I have built the engine on OS X, and it ran fine with a few minor glitches. Since I can't compare it to the Windows build, I made a demo where I show the glitches. It would be nice if someone could watch it and confirm which of those are known problems and which are specific to this build. One thing I noticed was that the light around the laser beams was very bright and looked odd. It's described in the demo and I have also made a screenshot.

MH, I have also made a patch against r3.485, it would be nice if you could review and apply it. I also had to change a bunch of function pointer types because the compiler would not find them. Everything else works fine. I have also included the UDP networking driver instead of the broken one from my original SDL port.

If anyone else wants to try this build, you have to download the demo from here, unpack it, use the Windows installer to extract the files and place then move the rmqwinter11 folder and the build into your Quake folder.

Ok, here are the files:
OS X build (OS X 10.6+ on 32bit or 64bit systems)
Demo of E2M1RQ with some visual glitches
Odd lighting of enforcer laser beams
Patch against r3.485 for MH

If you run into any problems with this build, report here and I'll see what I can do. 

The team has demonstrated resistance against most kinds of constructive critic in the past so don't waste your energy trying to help them make it good.

This is bullshit; re-read this thread and see how we reacted to serious technical criticism. We are very open towards it. It is quite illuminating that the only things you posted in this thread, Spirit, were obviously meant to portray us in a bad light. That's pure classical trolling.

Nitin: The comment about being clutching at straws was made @ Fladjern, not at ZQF. I said I respected ZQF's opinion but didn't share it. Re-read the thread.

@ all: We have every right to make the kind of game we want to make, due to us being the ones getting off our arse and making it. If you call this attitude high-and-mighty, and if you perhaps think you should be the ones making the game (only with us doing the actual work, you know), then we're not living in the same world. Let's see how many shits id software or Zenimax will give about you when they one day decide to remake Quake.

@ the name: We can name our game what we want, I'm sorry, but deal with it.

If you'll excuse me now, I have work to do. I'll gladly answer any more serious feedback towards the demo, and I'd like to watch more demos, but a lot of you are just wanting to act butthurt and troll, so I'll leave you to that. Not that I expected anything else.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lnjwsdhPxV1qdd8wro1_r3_500.gif 

This is bullshit; re-read this thread and see how we reacted to serious technical criticism.

Actually, I read the last demo thread, and apparently barely anything that was universally complained about was changed.

If you post demos and then tell everyone to fuck off with their opinions, then it's not us who are trolling. 

yeah, http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60279&start=248&end=248 

I remember reading that and being disappointed that you didn't like it :( 

Does the random enemy placement also happen when I load a savegame? Because I could have sworn that after I loaded a savegame, there were enemies there which I had killed before. 

but I believe that the enemies which have already spawned at the start of the map will remain in the same place, but the enemies which are randomly spawned that are triggered as you progress are chosen at the point that they are triggered, so there will be some enemies which are in the same place when you load a savegame, but some which would be triggered later on which could theoretically spawn differently. 

gb

The topic has text in it that says:

"Let us know what you think"

If you aren't actually interested in feedback, then please don't put that in your news topics. Or change it to, "Praise is welcome and nothing else" or something like that. 

I mean, ffs, stop whining about you being the ones doing all the work. You chose that! Nobody is forcing you to work on this thing.

And if you're going to be a pissy prick every time you release a demo and people start telling you what they like and don't like, DON'T RELEASE DEMOS. Just work on your game in isolation and be happy. 

It's a 'corona' light blob, just like in bad'ol glquake. Cant turn it off, unfortunately. 

It seems more pronounced, or maybe QuakeSpasm doesn't have it so I'm not used to it anymore.

On a different note, I seem to be able to walk through the ladders to and on board the ship in e2m3rq. Is that a bug that's in the Windows version, too? For the ladder that leads up to the ship, I had to noclip to get aboard. 

r_show_coronas 0 

r_allowerrors_0 :) 

I will be busy trying the milk out the enjoyment of this mod.

I do realize the Func people are easily startled, but will be back and in greater numbers. 

I'm not 100% sure either tbh, but I think that monsters are all set at the start of the map and never change.

It's using Preach's old I3d tutorial, the same method in Quoth so the monsters don't actually spawn in, they're still placed, just turned off.

Then when triggered they appear and do whatever their little brain desires.

There are some other factors that can make things different though, like roaming, and some monsters also have teleportation abilities. 

So I guess if a monster shows up on map load that was not there when I saved that is either related to bad memory on my part or a bug. I'll see if I can reproduce this. 

whats the plan regarding introduction to the player of changed/new behaviour of monsters/weapons etc from standard quake? Just via readme or in game? 

I'd like to do a Manual, but that'd just be for fun - the player should be able to learn everything they need from the game itself.

In any case, they're still not that complex, and I see things like how randomized spawning or roaming work being of more interest to the mapper than a regular player.

One major difference (that wouldn't be visible to someone completely new to the game) is that monsters get better at using their abilities and attacks on harder difficulties.

What I mean is there's lots of stuff thats new to Quake, but you'd take for granted in any other game made after 1996. 

e3m2rq demo
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/e3m2rq_ankh.7z 

 

I couldn't watch all of e3m1rq - there was a disconnect cable error about halfway through and it locked up.

Nice e3m2rq demo - you figured out how the blaster worked and even seemed to be having fun, in a pants wetting terror sort of way :)

A hint about the secrets - in e3m2rq at least they're usually where they were before, although with a slightly different access method. 

I didnt mean features like random spawning or roaming but meant core mechanics (that I've read about) like Shamblers teleporting or ogres with different attacks etc.

I'm not sure how you would introduce the vhanges personally but is the plan that players will just work it out? 

If an Oger fires a rocket at you then its pretty obvious what is going on - same for one with double chainsaws or whatever.

Shamblers only dimension door when at a higher skill level and specifically flagged to do so by the mapper. And they're Shamblers - one of the high-tier enemies and as such players who see this happen are already going to have a good enough understanding of the world in order to understand what's going on.

Basically, yes, the idea is for the player to figure it out on their own.

As you'll remember the original monster descriptions were very rudimentary:

http://quakeone.com/q1files/documents/q1manual.pdf

Probably an added explanation there of the the Shamblers being able to telport in special circumstances on high skills would be a single sentence. 

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/e3m3rq_ankh.7z

e3m3rq demo. It stops somewhere in the middle of the map after I died from squishing (twice).
The map is very quake'y. Too long though.
What is it with the 4th button that can't be pressed?
The fog-poison area wasn't a nice experience/ 

Just yet - technical issues.

I've rethought this map quite a bit, the next version will be shorter and more objective driven.

4th button - I assume you mean one that has a 'rusted' message. The idea is to weigh it down to depress it. 

Is a bug... I'm assuming the shutters that raise there in the middle gibbed you - maybe they're off-axis or something.

The second one is intentional, just unfortunate the NPC placement - he's supposed to show you the danger by getting squished. 

... But I can't seem to quickload (or even load). Engine says "Hunk_Alloc: failed on 4194336 bytes". What's up with this? Any workarounds? I restarted the freakin' thing like 15 times...

Yesterday e2m1rq worked just fine... 

That's most likely one of the 1024x1024 textures. If you can get to the point where you can at least see the console and menus I know that it's not the post-processing textures (which would only be loaded at this size if you were running a video mode of something like 1024x768).

That leaves the replacement textures supplied with the pack. You could try either deleting or renaming your "textures" directory and see if it will load then; that would confirm that it's one of those.

RMQ allocates a 128mb heap by default, so options for you if that succeeds would include specifying a larger -heapsize (try 256mb).

Also, if you're using any other replacement content (e.g. in ID1) kill that to see if it fixes it.

Finally, if you're running Quoth with RMQ (unlikely but I have to check) then don't. Quoth isn't compatible with everything out there, and has been observed to break other mods (ARWOP is one I can remember from recent-ish).

And don't rule out something else on your PC as a possible trouble-maker. If nothing in RMQ content or it's engine has changed, and if it worked yesterday, then it's always possible. 

