there's this Admer guy at QuakeOne having trouble running Mark V. I told him I'd drop you a line, so for troubleshooting purposes you might wanna check posts #55-58 here.

Also, a few posts above those, Dutch states that he's experiencing a notable performance drop with the latest DX9 exe. 

I look at issues posted in this thread by the individual having the issue. There is a link to this thread on the Mark V page.

Keeps everything organized. 

Dutch probably made some setting that harms his FPS. Like r_shadows 3

He should try a clean install.
Same with the other guy who it won't run for -- completely new install in a new, clean Quake folder. 

Looks like an experimental map (an awesome looking one at that).

If that map gets released I'll see what is going on.

It could be one of a million things (vis, a texture, a skybox, external textures, a lit file, entity error, parsing issue, a texture name, a setting in Mark V even.). 

Hello, Baker. I'm the guy who can't run Mark V.

I tried what Gunter said, but the same problem still happens:

- I open the .exe
- RAM usage is at 9628KB
- After 15 seconds, the RAM usage jumps to around 46MB (I'm assuming it loads some game files)
- The .exe simply exits without a warning

In short, it won't run at all.
Sometimes, this happens:

https://i.imgur.com/JhSK4qI.png 

Yeah, it was a clean install, straight outta the box. New directory and everything. No old cfg files, lifted it all off my quake CDrom from '96. It's probably the r_shadows cvar. 

There should be a qconsole.log file in your Quake folder after you start Mark V.

Can you paste the text of that? 

That Microsoft crash report, could you post the text of that as well. Often the crash report text can indicate where something crashed.

What version of Windows are you using?

And I assume you are using current version of Mark V? 

Dutch, if you happen to be testing in the Start map, make sure to set r_mirroralpha 1 to disable mirrors. Mirrors are enabled by default (really shouldn't be). They are bad for my FPS.

I don't think any other FPS killing settings are defaulted on. r_oldwater 0 is another one that harms my FPS, but that isn't set by default. Assuming the secret hidden cfg file isn't retaining any non-default settings when you do c clean install....

You couldn't possibly be using a slower/older computer than I am (XP Netbook!).... I get between 40-75 FPS on the Start map, depending on what the lava balls are doing, as long as I don't have too many extra features enabled.

Hm, and if you happen to be running in a window, and you have some other program on screen that is drawing stuff, that could cause a problem too. I have a program called BitMeter, and it will destroy my FPS if I have it showing while running DX Mark V in a window.... 

I'll see about the crash report later today, because I'm currently using my phone. I remember it was referencing 3 files located in Appdata/Local/Temp.

My OS is Windows 7 (32-bit) and yes, I'm using the current version of Mark V, or at least that's what I think.
I've downloaded it here: http://quakeone.com/markv/ 

Slight correction: Windows 7 SP1.

I copied the 3 files in another folder:

https://i.imgur.com/33g4ZtZ.png

WERD147.tmp.WERInternalMetadata.xml
WERECF3.tmp.appcompat.txt

Should I send the .mdmp file? I'm a noob at debugging. 

I am on Windows 7, although not 32-bit.

The quake\id1\qconsole.log would be helpful. It is the log file Mark V writes out. 

Here are its contents:

Command line: [ ]
Log file: C:/Games/Quake/id1/qconsole.log
Sat Sep 09 18:17:08 2017
Mark V Windows (Build: 1036)
Exe: mark_v.exe (1327 kb)
Exe: 22:32:27 Jan 19 2017
Caches: C:/Users/kliker/AppData/Roaming/Mark V/caches
UDP4 Initialized: INADDR_ANY, 192.168.x.xxx
IPv6 Initialized: [fe80:0:0:0:a59f:53f6:4528:9fe7%41]
Exe: 22:32:00 Jan 19 2017
256.0 megabyte heap 

1) Do the WinQuake or Direct3D versions run?
2) Is there an opengl32.dll in your Quake folder?

I know Quakespasm runs on your machine, so it shouldn't be an Open GL issue although Mark V uses some Open GL capabilities that Quakespasm doesn't.

If there is an opengl32.dll in your Quake folder, you should delete that. But since DarkPlaces seems to run for you, I can't see how you could have a (toxic) opengl32.dll in your Quake folder. 

