What is the correct engine? (If there is even one)

[mh]

Not to give the impression that Quake can't do open spaces, of course. The engine is perfectly capable of rendering anything that can be expressed in it's BSP format, including very very very wide open spaces. Just that the rendering algorithms it uses are very sub-optimal when it comes to that kind of scene.

[LordHavoc]

Not to give the impression that Quake can't do open spaces, of course. The engine is perfectly capable of rendering anything that can be expressed in it's BSP format, including very very very wide open spaces. Just that the rendering algorithms it uses are very sub-optimal when it comes to that kind of scene.

The video motorsep linked was in q3bsp format, which is much more outdoor-friendly (as long as the lightgrid is set stupidly large, otherwise the bsp file becomes huge, and tweaking the blocksize can be necessary as well...).

However none of the bsp formats support level of detail switching on chunks, so they're not well suited to vast outdoor landscapes unless you use fog clipping (the Onslaught map included in Nexuiz 2.4.2, ons-reborn, uses fog clipping for this purpose), which is clearly cheating on the whole 'vast outdoor landscapes' thing a bit.

[Urre]

Bah, screw LOD. ETQW didn't do any LOD now did it? I'd call that vast enough for most things

[LordHavoc]

Bah, screw LOD. ETQW didn't do any LOD now did it? I'd call that vast enough for most things

ETQW had no terrain LOD, but it did have architectural LOD - trees and various architectural details would fade out in the distance (using a strange dither mask thing).

It also had very low poly terrain.

[Urre]

Yes well there's the point, you can still do LOD on such things. Just keep the trees and "architectural details" as entities, and you can fade them or change their model as much as you like.