Let's see... A bit more info:

my command line is as follows, "C:\QUAKE\RMQEngine-Win32.exe -heapsize 56000 -game rmqwinter11 -sndspeed 44100 +map e3m1rq", I'm playing on a 3,1 Ghz Intel Core Imac with 8 gb ram on Parallels (I just played Serious Sam 3BFE on medium/high settings pretty well, and Wolfenstein 2009 works like a charm). I'm emulating a win2k machine that was my former pc and managed without a hitch the previous RMQ demos.

If I start the level from scratch, the loading goes just fine, trouble starts when I F6 and then F9.
There, it crashes.

I played up to the button that opens the first two doors, after having found the gunsmith secret...

I'm going to bed now, tomorrow I'll try something you suggested... Thx a bunch! 

Why don't you try the Mac Port of RMQEngine I posted above? I would be interested in your feedback. I am running it on a very similar system and it works like a charm. 

A very small heapsize - try 256000 or 512000.

I suspect this is the sounds in that map bombing things again. 

Is nowhere near adequate. e3m1rq actually needs only 16mb heap to run, but it will need a LOT more during loading as temp storage is heavily used.

A 1024x1024 skybox, for example, will need about 45mb of temp storage to just load. It's all discarded immediately after (as soon as the textures are created) but the texture data has to come from system memory in the first place (that 45mb includes files as they are opened and read, then converted to BGRA (cos it loads faster than RGBA)).

All maps will load and play fine using the default heapsize in the engine, so either drop it from your command-line or use a higher value (with 8gb of RAM you really have no need to be using just 56mb). 

Try the Mac port! :) 

...What happened is that my heapsize was inherited from who know when via multiple copy+paste. I was not aware it was set SO low. Sorry to have even asked. I should have thought this by myself. Maybe too tired to think, tonight I'm gonna set things right.

And ehi, sure Sleepwalker, glad to give you feedback on this!!! Thanks for taking the time to make the port, in the first place!!! 

there is also an OS X port of QuakeSpasm 

"then converted to BGRA (cos it loads faster than RGBA)"

Seriously? Are we talking something measurable or milliseconds here? 

I really must put that test program up on the RMQ SVN....

I've done a lot of measuring and benchmarking of formats and layouts here. Bottom line is that on all hardware (except ATI/AMD for some odd reason, where it's the same no matter) BGRA is between 6 and 30 times faster than RGBA.

For load times this may or may not be important.

If you're loading native 64x64 8-bit Quake textures, then it's likely you won't even notice.

If you're loading 512x512 TGAs it may be the difference between the player waiting 1 minute vs waiting 5 minutes for the map to load.

If you're updating lightmap textures at runtime, it may be the difference between running at 10fps and running at 250fps. That's where milliseconds are actually measurably important - 4 milliseconds will get you 250fps. 20 milliseconds will get you 50fps. If you're also running a server, running QC, drawing stuff, updating anuimations, playing sound, etc, then every single millisecond is precious. Every millisecond you save in this kind of this is a millisecond extra headroom for something else. 

OK, the test program is now on the RMQ public SVN: svn://svn.icculus.org/remakequake/engine/Experimental/TexSubImageTest

The code is mostly portable, but at present relies on some Windows-only libs for timing - you could replace this with the SDL timer stuff if you wanted (portability is not a huge concern for test programs). 

Well, some proper feedback on the sounds then (not giving a flying fuck about the bitrate because it is very irrelevant):


Nailgun and Super Nailgun sound like silenced weapons.
Sound player makes when coming out of the water sounds weak and squeamish.
Lightning gun sounds weak and silent.

All weapon sounds seem to have no bass and sound hissy. 

"BGRA is between 6 and 30 times faster than RGBA"

That makes zero sense to me but if you've measured it then I'll defer to that. 

All weapon sounds seem to have no bass and sound hissy.

This. What makes this extra strange is that the sound of soft gibs hitting the floor is the most bassy sound in the game!

All in all I have to say this is a huge improvement over the last demo. There are some great bits of atmosphere, especially thanks to some of the ambient music. As far as sounds go that's as possitive as I can be as the Enforcers (and now the ogres too) still sound as if someone's pulling a string on their back and if you get a whole load of grunts running around overhead it sounds like there are a bunch of coked up tap dancers roaming the slipgates.

For the most part the build quality of the maps is top notch, though I feel some of the "new areas" are often pretty unnecessary and just end up diluting the original level. The bit on the floating ship in Ep 3 has the most infuriating ladders I've come across in any game ever -- please put a clip brush in so it's not possible to just walk through them? A couple of times I got nearly to the top and then just shot straight through it and suffered falling damage. The third time I got to the top and an ogre raped my face. What's the fish about?

The laser rifle is way overpowered -- Fiends and Shamblers just arent scary when you can tear them apart in a matter of seconds. 

If you aren't planning on updating the animation of the Super shotgun (or are but haven't by your next release ;) ) you should add a simple 'click' noise at the end of the SSG reload imo, as the weapon sits inert but is unable to fire, so a little cue that it's ready would be helpful for learning it's firing timing since you've changed it. 

The OpenGL "common mistakes" page is quite awesome for this kind of thing; this link is relevant: http://www.opengl.org/wiki/Common_Mistakes#Texture_upload_and_pixel_reads.

Summary.

Most GPUs will internally store all textures in BGRA layout, irrespective of what you specify when creating the texture.

What should be obvious from this is (and this applies to the format param of glTexImage and glTexSubImage calls):

Using GL_RGB for starters is just plain nuts. You're not saving video RAM and when loading the texture your driver must expand it to 4 components and swap R and B.

Using G_BGR avoids the swap but means it must still be expanded.

Using GL_RGBA avoids the expansion but means it must still be swapped.

Using GL_BGRA avoids both the swap and expansion - transferring the data from system memory to GPU memory is just the equivalent of a straight memcpy which can be optimized (the most simple optimization being transferring 32 bits of source data at a time instead of 8 bits). No CPU work required before transferring, data is already in the format the GPU will use internally, result is a much faster transfer.

Of course, once the transfer has completed and the texture is in GPU memory none of this has any impact on performance. But if further transfers must happen during runtime (like e.g. Quake dynamic lightmap updating), then it most certainly does. 

The laser rifle is way overpowered -- Fiends and Shamblers just arent scary when you can tear them apart in a matter of seconds.

I think it should be toned down quite a bit as well because of this. 

I finally have my pc back with Q1 installed and I thought I would try this mod out! I downloaded it (400mb), readme instructions were confusing (seems to have been mentioned before).
Installed the mod in a RMQ directory, started with the -game rmq command, moved the winters content down a level. Typed map e2m1rq and got an error about a model :-

host_error: mod_loadmodel: progs/h_shal.mdl not found

I tried the original Q1 with the RMQ engine and it worked fine. Love the blur effects when taking damage. Oh well back to lurking ... 

h_shal.mdl is part of ID1 Quake content. Are you missing PAK1.PAK? 

Sounds like it can't find the original Quake there.

Laser rifle: I forgot to bump the Shambler health. This is because it conflicts with a secret plan.

How the blaster works is it get incrementally more powerful the longer you shoot, but also gains a cooldown time - thats why you see particles from it when its fired for a while.

A fiend doesn't give you enough time to warm the thing up by firing, I like how that's working. It's also good for the other enemies, since it's stupidly easy to spam away and run out of ammo.

But the poor old Shambler caught the raw end of the deal since how you fight it is ideally suited to a sustained fire = more damage weapon. 

test 

But it also put my name and IP in italic. 

I think perhaps it should take longer to warm up because no fiends got anywhere near me! 

For some reason my pak1.pak was corrupt, so replaced it and all fine.

