Tr3b, head developer over at the
XreaL Project, announced yesterday that he plans to port ET to his "XreaL Engine". One of the main advantages of the XreaL Engine is its renderer, based in id Tech 3, but massively improved - and able to compete with modern commercial game titles. Tr3b has already started working on the project, and says "I already diffed the vanilla Q3A renderer code with the ET one and there aren’t many changes. Most changed lines contain the new skeletal animation code and there is some new foliage and decal rendering code. It is not particular difficult to merge those changes into the XreaL renderer."
For years there have been calls on Crossfire for somebody to "just update the graphics and leave the gameplay alone", could this be the update so yearned for by the community?
Tr3b has also posted a YouTube video of "Parallel Split Shadow Maps" in the XreaL engine, leaving us to imagine an ET that looks as good as, if not better than what is in the video.
XreaL-Project.net
Official Announcement by Tr3b