Oh, and this probably can't be helped (I skimmed over mh's post about fog, above), but the fog in DX Mark V is rather unsmooth compared to the OpenGL Mark V.

http://imgur.com/a/fNE7a

It's hard to get a good still image of the effect, but you can tell the lower image is much more "line-y" even in areas that aren't so dark on the wall. It's really noticeable when walking around, because you see the fog lines moving across the walls.... The OpenGL version had a much more subtle effect, and seemed smoother and much less noticeable on most surfaces.

I guess this is just a result of DX not doing fog as well or something? Probably not a setting to smooth that out.... Too bad; I like a little fog. Give a nice sense of depth. 

Are you interested in doing a review of Quakespasm from your perspective?

Most of the feedback Quakespasm receives is from single-player only types.

Diversity of feedback is what makes an engine better and helps developers have a broader point of view.

(re: fog --- Yeah, I have no control over Direct3D differences in fog rendering. Probably midday tomorrow, I'll try to rebuild fixing missing voreball trail. I probably stripped the flag.) 

that fog banding is interesting, because both shots have the same number of bands, but somehow on the lower shot it's more noticable.

If you look at the darkest parts of the image, like the wood pillar on the left side, it's clear that the lighting ramp is different -- top shot appears more blown out (slightly) -- i wonder if that's why the banding is more noticable in the bottom image, because the lighting is darker so the fog grey color has more higher contrast to the black walls.

Anyway both shots look bad, and this is a good example of why fog is difficult to make look good. You need to avoid solid colored patches of the scene, (such as a pitch black wall) since only the noise of textures and lighting can hide the banding that will always occur. 

ericw, r_oldwater was the culprit. As soon as I turned that off, the FPS smoothed out DRAMATICALLY (running in an 800x600 window, it went from 6 FPS to just over 60, standing in the Start map, looking at the 3 teleporters and lava -- all water surfaces).

Thanks! Glad that worked. 

I guess this is just a result of DX not doing fog as well or something?

GL or DX don't actually "do fog" at all - your GPU does. All that GL or DX do is provide your program with a means of saying "draw this polygon with fog", but your GPU does all the actual drawing.

With everything else being equal, there should be no difference whatsoever between images produced by one API versus images produced by the other, because it's the same GPU that's doing the drawing; all that the API does is send commands to the GPU.

On the other hand, DX does provide a handful of extra fog quality/performance options whereas GL hides them all behind a single glHint (GL_FASTEST/GL_NICEST), and allows the actual result to be implementation-dependent.

One possibility is that one of those extra options, if configured, would resolve it.

Another possibility is that the projection matrix isn't configured correctly in the DX version, causing loss of some depth precision, causing the extra banding. 

Baker, I'm afraid I just find Quakespasm off-putting for various reasons, but I will try to give it a test drive, since you asked....


So, it seems that now DX Mark V is running fine in a window... I'm not sure what changed (I often delete config files when testing), but most likely it was just me rebooting my netbook after testing no-telling-what last night.... In any case, the DX version is now running just as smoothly as the older OpenGL one, even in a window.

But here come some bug reports! heh

Your default lava color is incorrect!!!!!

Haha, yeah, this is a minor niggle, but your r_lavacolor is "255 80 50 150" and the Quake default should be "255 80 0 150" (search for "lava" here to see http://unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/quake1/newsrc/Quake/view.c.html )

It does alter the color a bit... Of course, the lava intensity needs to be dropped to about 100 for my tastes; in standard Quake, if you were in lava you were dead, so it didn't matter that it was blinding in there. But in Runequake and FvF, there are ways to be in lava and not be dead, so you need to be able to see a little bit... 100 looks good to me (it's still lava, after all!). Normally I'm for keeping the defaults, but in this case, it would benefit from a slight change. Though I'm afraid I don't like the "light" blends in Mark V though -- way too transparent. But as long as it defaults to the defaults, that's fine. And Mark V provides the ability to change them to tastes, so that's fine too.