My feedback from playing e2m1rq:-

* Initial cinematic totally confusing, I thought the game was broken at first and was teleporting me around the place randomly
* The Broken floor was not obvious (the very quickly displayed message about the floor was bad), if you need a message to tell players to do something with the floor then gameplay is broken. Should be visual in some way. Plus why am I in a prison cell with a gun!?!
* Dropped into a black hole and was lost for a while, black confined spaced early on in the game, not a good idea.
* Not sure why you give a quad so early in the game, I picked it up and it ran out in what seemed like 5 seconds.
* Grapplehook secret is pitch black (on my screen) found it by complete chance.
* Performance is terrible on my machine, I kept lowing the resolution but nothing seemed to fix it. Probably some weird setting I have missed on the command line!
* I want to shoot the security camera's off the walls!
* Too many crate styles, I kept finding new styles and was shooting them for secrets! :P I know it odd thing to say but a pile of crates the same style looks more believable than an every crate texture next to each other.
* Played on default skill setting and everything felt too easy. It felt like enemies health was scaled with skill level. Not a fan of this TBH.
* First button mashing puzzle was strange, drain water from pool below. Was looking for a cool pipe handle to turn somewhere and then I remembered it is Q1 ... and I had to bash a button in the water! I hit the button, went back to the control panel and was told I had to use a lift back in the water!?! It just seems so odd and retro level design.
* Died a couple of times to some hunter thing, first one I did not even see hitting me. Next couple just appeared out of nowhere and it was instant death. IMHO a bad mechanic.
* I still can't believe the menu's are not scaled up correctly, it makes the game feel so dated.
* I don't remember E2M1 feeling like this base layout, it felt completely different. A good thing! :)
* Maybe I have been spoilt by modern games with locations feeling like real layout. Offices, lifts, railings, even the puzzles felt old. The place lacked a scale and I know it can be done right, I have played Q1 maps with it right. (Rubicon1+2)
* The high res textures felt all wrong to me, they looked like a mashed up mix of colours, draw styles and their use in the environment felt random. The map desperately need an artist to make everything work together better. Control panels look pixelated next to high res signs, walls with too many details in the texture. There is a beauty to some surfaces being plain concrete and just having dirt on the edges.

I know I am picking at the level, but I assume you want feedback not back slapping. It is certainly a good MOD, but at the moment it feels odd, especially the visuals. 

These are untouched right now, we're just throwing some things back and forth now, before we commit to anything else with them.

Health scales, but its very slight, and has a large randomisation factor - you can still find tough enemies on low skills.

Performance could be related to the aforementioned memory settings - oldschool Quake settings are stupidly low for RMQ. Mh's engine defaults it to 128000, but you could try bumping that.

A lot of the others have been noted already, but there's some useful ones in there, thanks. 

Hmmm - the project name kind-of implies that the original Q1 shouldn't be needed to run the thing. 

I didn't even notice the heatup / cooldown in the game (kept wondering about the particles though). Probably because everything just died right away, fiends also. I tend to run away from fiends backwards and that must have given the blaster enough time to heat up.

I'm not so sure about this mechanic tbh. - Quake II had it, and the Hyperblaster bece the least uses weapon for me. It was like the Chaingun just worse because at least that's a hitscan weapon and easier to aim when moving.

So I think if you want to keep this mechanic you must balance it better because Shambler health bump or not, it's too powerful. And some better feedback about the heatup phase would be nice. 

Nothing different from everyone up here to say, except maybe that I found some badly aligned textures here and there...

Got to the green fog place, made me wanna puke. Had to quit.
You sure this is a good idea?

Sleepwalkr: I'll try out the port over the weekend. I'll keep you posted. 

It might be to do with mostly playing in quite a bright room, but I've occasionally just given up and played with r_fullbright 1 and generally had a better time doing so. I'm sure this makes me a terrible human being, but maybe a few fewer shadows would help? 

First of all - thanks for playing my map! :)

And the list of things you mention is a good list, I will be looking at some of the things you mentioned - some of the textures have been improved already (by Inkub0), and there are some other issues you mentioned which I plan to rectify (like the scale for example - I also think I could improve this). Unifying the crates a little more isn't a bad idea ither.

So overall, thanks for your feedsback!

@Spirit

Thanks also for your feedback, MOAR BASS!!!! 

mwh - which levels?

poison fog - there seems to be a split on this, some like it, some don't.

Blaster - will revise it. Q2 didn't have this though, it just had a warm up for the HB and a warm down for the CG. The idea here is that the weapon overheats, firing more powerfully, but needs to cool down afterwards as well. So not spamming with it is less effective, but spamming too much can leave you without ammo and/or unable to fire. 

I didn't realize the lasergun was heating up and inceasing damage (+cooldown time), either. It could be made clearer by two or three skin changes (glowing exhaust slots: not, orange, red), and a distinct wshhhh steam sound.

But like I said earlier, I think the weapon is kind of unnecessary and only makes the game even harder to balance. If you need to bump the monsters' health to make the weapons work, you're doing something wrong (wasn't it the same with the SSG before?).
In my view, it would be better if you allowed all standard weapons, and additionally, since the player is supposed to be an Enforcer, gave him a sort of laser DBS, or laser Riot Controller. Something that works similar to the standard enforcer attack; two rays + wait time. They would have to be more powerful (and costly) than regular laser shots of course, DBS/RC style. This way it could serve as a special weapon for certain situations, like the Cauterizer, and bound to this episode, but would not imbalance the regular gameplay and not require too much additional doctoring around.

As for setting a bigger heapsize - it was my understanding that the memory heap is only important for loading stuff, the map, precaches etc, but has no impact on the actual game performance. The bigger a bsp size gets, the bigger the heap requirements are (map data, visdata, lightmaps, textures etc). A heapsize of 64000 is usually enough even for the largest maps (within the 'old new' limits). Only now that maps can grow to 22MB more startup memory is required.

sock: HF in E3M1RQ (performance-wise). ;) 

+1 for a proper DBS animation. Ideally Something akin to Doom2, or at least some visible cocking. Or maybe an animation where the gun is lowered and a sound is played that suggests two new shells are being put in the barrels which is not visible to the player.

The animation of the new shotgun looks a bit odd to me, because the cocking is so fast. It seems the model was adjusted to the sound and not the other way around. It should be a tad slower (surely the firing delay allows for that?). And the hand could use some tan.

I don't want to make it more complicated for you, but I think the DBS too nerfed now. At least I didn't use it as often as I would have in this demo (when I had the choice between regular SG and DBS), though maybe it's only because the E3 maps focus so much on the laser rifle... 

...it's dark as fuck.

Have to play with all lights turned off, secondary monitor off and brightness settings tops.

Atmospheric? 

Poison Fog made me feel a bit sick too. I realise this was the intention, but I'm not sure why you'd want your playerbase to experience actual nausea. Anyway, I think you could fix it thus:

Reduce the swaying very slightly. Most of all though, change the way the section has to be played. Give the player an enviro suit at the top of the elevator which will run out when he's in the poison area, then have one or two more suits dotted around down there that the player needs to find if he wants to see & shoot correctly. 

 

That was problematic for me, too. I had to crank up the monitor brightness and in game brightness to be able to see something, but that made the entities washed out. Maybe it's related to the gamma curve, which is different on Mac systems. What do Windows users say? 

Maps require a small amount of -heapsize to run but a large amount to load, yes.

But if it loads OK then -heapsize shouldn't affect runtime performance (e3m1rq only needs 16mb of heap to actually run, for example).

Things that can affect runtime performance are many and varied. You own PC's performance, size of the BSP and how much impact all the BSP tracing done by the engine has, sounds, QC, drawing stuff, etc.

The one thing that can make performance suck badly and you do have immediate control over is textures.

If you're using large replacement textures on hardware with only 256 or even 512 mb of video RAM these can kill your performance as the total amount of textures may not fit into video RAM and your driver will be continually having to swap them in and out.

We set the hardware requirements as "in or around similar to Doom 3" so far as the rendering tech is concerned, but that doesn't tell the whole story.

Doom 3 used 256x256 textures (which were compressed on lower spec machines). The Quake community likes to use 512x512 or even 1024x1024 textures.

A full mipmap chain for a single 1024x1024 texture needs just over 5mb of video RAM. Use 40 of those and that's over 200mb. Gone.

If you run at something like 1280x1024 resolution you're using 15mb for your front buffer, your back buffer and your depth buffer.

