Take the skulls for example, which change size in software mark v depending on your scaler. Candles change position and also get a different model on hardware/software.

Heh, the candles don't change because hardware/software - they change because the candle entity is deliberately set up to spawn a random version each time (they come in many variations of tall/short/thick/thin)

The skulls changing size though is some funky shit - why is that happening? 

For what it's worth, hardware resolution scaling is possible. Never said that it wasn't.

You do need render-to-texture to do it with best performance, which means OpenGL 3.0 or GL_EXT_framebuffer_object.

A slower GL1.1 path involves a glCopyTexSubImage call.

The point that I need to be absolutely clear about is that MarkV's bottleneck is elsewhere, so hardware resolution scaling would give marginal improvements to it. With e.g. QuakeSpasm it would be worthwhile for cases that are fillrate-bound, but MarkV isn't fillrate-bound. MarkV is CPU-bound. 

Is regular Mark V also rendered on cpu? I just assumed a gpu was a requirement for opengl. So Mark V essentially emulates gpu-features on a cpu? Is that correct? I don't know enough about this stuff...

That certainly would explain why performance is so bad. Apparently my poopy laptop isn't at fault after all, I just tried running those levels in quakespasm and they run at a stable 60. I hadn't even considered that to be a possibility, mostly because my laptop struggles to run just about anything that came out in the last 15 years. 

By CPU-Bound, mh means (I think) that the performance limiting factors in markv are operations that are always done on the CPU in all games.

I'm no graphics programmer, but as I understand it, the CPU has to explicitly ask the GPU to draw each frame. If it takes too long, it won't matter how fast your GPU is because it's just sitting idle a lot of the time.
Quakespasm sends it's draw calls in a different way to markv which means that the GPU can always be busy, or at least busy more often to the point where upgrading your GPU will make a difference.

I might be wrong about all this so take it with a grain of salt. 

Thanks Pritchard, that explanation seems a lot more likely than mine. The difference it makes on my system is batshit crazy though, that's why I thought it had to be cpu rendered. While mark v sometimes dips down to less than 10 frames in busy areas you won't even notice as much as a hiccup in quakespasm.

I guess I'll have to switch engines for now, I'm gonna miss you zoom button... :( 

Pritchard has the right of it.

When drawing objects, every single component of every single vertex has CPU overhead in MarkV that doesn't exist in QuakeSpasm.

For any given scene this overhead is based on the number of polygons and number of vertexes in the scene, so it's fixed irrespective of resolution.

Small scenes - like in ID1 maps - are barely affected, which is why it won't be noticeable if all you ever do is e.g play DM3.

As the polygon count goes up the overhead gets more and more. 

Baker what features and stuff do you think you might want to implement in Mark V's next release?

(Crazy and Stupid) Ideas:
Atleast try to support orl's Zeangala map or what ever its called.Who knows,someone might make an adin1 like bbin1
Create feature like in reQuiem
(Might need to check this one)
Music command like in QuakeSpasm
Some proper coding!

So far I know 4 coders doing engine stuff
1.MadGypsy
2.Baker
3.Spike
4.LordHavoc 

Does anyone know why the skull models change size between the different resolutions? That's some crazy beans... 

Sort of, at least. In a proof-of-concept way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJJ8005Ig0A&feature=youtu.be

The video makes it look pretty crappy and stuttery, but it actually runs and feels awesome. The only real downside to this method is that you have to be incredibly careful not to make any sudden mouse movements, that causes the borderless window to stop capturing the cursor for a fraction of a second and the magnifier will register that movement, jerking the viewframe in whatever direction you happened to be aiming.

Keyboard aiming it is then! I can handle that. Probably. 

 

You could always use a joypad? 

So you mentioned that 4-player splitscreen is a thing you want to implement in the future? How about 4-player splitscreen that also allows people to join from the internet?

I have been playing a bit of the remastered Turok 2 from Nightdive and this has the same feature. It's a good way of getting people online and playing! 

You could always use Audacity or any sound tool to export to mp3. 

... is also good at that: I created some custom sounds and background loops a while ago with it.

It is not a freeware, but it has a lot of interesting features. 

How about a Text Contrast adjustment that will only affect the text (maybe like the texture baked-on gamma/contrast).

The dull text can be hard to read in front of all the other dull colors in Quake.... I don't want to universally ramp up the contrast for everything, so it would be nice if I could just adjust the text contrast alone. 

I was running an ancient version of dp then fte before mkv. in those I was using a conchar file that had black outlines and cleaned up characters, the diamond grip numbers, and conback from qtest. I had obtained these from gfx.quakeworld.nu quite some time ago all for clarity and legibility sake. Is there any way to have mkv load external wad assets, or does it perfer certain fyle tipes such as pcx? 

Mark V only supports .tga, uses the DarkPlaces way of naming replacement textures.

For instance, throw this file in quake\id1\gfx folder (conchars.tga).

Random comments: Gunter should be using a custom charset ;-) He could adjust the contrast in an image editor and self-serve. 

If your custom gfx are in .lmp format:

DP/FTW will use a loose id1/gfx/conback.lmp (conchars, etc.) in preference to the one in id1/pak0.pak, but vanilla engines including MarkV require you to put them in a pak file (e.g. create a pak2.pak) in order to override the stock ones. 

Everything was in a portable network graphic format so I just used gimp to patch them over to targa. I also increased the color saturation levels of everything and added black borders to the hudnumbers as well. Another thing I noticed after this was if you disable the start demos it just dumps to console, is there any way that it could pop the main menu up as well? I also saw a sort of custom start demos command but I couldn't get it to operate. 

Akira, just put "menu_main" at the bottom of your autoexec.cfg file if you want it to pop up automatically upon game start.


Wow, that custom conchars.tga is definitely high-contrasty-more-legible in the game... buuuuut it doesn't look like Quake, heh.

I guess I can mess with the contrast and make my own custom conchars, but it would still be nice to have such a feature built in. 

this is the one i use, and Gunter will approve!
http://gfx.quakeworld.nu/details/196/original-conchar-simplified/ 

edit: what you CANT see by that image is that the characters have a thin black outline around them.
Unless I selected the wrong file. Or just look in Qrack's pak0 for charset-3. 

Not bad... (had to convert to TGA for Mark V, but it works). That's more Quake-like than the one Baker linked, but I'm very picky in that regard, heh, and it's still not quite right.

I came up with this one by just ramping the hell out of the brightness/contrast so the text really stands out, but it's otherwise still the original Quake characters: http://fvfonline.com/conchars.tga 

Just a heads up, Baker. Looks like the cvar scr_clock still allows the game time to be drawn when set to -1 if playing DM (it does disable in SP).

Wouldn't normally bother me but it overlays on top of the player colors (the mini-scoreboard when viewsize is set to 120). 

EDIT: sorry, I meant when viewsize is 100 or less, in regard to the above post