All other blends look good to me at Quake default, though for some reason the Ring blend looks a bit heavy. Maybe I'm just used to all the Quake clients that made it too light, but is there a variable to adjust the Ring blend? Hm, it does look like the cshift_powerup stuff for invisibility is the highest % on that page I just linked. I guess it's supposed to be that way.


Speaking of invisibility... I really liked that "always draw weapon when invisible" option in the old OpenGL version of Mark V that I was using... It made my weapon transparent. I like little tweaks like that which enhance things without really drastically changing the default Quake feel.

However, in the new DX version, the weapon just stays completely solid, and in the Winquake version, the weapon is completely invisible again... (of course I can't test the newest OpenGL version...). I wouldn't expect the Winquake version to do good transparency, but it seems the option, in that case, should leave the weapon completely solid. Which I actually don't like (laugh)! 

Ok, so, I find this interesting too, though I am clueless as to the internal stuff.

I cranked the gamma and contrast up to max (for the sliders) and made some more screenshots.

OpenGL (older version of Mark V) is on top, and the newest Mark V DX version is on bottom....

http://imgur.com/a/pkjip

You can see the ugly square of fog over the close wall in the bottom image.... Though it turns out, in the top (OpenGL) image, the fog is actually extending farther toward the "me" in the image -- that's why the left edge of the first image looks lighter. The OpenGL fog still somehow looks better/smoother (even in this forced setup). I'm not changing any other settings -- just switching which client I run.

Here the same angle with fog off, and they are pretty much identical:

http://imgur.com/umSZFPC

You can only tell them apart because of the odd lighter shadow under the grenade launcher in the OpenGL one -- I don't notice that in game, but the screenshot seems to capture it, same as the first image I posted upthread. Uhh... for some reason, imgur may resize the view so the odd lighter shadow is not visible o_O But trust me, it's there in the original image, heh.

Ok, now the most interesting image.... I changed my position to emphasize the fog distance difference:

http://imgur.com/RhCrSig


Now look at that!

The fog does get closer to "me" in OpenGL, but also the bands on the wall are not all straight and parallel, which actually helps them not seem so ugly/uniform/bandy/unnatural.... And especially in the lit areas of the wall, the GL fog looks much better than the DX. This is what is pretty noticeable in play, under more typical lighting conditions.

There's also some difference in the interaction of the fog and the teleport texture. 

Image 3 settles it - there's a different fog range calculation being used depending on the API.

That's going to require a code change and a whole bunch of testing to fix up though. 

While testing Quakespasm, I looked at the fog (looks good - identical to the OpenGL images above), and I noticed what is causing the difference.

The fog is BEHAVING differently... and this would be hard to capture in a non-animated image, and it may be difficult to describe. But you should be able to replicate this yourself if you wanna see it in action. Just ramp up your brightness and contrast in Quake, and go to the entry room for E4M8 and look at the black wall opposite the portal while walking forward very slowly, or even looking left and right a bit. Oh, I also use a very light fog setting 0.03

The GL fog is JUMPING along the wall, in small sections at a time. That's why the bands in the GL screenshot are not perfectly straight lines -- one section of the line will jump forward, then another section. This actually makes it less noticeable on the walls when you are moving around, because you don't see any "movement" -- a line doesn't move across the wall, it just suddenly is there or isn't there, and that's really hard to notice when you're moving around, especially with the lines being not perfectly straight due to them jumping unevenly.

The DX fog is MOVING very smoothly along the wall, in perfectly straight lines. It looks bad because you easily see the movement of straight lines smoothly scrolling across the walls.... 

Ok... animated images... Keep in mind the colors will be extra ugly for being compressed to a GIF.

Just barely creeping forward you can see how the GL fog jumps in small sections, instantly. There are no missing frames in the fog's positions:

http://imgur.com/grwHCPv


In DX, moving forward a big faster, the fog evenly scrolls across the wall. There are lots of missing frames of fog position in the animation.... I'd describe it as similar to interpolated movement, if that makes sense, because it moves very smoothly across the wall.

http://imgur.com/sTbVMuU



Is there any point to doing/discussing this?
Who knows!
I just do the testing. It's up to other people to do anything about it ;) 

Windows Build

Vore trail fixed, "submersion in lava" color slight typo fixed.