A 1024x1024 skybox needs 25mb.

You're looking at about 40mb for lightmaps.

There are additional textures created for post-processing effects (like the underwater warp) - these will take about 16mb at that resolution.

All MDLs and brush surfaces go into vertex buffers which take more (the alternative - streaming them from system memory on demand - is worse for this kind of content).

You see where this is going?

So first thing to do is drop back to native textures and if that resolves any performance issues then you've located the cause of your problem.

Second thing to do is ramp back the video mode a little. Drop a notch in resolution. That might help a little. Also drop back AA and AF in your video card's control panel. You may be used to running regular Quake content maxed out, but this is not regular Quake content. This is extremely heavy content. You may be used to running modern games maxed out, but Quake formats (in particular Q1 BSP) are SHIT for hardware accelerated rendering. That's a tradeoff you need to understand and accept that you're working under when you use Quake formats. 

Why would you set the Hardware requirements to "in or around similar to Doom 3" when you're not aiming to make a game that looks as "good" as Doom 3? And if you do want to look like Doom3, why not just use DarkPlaces?

Honestly, looking at RMQ I see very little reason it shouldn't require similar specs to something like FitzQuake. Maybe there's something technical that I just can't comprehend going on, but if it isn't obvious in the visuals then perhaps it's unnecessary or should be scaled down by the development team rather than the players? 

The problem is that the BSP format is not suited for hardware acceleration, and this problem gets overproportionally worse as the maps get larger. 

Yeah, this was previously discussed in the thread, it's missing heat up vfx and similar.

The DBS has had some internal discussion as well.

Removing the blaster and adding a laser DBS sounds kind of 'would sir like an apple, or a pear?'. What's broken there is that the cooldown isn't enough to force you try to fighting like an Enforcer.

So if you play cautiously you'll fire, say, a couple of shots at a time and never waste ammo - but if you go berserk and fire off a lot of shots then you'll do more damage but also become more vulnerable + waste ammo.

The pro player will try and keep it somewhere between the two - doing slightly extra damage and wasting almost no ammo.

A case of getting the balance right. 

Is this only in my maps or in Ricky's as well? 

...with obvious variation in places.

The Gunsmith secret area pops to mind... You can barely see the path to get to the goodies. 

being darker, or at least having more pitch black corners. I'll replay and check. 

The hardware requirements are similar in terms of the GL extensions I use.

The formats and underlying technology are completely different. Doom 3 stresses your hardware in much different ways than this stuff does, and depending on how your hardware responds to this stress you may have a very different experience on both.

DarkPlaces is not an option because a custom BSP format was needed during the course of last year. Q1 BSP imposes various 64k limits which were overflown - vertexes were an early one, which got worked around, clipnodes became a serious problem, and leafs is a fairly recent one.

Using a different BSP format was not an option for various reasons. Formats considered either did absolutely nothing to resolve the problem (Q2, HL), were missing important features (Q3A), were encumbered by licensing restrictions (HL) or required too much upsetting of codebases and changing of the toolchain (all of them). The eventual choice to extend Q1 BSP by using ints instead of shorts in key strategic places meant that mappers could continue using their preferred editors and that minimal changes were needed to both tools and engine code (and - importantly - the very same backend code could be used in the engine for both the new format and the original - there were some small changes in the loader but that was all).

If DarkPlaces implements support for this format then DarkPlaces will become a serious contender.

None of that makes Q1 BSP suitable for hardware rendering. It was designed around the requirements of a software renderer running on a p60 with 8mb of RAM, so it chops surfaces up far too much (and far too small) leading to poor batching and lots of tiny submissions of geometry to the GPU - all things which make hardware rendering suffer. This wasn't resolved in any ID engine until Q3A, which would be easily capable of running this content with much higher performance. 

I'd expect my maps to be darker since I work in bright places..

I think in future I'll light for minimum brightness settings on my machines, it's the only way to make it work properly for everyone.

Point of fact I played the brilliant Moonlight Assault the other day and couldn't believe how bright it was - thats not the level thats broken, but my set up.

BTW Text_fish, yes, what you're describing there is an idea for a trigger_status which would cause status changing effects and have methods for not affecting the player, like being in an envirosuit, partially or fully submerged (fire) and so on. In theory it could instead become an extension of the trigger_hurt's functionality, which would be neater.

What you see in e3m3rq is basically a maphack. 

So then the logical step must be to reduce the map's complexity, use fewer textures, or optimize it in other ways to make it playable on a smooth framerate. As painful as it may be. 

Just checked the texture folder. E2M1RQ has 183 files with a total of 100MB. E3M1RQ has 100 (!) files totalling to 220MB, lots of them being 3MB. Obviously, some optimization in this area is required. 

Sounds like a lot of 1024x1024 RGB textures.

Even pulling them down to 512x512 would help a lot to relieve the hurt. We probably need to talk more about this internally as there are tradeoffs to be made here (one of the options we've been looking at recently is using DXT compression, which would reduce that 220mb to 27.5 mb and also enable much faster texture sampling in the fragment shaders - there are patent issues surrounding that however, which would affect the ability to provide a reasonable fallback for those using free Linux drivers that can't support the required extension).

Lighting

I don't think that there's a perfect solution that will run well for everyone. Everybody's hardware is different, different monitors will have different gamma curves, etc.

The next release of the engine is going to have an r_lightscale cvar that you can use to bring up lighting levels (but without any clamping or washout) which may be all that is needed. 

Sure, but right now I'm lighting from a middle position, if instead I go from one extreme (full black / full bright) and work towards the opposite then it should result in a more balanced range overall.

Starting from black will leave the levels with max brightness being almost whiteout - at least that's the plan.

Maybe not explaining that very well: right now the brightness range is to small between black and white.

Textures; yeah, 1024 isn't actually visible on most monitors just down to pixel real-estate. Granted it might look good if you headbutt a wall - but thats not something you're going to be doing much, compared to say, fighting.

Map size is something we probably won't be decreasing, there's levels in the works that are a little bit bigger than those in this release. I suspect on textures alone we can save a massive amount of overhead. 

We're saying 'Make gigantic maps!' or 'make maps with a huge amount of detail'. The toolkit that we use is really amazing. Just the engine and tools alone open huge possibilities. 

 

http://kneedeepinthedoomed.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/spdemo3_9.jpg 

200 mb of textures for a map roughly sounds like the q1 mega texture space requirements. I'd definitely like that. 

It's an interesting idea but not something I'd be keen to do in a production engine. Not with OpenGL anyway.

OpenGL is basically shit for updating dynamic resources. glTexSubImage is OK provided you invoke the correct eldritch incantations, but anything built on the GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object and GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object extensions is pure and total rubbish. Vague usage flags, mysterious crap happens behind the scenes, the driver does what it wants to anyway irrespective of what you do or don't specify, you get arbitrary fallbacks to software emulation and in the end it would have been faster if you'd just used system memory instead. (They're OK for purely static data though.)

Essential reading: http://www.stevestreeting.com/2007/03/16/glmapbuffer-how-i-mock-thee/ (one of the Unity people also has a "GL_ARB_vertedx_buffer_object is stupid" post but I can't access it from this PC at the moment - try Google). 

 

is to actually lit the places where it matters - ie where player will have to go or will have to look at, instead of relying on a dim ambient that only works with high gamma settings.
Doesn't help that some of your textures are very dark, like peaking at 40 and cutting off at 70 (out 0-255 obviously) and you can only go down from those values since no overbrights.

Btw my monitor gamma is brighter than SRGB (I can distinguish the lowest grades, even 1-2-3 depending on the view angle http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/black.php) and I found some places too dark as well. 

That this is just not gonna work. I run my own monitor fairly dark (and I smoke so it tends to pick up a lot of gunge over time) but I could still see everything OK.

Which means that one's own individual experience means absolute squat in terms of how the maps are lit.

And: "no overbrights"? I don't think so. In fact the engine enforces overbrighting always on. 

I blame TFT screens! 

