
Also of note, the release of Mission Pack 3 aka Abyss of Pandemonium, the unofficial (but commercially-released) expansion and 'final chapter' for quake original.
It's a great game.
I added detail and re-did the abyss-specific monster and weapon textures, and did the same for Travail-specific textures and some The Myths stuff as well.
See mission pack 3 for full details.
Abyss took me a long time to work on, somewhat surprisingly.
A secondary note for version-number-junkies - I try to make each subsequent build better from subjective and objective perspectives, more accessible than the last, but there've been some who've asked why I'm not using later versions of X/Y/etc. There are only two components of the build which've changed significantly over the past two years, the smc and the darkplaces engine. There are very clear reasons why I haven't updated those - for the smc, it's because most of the work I did on that was to tone it down, but the direction it has moved in is towards more stuff which distracts from the atmosphere of Quake, in my opinion. And there are no new effects that I'm interested in (although I have to admit, the slow-mo and zoom effects are kinda cool). For the darkplaces engine, even at the time I released 1.0 it was an older version, the reason I use it is because it has better subjective quality in some aspects, but mainly because the speed is better - later versions clock in at about 10% slower, on average, and 50% on some heavy-shader/particle scenes. Since this is an issue that impacts heavily on epsilon users, I figured there was no need to change. There are many fixes in later versions, but none which impact significantly on single-player usage as far as I know.
So, sorry about the delay ;)
Enjoy-
Matt