/Took a quick look at the DX transparent model with invisibility ring. Oddly discovered it doesn't look like FitzQuake 0.85 ever had a pathway to use model transparency if the driver doesn't support combine (the Direct3D wrapper does not support combine) --- so may not even be possible (didn't expect that). The non-combine rendering pathway does a series of operations that already use blending but it isn't alpha blending -- so that's probably one reason FitzQuake uses combine in the first place. A bit annoying.

I don't have time to do anything of substance on the engine, but the above 2 things were 2 minute fixes.

But in the future when the day comes that I have that time, I always read all the notes. 

That's interesting, i don't remember whether i added that support or not (but i would have assumed i did.) There is this comment in the readme:

- fullbrights now use additive blending instead of alpha blending. This allows me to support external glowmaps, and entity transparency with fullbrights/glowmaps. In some cases, additive fullbrights are rendered using multitexture, but only if GL_EXT_texture_env_add is available. The command line option -nocombine will disable the use of GL_EXT_texture_env_add.

This implies that without combine, models with fullbright masks are rendered in two passes. It doesn't say that they are rendered correctly with alpha though... hmm. 

It is probably a virtually non-existent situation.

I've not seen an instance of someone using .alpha on an alias model in a single player release. And there probably aren't any Open GL drivers that don't support combine.

It's just that the Direct3D wrapper doesn't have combine ability written in the code and that Mark V offers a "gun with transparency" option when invisible, instead of Quake not drawing the gun at all.

/But the brush models don't suffer this problem in the Direct 3D + no combine scenario (I tested against back2forwards which uses .alpha for glass). So at some future date when I have time to chart out the rendering, I should be able to rewire something --- assuming I would do that instead of maybe taking a shot at adding combine to the Direct3D wrapper. 

(Actually, thinking about that --- Nehahra does .alpha on wraiths and Mark V runs Nehahra.) 

the sparks in rubicon2 fade out using alpha (they are models) 

Hehehe, never noticed that. I only noticed the laser barrier bars and such used .alpha. 

Torch flames in sock's maps usually (always?) have alpha as well. Any maps using Preach's smoke model. 

I did proper animated fog once. It used world position and a function of time to do a lookup in a 3D noise texture which was then used to adjust the opacity. It looked beautiful but the performance hit was just on the wrong side of what I considered acceptable.

Totally irrelevant to the ongoing fog discussion, of course, but it was fun. 

While we're mentioning fog, faint transparent water with a more subtle texture could make for neat looking fog, especially if combined with mankrip's shore fading. 

Contract Revoked used this trick, IIRC. 

Didn't have fog. 

dwere was probably talking about this. I didn't adjust the translucency and soft depth levels to match Qmaster's suggestion, though. 

Ok, you asked for it Baker, so here is my review of Quakespasm. Much of this will be personal preference, and other stuff will be comparisons to Mark V.

I mentioned that Quakespasm is off-putting to me. This starts with the website (I talked about that long ago, way upthread). I do note the addition of a clear "readme" link on the site, and that's a definite improvement, because when I go to try and download something like this, I want specific information rather than the vague artsy presentation which just gets in the way....

The second off-putting thing to me was all the files Quakespasm wants to drop into my Quake directory.... My goodness, that's a lot of files. 12 DLLs, a PAK file, 3 TXT files and an HTML... along with the 2 EXEs. What a lot of clutter.

The third major hurdle was that r_oldwater defaulting to 0, which caused my frame rate to be like 5-10 on the Start map.

Finally, there's the difficulty in finding what settings are available, such as all the various console variables, like the one above -- there's no good documentation. I would have never known to try that to fix my issue.

So yeah, with all those issues, I was like, "Forget this..." and I'd move on to something else.


But I will say, once past all that, Quakespasm is a really nice engine. It may even run a bit smoother in places as compared to Mark V. Well, I am stuck with the DX version of Mark V now, since the newer GL ones just crash for me... so... that may make a difference. The fog certainly looks better in Quakespasm as compared to DX Mark V (but that's also true of GL Mark V vs DX).