I had Quake brightness slider half way up and it was WAAAYYY too bright on e2m1rq. Put it back to the default (lowest) setting and the map seemed OK to me.

The person who said the map was too dark:-

1 - what is your GPU? (U never know)

2 - what is the brightness/contrast setting on your monitor?

3 - what was your brightness setting in the engine? 

It was you! Sorry mate, I forgot who had made the post. 

here goes:

1 - AMD Radeon HD 6970M - 1024 MB.

2 - Optimal, I'd say, even though the iMac screen is a bit too reflective for my taste...so I tend to keep it a lil' bit higher than I'd do on a normal monitor...

3 -Top. 

Nice rig btw :)

Is it a Mac though? I mean OS, engine etc... 

You don't understand, you need to properly light the map with contrast lights so it looks fine regardless of the gamma in the areas that are important for the progress (not secrets obviously) and use functional lighting to lead the player. (Unless you want to pull Doom3\Amnesia)

There are no overbrights on external textures, they always look darker http://i.imgur.com/722XZ.jpg 

an interesting point. Er... MH? 

What engine is that? 

Mac Port of the engine. 

is by far not as dark as e3m1rq, although it's missing overbright lighting, too. 

Lighting in fitzquake should not care whether it's an external texture or not (and i assume RMQ hasn't changed this) -- do you have the "idgamma" patch installed? That would cause brightness on 8-bit textures to be different. 

don't forget that you can use gl_max_size and gl_picmip to reduce the texture sizes and memory needs...

(gl_max_size will reduce only the largest textures, gl_picmip will reduce all textures by the same amount.) 

 

Sleepwalkr: so you see the same issue as shown in the screenshot in post #279?

Sleepwalkr or Ghd Fladjern Tilbud: does the problem in the screenshot go away if you set gl_overbright to 0? If yes, then it sounds like you're right and the overbright doesn't work on external textures. (again, this assumes RMQ behavior for that cvar hasn't changed from fitzquake) 

Doesn't exist in RMQ. 

i've noticed there is a difference between external textures and internal bsp ones. i just assumed it was due to the palette subtly changing colours when i palettized the textures. 

@ijed, I went back to the original Q1 and the basic marines are a couple of shots with the single barrel rifle. In RMQ they are one shot, it feels too easy compared to the previous game. (I did nothing to change the skill level)

If you are changing health based on skill level then that is indeed a bad idea. Get the designer to swap AI units around based on skill not fix it with code. Let players understand the AI better by knowing what to expect (damage wise) to kill them. Tweaking numbers based on skill is a recipe for disaster.

@RickyT23, good luck with the textures. Ideally you should start with a proper unified set that is actually designed to work together. At least fix the texture density so they are all consistent. It is the first thing I notice and makes me stop and stare even more. 

okay, guess it's changed enough from fitzquake that i can't really help much :) 

There are overbrights on the external textures; there are overbrights on all textures and the fragment shader code is very explicitly texture * lightmap * 2.0; I wrote it and I know that that is what it does.

Saying "there are no overbrights" makes precisely zero sense because we are talking about an explicit mathematical operation here that does not distinguish in any way, shape or form between whether the texture is external or not.

Convince me that "TEX diffuse, fragment.texcoord[0], texture[0], 2D;" or "(l * 42.5f) / 255.0f" is capable of distinguishing whether a texture is external or not.......

None of this means that I'm saying that problems don't exist - what I'm saying is that if there is a problem - you're barking up the wrong tree. It's coming from somewhere else. 

The map is way to big and it lacks encounter focus. Let me give an example:-

The location of the map around the HQ building has a long corridor section pointing towards a bridge area. When I come into that area I am facing towards the HQ. There is AI firing at me from 180 degree's, the dead end to the left and stuff from the bridge area. I am not saying the area needs to be more linear but the encounters need to come from a small angle. Introduce the AI over near the bridge when the player goes there not before.

Also I accidentally found I needed to go into the HQ and then engineering to get the bridge to work. I was lost for ages and for some reason that area is like a slide show for me with <10 fps. Once I finally got to the bridge area all the AI had died and it felt like anti climax when I got there. I don't think you need to spawn stuff so far away, it feels like a sniper game.

The flow of the map is broken and misleading where to go next. Let me give an example:-

When you finally get the bridge to lower, there is a platform with crates and a locked door. (There was some AI stuck in the door as well). I could not see anyway to go (obvious) Then I started jumping around on crates and jumped to the rock ledge to the left. Apparently this was the way forward because it got me into the complex. I assumed that was a secret area not the main route. I was expecting a door, a ladder or something that was going to lead upwards. The flow of the map should feel natural and not misleading.

Will play more later! :) 

It's not obvious that the rock ledge is the way to go, true. I'm not a mapper so that's not my provenance and it's best if I don't get involved in this side of the discussion.

My provenance however is very much the < 10fps experience you had in the bridge/HQ/engineering area. Can you give me some info on your hardware and setup as it would be useful to me in addressing thing in future, please? 

 

(replying to health)

The random variation in health is very slight - rarely it'll take one more shot or one less, depending on the weapon. Mostly you won't notice the variation unless you're using nails.

It was geared to this for the players who knew exactly how many nails it to for enemy X - I was one of them.

The reason why the grunts take one shotgun blast rather than two is because the weapon itself is more powerful, but also much more range dependent.

The balance in general is towards mobile enemies being more vicious and unpredictable, but also easier to kill, depending on the methods used.

Grunts circle strafe for example, and versions like the Axe Grunt have a one-off axethrow that causes heavy damage at short range.

You'll notice the ammo system has changed a lot to accommodate this as well.

Finally, the difficultly sliding is throughout everything - how frequently monsters use special attacks, how fast their shots are and so on. The health increase is fairly minor.

The design focus is to make the game more unpredictable - not stupidly so, but just enough to keep veteran players on their toes.

Ideally we want to promote the same fear and tension in a veteran has they first had when playing the game for the first time.

Maybe this all sounds a bit anal-retentive and hubristic to someone on the outside. 

I have a very clear memory of The Dismal Oubliette from then, definitely moreso than any other map (aside from e1m1 and e1m2, perhaps). I recall the feeling of mounting tension, the sheer dread, being soaked in sweat and almost collapsing as I finally got there.

These days I can do the standard route in a few minutes of course, but aiming to capture that feeling again is perfectly fine in my book. 

It makes balancing things much more complex, but nobody said it'd be easy.

It does have some harmful side effects as well, that need to be patched. The randomised wake up time for zombies, for example.

From the demos it seemed to make player very nervous 'when can I gib the little fucker?!' but I think it borders on annoying.

Open question - should zombies (and any corpse) be gibbable by explosions? No shotguns or other weapons, just explosive blasts.

I'm breaking the rules of games design asking that here :) 

zombies becoming completely invulnerable when falling down doesn't really make any logical sense nor does it provide an interesting gameplay element beyond making the player wait (which is always bad).

i don't think this is behaviour that needs to be preserved. 

There's been a lot of talk about zombies recently. They're definitely one Quake monster with huge unused potential, and ways of making them a more interesting and varied opponent are being discussed.

One example I came up with (which I hope the folks don't mind me mentioning) was in relation to zombie gibs. Obviously you cannot kill that which does not live (but you can blast it into chunky kibbles) so an argument can be made that even zombie gibs are not exactly dead. So what can be done with zombie gibs to make them reflect that fact? And how can something cool gameplay-wise come out of it?

No decisions made, of course, but it is one potential idea into the cauldron. 

I double checked and indeed I had a modified pal lmp that I had completely forgotten about, so never mind about external\internal.
Its just the way maps are illuminated and the way particular textures give back the light.

BTW if you want to save on texture memory, you should start with those 17 1024&#178; door textures that differ only in captions on them.
There are many other textures that have tiling going on inside them, so you could cut the texture size in 4 with no quality loss. Typical 'cranking up resolution for resolution sake' case of replacement content.

And last note for The Silent, in-engine gamma adjustment could conflict with other software or drivers and make no effect. 

