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 

I've come across a few bugs. The first one is in mutiplayer the ping command doesn't seem to work, I tried ping 100 and ping +100 but I don't see any changes on the scoreboard or latency. It seems to be in there though as it doesn't come up as an unknown command. The second is single player that when you die and instantly hit space to respawn your view remains sideways, I'm not sure if it has any relationship with quicksav or being splattered. The last one I've had happen a couple times first on some map from 1996 then in ad monsters spawned like brushes I was using quake injector. 

1) There is a loadgame + death bug reported by Pritchard. Will be fixed in the next release (already fixed in unreleased code). Results in the deadness issue you outlined above after loading a save game.

1) ping +x is not supported (ability to lag yourself). Feature exists in ProQuake/DarkPlaces/Qrack, but adds some complexity/ugliness to maintaining the network code. Possible it may get added at some point. 

is there any portal culling for VIS like in DP? 

Doesn't have such a feature, which AFAIK is intended for real time lighting.

Arcane Dimensions quake.rc has r_useportalculling 0 and Map Jam 8 users needed to turn off r_useportalculling to avoid issues with DarkPlaces.

Arcane Dimensions finds it necessary to turn off r_useportalculling in the quake.rc file for gameplay or visual compatibility reasons. 

yeah, "r_useportalculling 2" breaks map if you have some Warnings/clipped portals during VIS. It's very annoying, but 50% of fault lays on mappers side ;)

I was just curious if there are any VIS improvements in your engine, or do you plan any?

As we know VIS in Quake is very primitive and does it's job poorly, so you have to do tricks etc. to limit r_speeds. 

The idea the engine would do the same thing as vis (which can take untold hours to run in some circumstances), and do it better and do it instantly on map load doesn't make sense.

I'm just saying ... if the engine could do that, why wouldn't you take those calculation and throw them into the vis tool instead?

Yes Quake vis sucks terribly, especially at open maps. Kills frame rate, makes demos huge --- like the 10 GB "I played Arcane Dimensions!" demos, makes QuakeC slows, makes map uncoopable with enormous network traffic.

The correct solution is improvement of map compile tools.

/Maybe you should get together with other interested parties and raise a $2500 bounty and try to induce someone who writes tools either in Q1 or in Q3 or at id Software or for another game engine to get Quake vis right or vastly improved.

/One idea. I'm often wrong about these kinds of things. 

I agree Baker, the only problem with vis, IMHO, is the thing where certain uses of func_detail can cause vis to see through your map where it shouldn't. I'm not sure exactly where the problem lies (qbsp or vis) but I'm sure it's fixable.

Unless the problem I mentioned leads to exaggerated PVS in AD maps in a lot of places, vis is not really to blame for large demos in AD and the large unreliables, that's just the particle system based on entities and lack of use of static entities combined with protocol 666. 

Yeah, my main complaint are open spaces. I know how to optimize vis for indoor maps.

I did hedge maze and of course everything is rendered, because of open space above it... I'll have to add some obstacles to separate sectors better, or try some hint brushes, but I think hint won't help in this case.

Best option would be occlusion culling like modern engines do, but of course it's impossible with BSP.

Anyway thanks :)

PS
Btw. how different is Q2's VIS? (except doors blocking it) and how much we can borrow without a need to upgrade BSP ? :D 

ericw, you've done awesome work with the tools so this isn't directed at you. It isn't your responsibility to fix vis. You are a volunteer. This isn't a reflection on people that do the great work on the tools.

But yeah ...

vis is certainly to blame. It is supposed to block faces and entities from being drawn. That includes things like AD particles.

http://quakeone.com/markv/media/ad_mountain_r_lockpvs.png
http://quakeone.com/markv/media/ad_mountain_r_lockpvs_directq.png
http://quakeone.com/markv/media/arwop_roman1_r_lockpvs.png
http://quakeone.com/markv/media/r_drawworld_0.png

/I don't like thinking about it because it is very disappointing. Nor do I seek to bring it up. Kreathor brought it up, haha. He's the bad guy.

Dead horse, I don't wish to beat it. I won't be bringing up, and I didn't raise the topic this time either. 

Nor do I seek to bring it up. Kreathor brought it up, haha. He's the bad guy.

Yeah but I haven't brought it to blame you guys, but to ask if there are some better solutions on the horizon and what can we do to improve this situation.
I saw that Mark V has some nice features, so I thought I'll ask if there are some features supporting VIS...

Speaking of raising a bounty I'm in, but...
Considering I'll give $100 I'll have to find other people willing to pay $$$ to get $2500 in total, which probably is impossible, so I think it's time to finally dive into code and see what we can do in that matter. 

Reporting problems is only a good thing in my book.

Wow, ad_mountain's vis looks really broken. Assuming the player was in-bounds and then you used lockpvs and noclipped outside?

The ARWOP screenshot doesn't look too bad to me.. assuming the player was at the start position when pvs was locked? Also I am 99% sure ARWOP predates func_detail being used commonly so it would be immune to the bug that can cause total breakage (vis seeing into entirely separate areas).

The last one of ionous/pulsar's map, I'm not sure there is much unneeded stuff, that's a big open arena type area.

Another point to remember at least with Quakespasm, it has the anti-flickering patch so if an entity exceeds MAX_ENT_LEAFS, the server will always send it. So testing in Quakespasm, large bmodels that exceed max_ent_leafs will always render, and it'll look like VIS messed up but it's just a server quirk.