My first point of feedback would be that the r_oldwater setting should really default to 1... since it seems to be such a power-hungry effect to have active (in my case any way). I tried enabling it in Mark V, and got the same result -- baaaaaad FPS. But Mark V has r_oldwater 1 by default.

In the menu, I really like the "Scale" slider. Very nice. I had to set up keys in Mark V to achieve the same effect by altering 3 different console variables. The nice slider seems to adjust everything at once (that's definitely something Mark V should add).

The "instant Quit" upon selecting Quit from the menu. Hm, not sure how I feel abut that. I don't love it but I don't hate it. The new Console background is the same type of thing -- not sure if I like it or not, but FvF has its own console replacement anyway, which still looks close to the original Quake one, so it doesn't matter much.

Hey, the "Always Run" menu option is a definite improvement in the way it functions. In most Quake clients (like Mark V), having "Always Run" on seems to place more emphasis on your forward movement, causing the side-stepping movement to be way too slow (when you gotta side-step to get out of the way of a rocket, you want to sidestep FAST!). The way Quakespasm implemented it seems to instead function just like a run key (+speed), which places emphasis on your side-stepping speed while only slowing your forward speed down a little (there's still an overall speed limit you can't pass when moving "diagonally"). Even better, when "Always Run" is enabled, your usual +speed key acts to slow you back to normal walking speed. That's a nice touch (Baker, Mark V needs all of this! :D ).

Uh, where's the clock ? The usual clock in DM mode is MIA. Is there a console variable to enable it? But watch out that it doesn't overlay the "player squares" that appear where the clock would normally be -- just limit the number of those "squares" that appear there.

Also, there are no pings by the scoreboard when you press tab while playing online. That's a pretty common feature, and pretty much expected these days.

Speaking of the scoreboard (and all other things that are printed in the center of the screen, like centerprints and "loading" images), the ProQuake method of positioning all these things near the top of the screen is the best way to go. Then they don't block your view in the middle of the screen. Every modern Quake client should be imitating Proquake in this respect. EVERY MODERN QUAKE CLIENT, Baker :D


(continued below, because maximum character count is only 5000, haha) 

Wow, MP3s load fast! I guess some of those DLLs are doing their job. The MP3s seem to load with no delay at all. My gosh, Mark V takes like 10 seconds to load an MP3 track (all the while your game is frozen). Can we get this in Mark V? Like, seriously. I won't even complain if it will require some extra DLLs!
Though it seems the menu option to enable/disable external sounds does not take effect until level change (Mark V enables/disables the music right away. Well, after the loading delay, that is).

Speaking of those DLLs, I don't suppose they would go into the PAK file to make them more tidy? Probably not, eh? Well, the next best option would be to move all the Quakespasm-related files (DLLs and PAK) into a Quakespasm folder within the Quake folder (this is like how Qrack does it).... Quakespasm would still know where to find them, and they would be out of the way. I think this would be a significant improvement.

Is there a way to toggle high-quality textures on and off? Mark V has external_textures to toggle.... I like to be able to turn them on and off in game, to make comparisons and to test loading time. There doesn't seem to be a way to turn them off at all in Quakespasm?

And... how do I get high-quality monster textures to work? I tried them in Qrack format (png), I tried them in Mark V format (tga), I tried them in various locations (progs folder or textures folder), but they don't show up. Documentation, please!

I do note that the high-quality wall textures load correctly in my modified dm6 (it's got some small extra areas added to the standard DM6 map). For some reason, Mark V does not load the custom textures in it, and reverts back to the standard textures for the map.


Speaking of my modified DM6 and Mark V (and this is really a Mark V bug report, but I'm on a roll), for some weird reason, when I run FvF and go to start a new Single Player game, I am dropped into my DM6 at a DM spawn point (I did add SP spawn points to the map) instead of the Start map! What's up with that? No other engine does that (including Quakespasm or older Fitzquake Mark V or Proquake....). Some weird interaction of Mark V and FvF, or the modified DM6? It's not really important, because FvF doesn't actually have a single player mode... It's just weird.


gl_overbright_models does not look good for me. Makes the Quake solder way too washed out when he's standing in a bright area, especially if he's wearing white. Same in Mark V. I just disable it.