All so far? That's only e2m1rq and about half of e3m1rq though :-)

I'm the oddball running linux on intel graphics (and a pretty crappy monitor -- I'll see what it's like on the internal display soon). r_lightscale sounds like it might be a useful hack for me. 

 

Ghd, the problem is gone for you then? Because if it is, that would mean that I have a modified palette, too, although I wouldn't know where because my paks are unchanged. Where did you find yours? 

So you can't replicate this? Does it look fine on your machine? 

The weapons:
- I started to use DBS for one shot kills mostly. waiting for the reload is very unpleasant and it slows down the game.
- the SG replaced the DBS for ogre fights (4 shots is enough)
- I like the knock back from the weapons
- I like that the grenade explosions can push monsters (and my other grenades also)
- SNG spread is ok
- RL didn't change I think but feels overpowered as always
- the new laser thing - I didn't notice the behaviour you described, it feels much overpowered
- I like to use the nail gun
- underwater weapon behaviour is ok but don't punish the player with using up more ammo, maybe the grenade launcher could still work underwater
- the limits on carrying ammo work surprisingly ok

other things I like:
- monster wizard teleporting
- shambler lightning
- knight zombies
- hell knight missiles
- health regeneration - although in standard quake it wouldn't be needed
- monsters follow the player better - they can surprise even on standard maps

things I don't understand:
- quad behaviour
- fall damage - to complicated
- why do I need to wait for zombies so long
- is anything changed with monsters going into pain animation? Fighting ogres with SG they usually go into pain after first shot and I can fire 2 more before they recover.

For me the gameplay is ok. It feels like quake with some small modifications and surprises which is good.

I have recorded some demos on quake ep1 if anyone is interested:
http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/Quake_ep1_demos_with_rmq.7z 

Funny you expect the game to hold your hand these days. "Retro" level design with some free exploration and several routes is so much better than waiting on the AI squadmates to unlock another door and get another objective in an absolutely linear tightly scripted map. Proof: DE:HR.

For the texture mish-mash, E2M1 actually uses a fairly true to the original Q2 set remake, but obviously some textures are by different authors or not properly repainted placeholders. I would ease up on using aggressive grid and grates patterns everywhere too. The rest seems fine.

Randomised stuff ironically could make it easier on hard skill, when you can get random big weapons, MHs or armors.
Btw scaled hp and attack with higher skill is used almost everywhere, ie in HL2 (such a disaster of a game ain't it). 

Modified pal only makes the internal textures look noticeably brighter and stand out. Check e3m1rq near the start below the lift and straight to the locked door - one of the wall panels texture is an internal low res.
If you have idgamma leftovers its either gfx/palette.lmp or a small .pak with it in /id1.

I didn't notice any overbights with new textures, so I guess its just the way maps are lit and the textures being dark, like I said. 

have you tried playing with the contrast slider? if you up it along with the brightness it can improve the 'overbright' look without making the darks too washed out. similar effect as a modified palette i guess, but it affects everything rather than just the lo res textures 

And brightness are both at 50% atm, will try your suggestion later. 

I've watched demos where the player was randomly shooting as he was wandering along. Took me a long time to realise that he was doing it to light up areas he couldn't see in. They looked perfectly visible to me and I must assume that they looked perfectly visible to the mapper too (otherwise they would have been lit differently).

Now, I did have an old PC in work (until about 2 weeks ago) where the desktop and other OS stuff, as well as other programs, looked no different, but Quake was incredibly dark and dingy looking, and I had to crank gamma to about 0.8/0.75 (lower numbers being brighter). 

We need a reference map with lots of lighting levels and stuff. 

The randomisation is completely controlled by the mapper.

Ankh:

The Quad starts with ten or twenty seconds, and gains 5 seconds for each kill you make. This still needs its times tweaking.

Fall damage too complicated??

Going to change the Zombies...

How often a monster goes into pain is unmodified from id1. I'm not sure if there's a damage threshold for Ogres that remained as is - that would cause problems since the shotgun and Ogre health has changed a lot. Will look into it.

Glad you liked the mod, and thanks for the feedback. 

I don't know much about the Quake lighting model, but maybe the factor that the new textures seem darker is related to the size of the texels during the lighting process. They are larger on the low res textures so maybe they collect more light? 

Why don't you give me all your lighting related settings as a cfg file and I'll make some screenshots for you - that way you can compare. 

The lighting process doesn't actually read texture data at all, and texel size isn't relevant here.

What I'd like to see however is a comparison made using the ID1 start map. I'm suggesting that because otherwise there are too many variables in the equation - new maps, new textures, new lighting, etc. The ID1 start map is a known constant and takes all of those variables out. We're left with engine and replacement textures as factors that must be considered, and nothing else to distort the analysis.

There are 4 things that must be compared to make the comparison complete and scientifically valid:

- ID1 start map, native textures, RMQ engine
- ID1 start map, external textures, RMQ engine
- ID1 start map, native textures, other engine
- ID1 start map, external textures, other engine

That's the only way you're going to get anything out that's not tainted by subjective opinion.

I haven't done a direct comparison yet, but I believe that a histogram of standard external textures (Rygel's or QRP) with native ID1 textures will show that the externals are darker overall. They do look that way to my eyes anyway.

On overbrights.

Seems to be some confusion here about what overbright lighting is and what overbright lighting does, which may be leading to the statement that the engine doesn't do overbrights.

It's quite clear that the engine does do overbrights - you can check some of the well-known trouble spots to confirm.

Overbright lighting doesn't make things brighter; what it does is increase the dynamic range of lighting. Any light in the standard range won't and shouldn't appear any different, any light above the standard range will be clamped without overbright lighting but won't be clamped (or - at worst - will be clamped at a higher level, although that doesn't apply to RMQ) with overbright lighting.

There are a few different ways of obtaining overbright lighting, with the standard being to shift down by an extra bit when calculating the lightmap then double the result after you multiply texture by lightmap. Q2 and Q3A double the texture and leave the source lighting fairly dark (they weren't written to target the required GL extension). DirectQ encodes a scaling factor into the alpha channel of the lightmap texture which is then decoded in the pixel shader. RMQ blends multiple lightstyles entirely on the GPU so it gets this as a natural result.

They're all just mathematical operations on numbers though, and the operation is the same whether the texture is external or not. In that case, if a different result is achieved, then the inputs must be different.

There is actually a second source of lightmap clamping going on too, and that's in the light tool. We have a solution worked out to address that, but nothing coded yet. 

In Ricky's map, I have seen enemies being rendered at the wrong position for a single frame. It was always in an area where I hadn't been before and the enemies in question were there for a single frame, then vanished and it didn't happen again. I have actually caught this in the demo posted above, in that case it's a dog. I just saw it again though and this time it was enforcers or grunts. 

Ok now that I can see the original E2M1 at the end of the map it feels a lot better. :) Maybe the problem is my expectations of what a remake is? I assumed a remake is taking the original game and updating it visually, this mod is doing a lot more than this, in places it feels like a TC.

I think the layout got better at the end than the beginning and certainly got harder as I went on (good thing) especially liking the turrets (would have been nice to bring them out of the ground and then activate them)

Once I realize what you are doing with the MOD it feels a lot better and I can accept the changes and see it as a different version of Q1.

You (the team) certainly have my respect for taking on such a challenge as a remake of Q1 because everyone has their expectations of what that is going to be. Probably the hardest thing to get right is meeting everyone's idea what is important to Q1 and not.

mh, I switched graphic cards and the fps slow downs did not happen anymore. Everything was much better and I started to enjoy the map more.

I tried E3M1RQ and that was crazy dark for me and I died a lot! :P 

The name is something that's been complained about a lot. A remake for me is re-making something... to what level that's done depends on who's doing it.

A visual only remake seems the uh, quickest option. We chose everything, which is why it's taking so long :)

We get a lot of flak, but a lot of positive stuff as well.

The episode 3 maps are mine - it seems my working conditions (light) have badly influenced how bright the levels are. We're working on things behind the scenes to fix this up.

