Questions about IRIS and working with the engine

Hi!

Since I have already messed with GTKRadiant in the past (years ago, when Q3A was way the best game to play) and since I know a little about manipulating the Q3A configs and content (even though I played around a little with Q3A I am still far away from calling myself a Modder ... :( ) I wanted to know some things about IRIS:

What about the maps: Since I read that u can build *.bsp Maps 4 IRIS with Radiant, but on the other hand read in the readme.txt that the maps need to be "edited" to work with IRIS I wonder what I should keep in mind when building maps for IRIS. Can the maps be compiled in vertex only, for example? Or with full lights? Can I use the Q3A Items? Or do they not work with IRIS? And if they work: How can I implement them? Can I just extract the needed files from Q3A *.pk3 files and copy in a "certain" folder and they run with IRIS? Or what do I need to do if I want to take over certain stuff from Q3A? I mean it seems obvious that if I just drag 'n' drop Items from Q3A to IRIS they will not work (e.g. health bubbles will not give the player hp ... this is not implemented into IRIS I suppose etc.) but I justwanted to see these things in my maps ...

Another thing are the Models: How about the player models? Can they just be taken from Q2 fanpages and used in IRIS without ANY modification?

It'd be nice if any Coder of IRIS would write some information about the maps and the models (and maybe some other things like "how to ... edit the HUD" or whatever ...)

A big THANK YOU for the IRIS engine and thx in advance for answering my questions :)

Iris is a rather barebone engine, as far as the public release goes not much you can modify.

You can create maps easily (must be compiled with q3radiant 202, because of the q3map compiler)

the MD2 format is the same as the Quake 2 MD2 format, nothing is changed

the only supported texture format is 24 and 32bit uncompressed TGA's under a 256 color restriction

and you cant really edit much elce...

hmm, okay. I played around with IRIS a little (got ingame, loaded some maps and models etc.).

This all seems pretty nice. But when can we expect something new? Or can u tell us how to implement a HUD? I mean like health status and so on. aren't there any things we (as non- or semi-coders) can contribute? Or can u give any information about how I can implement additional Items into the game?
Is it possible to add weapons to the game? Since this engine resembles Q2/3 in a way and the weapon model wasn'T changed in Q2 either when changing the weapon of use, I just don't expect this to be THAT difficult. Or is this already implemented by u?

Please, just tell me some more details about the whole engine and the game and how to manipulate IRIS.

AND ANOTHER QUESTION: I think I have seen u Produkt at the website of LTE3D ... do ya start to mess with that engine a little more than u do with IRIS atm?

Is it possible that ur IRIS and LTE 3D Engine are pretty similar? I mean as u said u built up IRIS from ground up but I mean becasue they both orientate on Quake engines, isn'T that true?
As I already said, I am not a coder (not yet :p ) but for me it looks like this'd be the case

Greetz and thx in advance for the answer!

[EDIT]: Produkt, where r u from?

Ok, well Iris hasnt been deamed ready for source release... and with our current development setup we cant decide how we are going to manage this

Initialy when the iris engine was first in development we would have a game code extention in the form of a .PRX this would cause a problem allowing mods only to be playable on 1.00 and 1.50

this is a bit selfish but releasing a master empty engine causes a little bit of chaos with modders... more to come on this sort of matter in the neer future.

no modifacations to the current release are possible other than maps, models, and textures...

A good number of years ago I did pc games, At that time and to this day I've always though the engine used hard to manage outdated forms of precompiled formats (unfortunately iris uses the same MD2 format... mainly due to its simplicty and ease of implamentation) unfortunately the format has too many short comings to be a pasable format in my book.

to match that Irrlich has always had a bit of visual defects that have bothered me you will notice it when looking around in the psp demo of LTE (examine the ladders)

The Iris engine and LTE engines are similar in concept but the way in which they were coded are different... It may seem like favoritism but I enjoy the Iris engine much more mainly for its optomization seeing as we can run the same enviroment at more than double the speed of LTE

(we probably can run more if the PSP didnt have a forced Vsinc...)

Heh... I dont like stalkers...