I like that r_wateralpha controls all the liquids by default. In recent Mark V, it seems each setting must be made separately (like r_lavaalpha). This appears to be a result of Quakespasm using defaults of 0 for like r_lavaalpha, and also allowing the r_wateralpha to affect all liquids. That's a much better way of handling it, which still allows fine-tuning of separate liquids if desired. Mark V could benefit from this.

Hey, the "under lava" blend looks perfect, right out of the box in Quakespasm. Has the intensity of it been changed? Quakespasm doesn't seem to have the ability to alter it manually.... Good thing it looks perfect as-is! But I'm curious as to why it does, when it looks so blinding in Mark V at the default Quake values.

Models with missing skins come up as white in Quakespasm. This is old GLquake behavior, but it should really be handled like Winquake does, by using the default texture. For example, if a monster or projectile has multiple skins for a mod (FvF does this a lot), but the client does not have those skins installed -- so the like mod is assigning skin_1 or skin_2 to a model, but if the client doesn't have them he should just see the default skin_0 for that model. Mark V does show the default skin in these cases.

Hm, scr_showfps doesn't stay set for the next time you start Quakespasm.... That seems to be standard behavior for Quake clients, but this seems like one of the settings that should be stuck in the cfg file and saved.


(continued) 

Keeping in mind I'm running on a netbook with a resolution of 1280x600,
If I set Quakespasm to a 800x600 window, the actual space inside the window (game area) is 600 tall, but the title bar and border extend farther.
In Mark V (and Proquake, etc), the entire window (including title bar and border), is 600 tall.
This means that in Quakespam, there would be a tiny portion of the screen cut off at the bottom of my actual screen, because I can't move the top of the window all the way off the top of the screen.
I'm not really saying one way is more correct (though the standard, I think, is that the 800x600 defines the dimensions of the entire window, including borders).
So I end up setting my window to a weird size so it all fits my screen, 750x550 (I've used this with Mark V and Proquake sometimes too), but when I do that, Quakespasm's color depth is locked at 16 bpp and can't be changed in the menu.
If I go back to an 800x600 window, the color depth is again changeable in Quakespasm's settings, though I really can't tell any difference at all in the graphics when I change it (in full-screen or window). My desktop is set at 32 bit color. I don't have any real issues with any of this -- I'm just reporting my findings, heh.

I do have a slight issue that the Contrast slider does not do anything for me (no matter the BPP or full-screen/window settings)... so the Brightness slider is my only option for adjusting things, and that tends to make colors less vibrant. Mark V's Contrast slider works fine for me.

The weapon model is too low. I guess that's the Fitzquake default.... Mark V allows (and defaults to) the Proquake way of showing the weapon, which makes it less hidden at the bottom. Well, normally Quakespasm hides the weapon behind the transparent HUD anyway, but I like to set my HUD to opaque. And I like to see more of my gun.

While on that topic, the Mark V "transparent weapon when invisible" is a nice option Quakespasm could use.

Demos don't load at all upon startup? Is there an option for that?

The r_noshadow_list has same problems as Fitzquake: There is no bolt1.mdl in Quake. That should be bolt.mdl. Baker did add bolt.mdl to Mark V, but he forgot to remove the bolt1.mdl. Also, k_spike.mdl (the Death Knight fireball attack) and lavaball.mdl really should be added to the list, as they are glowing things that should not be casting shadows.

Hm, I miss the stain maps from Mark V....

And I would suggest adding Proquake's RCON function to Quakespasm (as Baker did for Mark V -- thanks!!). It is extremely useful to be able to admin a Proquake server while I'm connected and playing. This is a pretty big criteria for me when selecting a Quake client, though it may not matter at all for most people.

And of course I always suggest adding support for Colors 14/15. Heh, They are in Quake... it's just that the client doesn't allow them to be selected. I think it's an easy thing to modify (later versions of ProQuake have it).


I guess in the end Quakespasm and Mark V are pretty close, with each having pros and cons compared to the other....