Not least lighting levels properly :P 

might be useful to make a console command that will display the player's current light level every frame like r_speeds.
this would actually make it scientific instead of just subjective: 'the area around this important door is only light level 30-40 which is too dark' as opposed to 'i can't see the door'.
i pretty much gave up on trying to light maps with any specificity because everyone's monitors are different. i just fall back on the brightness slider when people mention it. :( 

even zombie gibs are not exactly dead. So what can be done with zombie gibs to make them reflect that fact?

If a zombie misses, the thrown piece of flesh could chase the player. 

Enough zombie Gibs near each other could reform into a zombie, like the T-1000 

Zombie hands could chock the player, like in Blood 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAOKEIJ74R0&feature=player_embedded 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnlzqS1DzU8 

 

I had a slightly sick idea for zombies that go through a lifecycle, like insects or caterpillars into butterflies. Blow one up and it reforms into something else. It would definitely add replayability to areas of the map you've been in before, but I suspect it would only be effective if the player gets to see it reform (which would probably require a cutscene furst time). It might also piss off people aiming to get 100% kills.

@Necros - that's a pretty good idea; mind if I steal it? ;) 

the gibs from zombies could just bounce around like tarbabies, leaving behind blood tracers. maybe they cold die out naturally after a while. 

I sort of think when you've gibbed a zombie it should cease to be a threat. The gibs could stay there making squishy noises and the head could continue to groan for atmosphere.

Alternatively if you go with the idea of all the gibs reforming in to something they could turn in to one of those blob things.

Or other monsters could pick up zombie gibs as health packs! 

Make the player able to carry a zombie head and give him an achievement if he gets it to the helicopter.

More serious suggestion: Let the player collect gibs for some reward (per level and per game), be it just a number or something "real". I liked the coins in ne_ruins. It would be a tacked-on game feature the player can choose to participate in or not with not big impact on the game world (unless you present it as such). 

Already eats gibs and heads btw - once they've got enough stock they cack out a zombie.

Spirit - that reminds me of a pack I did in Quake2, which had the player placing 3 commander heads on a tomb in the hub for a reward... 

In e2m2rq, I died when the lava began to rise. After reload, it appeared as if I was still in the lava visually. I wasn't taking damage, but my vision was warping as if under water and everything had a yellow tint. 

Moving liquid brushes use a stuffcmd of v_cshift to set the colour shift, but this persists until another such stuffcmd clears it. The same applies to stuffing fog, and any other such cvar.

You can see another effect of the same bug if you go to the green fog area in e3m3rq, save your game, exit Quake, then start again and reload.

Anything else using stuffcmd will suffer from similar.

It's something we're aware of but haven't yet found a robust solution for. Ideally some kind of "area flags" would be best, but that's going to really disrupt the file formats. 

just use non-saved vars for that.

ie:
nosave .float isCShiftReset

along with an
if (!self.isCShiftReset)
resetCShift(self);

in a player think. 

There are a number of different ways of tackling it when you die/respawn. We could also stuff default values on respawn, or track changes made via stuffcmd engine-side.

The big problem is across the save/exit Quake/restart Quake/load boundary. The is visible too in other maps such as ne_tower, where r_wateralpha is stuffed after you shoot out the wooden boards at the start. Go halfway up the tower, save, exit, restart, load and go back down - water is now opaque again.

Right now I don't see a clean way of resolving this without format modifications.

Nahahra has a RestoreGame QC function which is used to re-stuff specific values that may be used in a map. That's quite a nasty way of doing it IMO (I'd prefer to see them as worldspawn entries) and it still doesn't deal with the case where values can dynamically change as you progress through a map.

Extending the save game system seems to be the only way (possibly by adding a state file so as to leave .sav files intact and usable in other engines) but I'm wary of the idea in case I've missed anything. 

Please read ....

http://forums.inside3d.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4601

Please! This save game crap must die.

Save games are for when you exit Quake and restart. Not for dying and respawning. Better concept in thread. 

My idea would only work for coop :( 

Somebody over at Q3World posted a link to a high resolution texture pack.

http://raynescorner.weebly.com/textures.html

Maybe of help to your project as your are using stuff that size (1024x1024). Most of the texture are generic materials which could be useful for rock, concrete and brick etc. 

I get the above warning whenever I try to run the demo. I have never seen this before. Anyone know what it is, and how to fix it? 

What's your gfx card?

Also, there are two "Multitexture Not Supported" errors in the engine - "multitexture not supported (GetProcAddress failed)" and "multitexture not supported (extension not found)" - which of them do you get? 

Posted to the internal forum, thanks. 

I get this error too when I tried to run the engine alone (i.e. it's running OK when "-game rmqwinter11" has been added to its command line).

I deleted the config.cfg in id1 folder, and then it runs OK too. 

There's something incompatible in your config. It'll default to that config if there isn't one in the mod folder - you can place an empty one there (or one without whatever the offending line is) to avoid losing or moving your id1 config.

As to the cause - dunno. 

http://youtu.be/0rqP7sqoSbg
Best bug ever. Make it official. 

I've no idea how a config setting could affect the ability to detect a GL extension. The only thing that would make any sense might be if you've specified a bad video mode for which OpenGL acceleration is unavailable (like maybe a 16-bit mode on some funky hardware that may hypothetically not accelerate 16-bit modes, although I've never seen that happen). 

Hahah - thats the magic system run amok. They're duplicating themselves and dimension dooring to your position. Skill 3?

If you build a test level with a vore in it try setting caster_level to 5+ and playing on NM.

They'll call in lightning from an empty sky, summon hordes and forcewall you.

Facewall is basically 'everything in this big circle gets gibbed' 

Yesterday I got the same vore duplication effect on e4m2. It was surprising - first I thought it just teleported near to me but it was sending copies after me. A bug I hope :) 

The code is unfinished, so buggy as well. 

The application has failed to start because d3dx9_43.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.

I got the above warning when I tried to run the engine with 'rmqwinter11' added. I don't use a custom .cfg. I'm not sure what kind of graphics card I have, my computer IQ is pretty low. 

DirectQ currently can't run this - you'll need to wait on the next version which will support it.

For that error you just need to update your DirectX to the latest version. (Having D3D10 or 11 isn't enough - D3D9 is completely separate and needs it's own update. Updating D3D9 won't affect your install of 10 or 11 if you have them.) 

I have:

NVIDIA GeForce2 MX/MX 400

This computer is almost ten years old, so it's probably not cutting edge technology. 

Never gonna work.

DirectQ absolutely requires vertex and pixel shader support at D3D9 or better level. That means a GeForce FX or better. Even an Intel 915 chip will run it, but the shader support is required.

DirectQ is not going to be a good engine for RMQ for at least 6 months though - the devil is in the dynamic lights - it runs incredibly jerky and sluggish when they start going (and RMQ is full of them). 

Amazed by the cutscenes it took some time before I ended up in the little red room.
I shot the grunt and although the weak floor I couldn't get out, lost all my shells till I went ogre berseric with the chainsaw. Haha!

Started again, and was really excited by the topnotched map design. It took some time before I could identify the feeling of walking in a Q2 level with Q1 monsters.

I had to learn not to jump on ladders, and the large map environnement gave me a great fight with lots of enemies. I played on normal and didn't had the feeling they were perculiar strong.
The heat of the fight was more in the third part, after going up the elevator to the place with the two turrets.
I saved going up the elevetor, but died each time after reloading the level. I decided to save the level somewhat further, but kept on reloading the elevator.

Found one secret, and was amused the way the level developped. By its large format I had the idea of playing a sequence.
Not a bad idea, but to play the level it took me 90 minutes. (and didn't waist a minute of pleasure!)

Little things, like the gloom of the pent kept on the screen after reloading, a grunt frozen in its pose. Not things to mention.

Yes, a real warped Quake level! 

I finally played some of these maps as I downloaded this to play Tronyn's thing.

