After reading something on Dev's blog this morning, I told myself that I was going to write something of substance when I got home. I thought I might write about the way that people make decisions and I'd make some solumn but upbeat conclusions in that optomistic way that folks find annoying. I think of a glass half full when it comes to people.

I was thinking exactly that when I got to where I'd locked my bike for the evening. Once I saw my bike though, the thoughts had all turned to dust. Suddenly I hated people.

Someone had stolen the seat from my bike.

It's a cheap-ass bike with a seat that is probably worth less than a dollar or two since it wasn't exactly sparkling and polished. My immediate and continuing thought was what kind of jerk would steal a worthless part off of somebody's basic transportation?

I'm not in a happy mood.

Recently a friend mentioned Tenebrae, an open source Quake engine renderer that uses lighting tricks similar to the upcoming (once again delayed) Doom 3 game from id Software.

Pushing Quake into the eye candy of today's technology is a grand idea. The gameplay of the original Quake is well balanced and solid and many people agree that it puts to shame Quake 2 & 3 and the various incarnations of Unreal. It just doesn't look pretty and that's a harsh drawback in such a visual medium.

In steps the open-source renderers. Tenebrae is just one of many, it's more of a technology demo actually, because the default textures, models and levels of Quake weren't designed for per pixel lighting and shadow stencils. Still it's a radical improvement that kind of blows you away when you compare it directly to say, basic GLQuake.

This morning I tried a few of these engines/renderers and I took some comparative screenshots for your amusement:

• Original Quake (screenshot) & GLQuake (screenshot).
• Tenebrae (screenshot) with mostly default options, check out the rays cast by the stain glass window on the left side.
• Darkplaces (screenshot), which finally adds proper in-menu gamma correction, plus a host of other features, including proper mousewheel support.
• NPR Quake (screenshot), which I had to include because the sketch mode amuses me. =)
• Telejano (screenshot), which is by far my favorite because it does the best to improve what Quake actually does rather than just shove in effects just because they are flashy. The transparency, fog and geocaustic effects are especially excellent. Telejano also maintains a much better framerate than some of the other renderers.

These are just the engines that I tried, there are additional ones out there.

Aside from the engine modifications, there are projects out there to replace Quake's textures and models with art that is a little more up to spec with today's hardware.

Devon just got a sewing machine for her birthday and honestly at the moment, I can't think of a cooler gift to get. It's something that's useful, self-empowering and very likely to be appreciated, yet sewing machines are so expensive that people rarely buy them for themselves.

That got me to thinking selfishly about cool things that I'd like to have that would make my standard of living seem better. Things that I don't absolutely need, but that would be useful and/or nice and yet I couldn't afford them even if I got a new job tomorrow.

• A mini-food processor. Not an all-in-one-wonder, but something small and cute that doesn't take up too much counterspace but that I don't have to spend so much time with a chopping board for my diced onions and crushed garlic.

I'm going with a much more streamlined look for Gameslate this time around.

In the past, for Gameslate I've focused on basic HTML 3.2 that could be read and displayed by nearly every browser since '95 or so, including text-only browsers and whatnot. Although that fit my sensibilities, it kind of held Gameslate back. CSS was used, but only for text styles, allowing a wide margin of falling back on older browsers.

Don't get me wrong, my focus is still strongly on HTML. I'm naturally a minimalist when it comes to Javascript, Flash, Java, DHTML, etc. or even the use of images. I've just moved from an archaic table layout to a more advanced CSS1 & CSS2 layout. Much like my blog-page here, it's all about the stylesheets.

One major difference you may notice is the inclusion of a non-typical font for much of the look of the new site. Rather than push a graphical Gameslate logo, it's drawn in a chalk-style font. The font is embedded for IE users, but the rest of us (I say us because I'm not really an IE fan myself) can download and install it. Even if you don't, I'm happy with a branding of the site just using typical fonts.

Now that the general layout is done, I can get back to work on the coding.

In case you're curious to take a look, a mockup is in place now on the actual Gameslate site.