It's a useful demonstration of a lot of things Quake is NOT about:

OTT coloured lighting
Levels that looks just like Quake 2
Ice skating strafing monsters
Tinkly armour shards and health boosts
Massive glowing balls of light around laser shots
Floating footballs that shoot you
Turrets
Off centre weapons
Changed sound effects to sound worse and more human or just bad
Horrible distracting screen blurring which hides how much damage you're actually taking
Enemy that are more like DM bots than monsters

There's a few things that Quake can be about in this:

More detailed ammo boxes
More detailed textures
Axe-wielding grunts
Hallways full of zombies waiting to rise and attack
Large stone slabs that grind out to form a bridge 

r_motionblur 0 

is that not the old gl_flashblend 0 

r_show_coronas 

Cutscenes.
Bland mapping.
Levels of difficulty that make Warpspasm seem relaxed.
Even more lurid coloured lighting.
Flying facehugging jellyfish.

But...

Zombie knights are very cool tho.

I'm kinda glad I didn't play this at the time. Compared to E1M6 Remake which, despite some annoyances with new sounds, falling damage, etc, had plentiful cool additions to the map and an exploratory vibe that felt like it was enhancing E1M6, this pack has kept all the bad bits, and either made them worse or added new stuff that's even worse, and hasn't really compensated with slick map remakes. Given the direction it was going it's probably a good thing the mod disbanded. 

Zombie knights won!

And they will haunt you Shambler..,
you, with your lack of grenade damage! 

I was trying to play Fort Driant under this, but the enforcers with the Hyperblaster does not do damage 

What we did was enemy_whatever = enemy_rmq in a separate qc file in order to support external mods.

Now that I think about it, the extended damage system might have needed those hooks as well.

Sorry it didn't work. Thanks for playing it though. 

Boy, was that idea over the top. Let people play Nehahra, Quoth and everything else under RMQ. :)

Oh well, you have to do something like that once in your life or you haven't lived.

I've been thinking to overhaul the e1m6rq demo, add missing Chthon animations and make everything cast shadows with detail brushes. And add the missing room behind those crushers you have to block with crates.

Hmm. Maybe a new project. Sometime.

Yup, thanks for playing it Yhe1. 

And make the boilers only destroyable by Chthon. The boss fight is much too easy. >:-) 

what plans, if any, are there for any as-yet-unreleased RMQ maps? Will we see a partial release eventually? 

It's was quite fun actually, Hope you guys can add full support in the future 

The Schism guys are still working on Schism, which I believe uses RMQ maps.

I've considered bundling some improved versions of my old RMQ maps and putting them up somewhere sometime, but since - to my current knowledge - Schism makes use of some of them, I'll only do that (quietly) when the Schism release has come and gone. I would probably fork such a release from the Demo 2 progs since I personally feel that was the team's pinnacle.

Also, the Scout's Journey environments are partly based in my RMQ maps, but their appearance has changed greatly. I had to dump certain parts of the levels due to technical reasons, replacing them with completely new setpieces, while other levels have been chopped up and their components are sort of recycled. Quite a bit of the actual brushwork from RMQ episode 1 will end up in Scout's Journey in some form though, so Quake fans might have a deja vu or several in the unlikely event they ever play it.

Schism should be *much* closer to a "faithful Quake remake" though, whatever that actually is.

Louis will know a lot more about Schism, naturally. 

Lost a post with error 42 :(

Schism will use some but not all the RMQ maps and have a much more manageable release schedule - a few maps at a time as opposed to 30+ in one go.

Right now I'm working on a rubicon2 project to get some perspective, after that I want to arm up schism release #1. 

Thanks for the update guys

I paid attention to the RMQ site, so I just want to say: I want to see that outdoor medieval map (was it e1m2?) with the dragon seen from above. I always thought it would be cool to link all the maps in one of id's episode together into one single giant outdoor map (I even started doing this one time with E2, but soon gave up). I liked the idea of seeing what was outside of/around these maps. 

That was one of the maps I had to cut up in order for it to be playable as a q3bsp (and because frankly, there was no real plan behind the design of that outdoor area).

The vis behaves very differently in q3bsp, you can't have the crazy outdoor areas that some RMQ maps have (and some of your own, Tronyn).

That map is completely open to the sky; you can grapple through holes in the roofs and run around on top of the entire thing. It was one of the extreme things we did. Without MH's engine(and BSP2), that wouldn't even have seemed feasible.

It's one of the maps that are on a list of things to fix up, whenever time permits.

Though frankly, I believe its SJ incarnation will be better. 

it would have been nice if rmq had worked. If i could just unstick myself from this ancient game i could do some awesome new creations... 

but the ancient atmospgere of this game is a big part of why you're here at all.
plus there's always/also personal reasons 

I sutil lime Quake :) 

Had the keyboard in Spanish :P 

are there any unfinished rmq maps that can be fixed up or combined and released? 

 

 

If I had the time and energy.

Rj had some great stuff with relatively few dependencies. 

is it still developing or abandoned? 

 

that project had a great potential, atleast at level construction, i didn't like the new gameplay but the maps were topnotch 

I have been working on it, I plan to release it eventually. 

another base map?
rj's are the most intriguing maps
gonna predict something e2ish 

> is it still developing or abandoned?

Episode 1 is not abandoned, but not claiming the RMQ name either. It goes under the name of "Rune of Earth Magic" but is currently in glacially slow development.

I recently started a fun remake of DM3 based on an old RMQ concept, btw. But I shelved it again because honestly I don't know who is gonna play it. I have a lot of shelved DM maps, not just RMQ ones :-(

My map sources are proprietary, except for the license I gave to the Schism project (ijed & co.)

If anyone should ever be interested in my map sources or code that I wrote (unlikely, I know), I am open to suggestions. I can be PM'd at various Quake forums. 

 

No.

- ROEM is a Quake mod like any other.

- SJ is completely unrelated. 

 

gb your stuff always looks amazing, that hexen 2 map and your e1m2 etc. I suspect both you and ijed are in a similar situation to me - in theory close to the end of a giant project, but the very size of it makes finishing it difficult. "If I could just unstick myself from this ancient game" indeed heh.

Maybe we should make a group therapy thread. 

This is about the 50th time this sort of thing happened. 

Maybe you should get a group therapy thread 

If there's one person on func who needs group therapy, it's you.

And your liver. 

i thought we were friends 

 

at least i could've learn to speak the english properly 

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61077 

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61077 

The railgun for the RMQ projects as well as the Zombie Knights should be salvaged 

vommitus
flayn zombie*
dividable tarbabies*
knight statues
flyers* (base scrags)

(* not in the demo) 

The exploding zombie.

Tarbabies I already rescued, expect the others one day in a distant, possibly dystopian, future. 

E3 in AD for qexpo16? 

It's an interesting idea but if I get back into Quake for a big project it'd be to finish Schism, which is the spiritual successor to RMQ.

I'd definitely want to port the AD shotguns though.

But my schedule is booked for the next 18 months at least. First finishing Syrian and getting it to market and then my second kid is arriving.

Quake is still fun though so I'll probably put something small together sooner or later.

Going back to the train wreck of e3rmq wouldn't be much fun though. 

E3 rmq? 

In RMQ. I built them fairly quickly but then got mired in retreating stuff that didn't need it and feature creep. 

Your episode had a lot of cool stuff in it. You're correct that some hearty cutting (and gameplay rebalancing?) would be a good thing though. IIRC you kept adding stuff that sort of diluted the vision that was there in the beginning. I remember I liked your early versions the best, like your rough version of e3m1 from the earliest stages. The one that still used quoth, with the rocketeers up there :) It was fast and loose.

I'm certainly guilty of the same thing, just in a different flavour. It all escalated a bit into a "more bigger stuff" contest especially when everyone started to make these huge maps. And some things were released in a very unfinished state, in hindsight.

E3's atmosphere was very brooding and properly netherworldly I think. On the other hand, fitting that high nihilistic vibe to the Quake gameplay seems difficult.

Good luck with the new baby. 

 

Thank god for deadlines or else everything I made would be overworked and mangled.

If I were to release it then I'd do so from scratch and probably as a series of turtlemaps to get that rough and ready feeling back in there. 

 

That's actually something I was gonna suggest, redoing from scratch. Just didn't want to sound negative.