Baker, compile a debug build for him, keep hold of the exact pdb file that msvc generates when compiling said debug build.
Send him the debug exe, get him to send you the resulting .mdmp file.
Open the mdmp in msvc.
Then you can see the stack etc, and inspect many of the variables that might be relevant etc.

That or rip the stack trace code out of FTE's win32 port. That would allow him to simply paste you a whole list of function names which is usually enough to figure out where it crashed (although not always what actually went wrong).
This of course requires no pdb files, so hurrah for that, but it won't show line numbers etc.
Still, if you expect your code is going to crash then its quite handy... 

Ywah, the strangeness/uniqueness of Admer's problem is has been making me think about improved crash data.

Can't do anything tonight, but I'll ask you questions tomorrow or Monday about what you are referring to in FTE. 

1) Yes, but they crash the same way.
However, the WinQuake and DirectX versions don't give any crash reports. That only happens with the original Mark V .exe. :P

2) I'm sure there is, I'll still check to make sure.

Mentioning OpenGL reminded me of something:

My GPU only supports up to OpenGL 2.0. This gave me lots of compatibility issues with programs that require OpenGL 2.1. 

Correction:
1) No, they crash almost the same way.
(I misread what you wrote up there, sorry) 

If WinQuake or Direct3D are crashing, your OpenGL drivers aren't involved in this. Neither use Open GL. WinQuake doesn't use anything at all ;-)

So it is something else.

I never actually suspected a drivers problem, mostly wanted to rule it out. It but seems unlikely.

I have couple of suspects.

I imagine in the next 72 hours or less, I'll make a special build with some of Spike's inventiveness, and then exactly what is going will be clear.

Thanks for the feedback ;-) 

Well, I was wrong. There was no such file as opengl32.dll in my Quake folder. :P 

Been looking for an update of WinQuake and so happy to see you giving it some love, Baker! The original software renderer is still very charming. I love that washed out shading, you can't replicate it in Quakespasm.

Tried loading Arcane Dimensions with this and was surprised to find out that it mostly works. The engine even auto converts the full color skyboxes to 8 bit! However some textures with alpha channel are broken, the fog in ad_necrokeep looks especially bad, and ad_swampy crashes when you get to the main area. Anyway, what I'm getting to is, any chance your version of WinQuake could be fully compatible with Arcane Dimensions? AD is probably the best benchmark for the modern map packs, so it'd be a good milestone to achieve, I think. 

I am sure Baker will eventually provide builds for *all* MkV builds that fully work with latest AD additions. Maybe even Ter Shibboleth. These days, mappers are doing everything to push Quake map specifications beyond any previously known limits. I hope that eventually we'll have a solution which won't require updating ports over and over again to make maps work. 

Fog in custom Quake maps is usually too subtle, to disguise the fact that it's not volumetric.

Custom Quake maps can "fake" volumetric fog by making some areas small enough for the fog to not show up, and making other areas large enough for the fog to cover them. Combining this with strong shadows in the small areas and very subtle shadows in the large areas makes the global fog seem to have different densities in each area.

The thing is, subtle color translations are very difficult to pull off in 8-bit color palettes. Large areas of the screen ends up being rounded to similar color values, resulting in huge color banding if not dithered, or heavy graining if dithered. This gets even worse when the raw color of the fog doesn't exist in the Quake palette.

Making fog look good in 8-bit color renderers requires design restrictions that the mappers won't adhere to. Just like transparencies usually looks awful in 8-bit color, fog and colored lighting will usually look awful too.

A fun thing is that the same principles applies to regular lighting. Vanilla Quake maps features mostly strong shadows, because subtle shading has lots of banding in the software renderer. But newer Quake maps usually disregards this limitation, because they're usually only designed for hardware renderers. Most of the awfully looking maps from the 90's usually failed to understand this limitation too. 

Another reason for the subtle fog in custom Quake maps is to disguise the fact it's not spherical. Thick flat fog looks bad when turning the camera. 

I've done some more testing in Mark V WinQuake and turns out the water/teleporter transparency (r_wateralpha) actually works, via dithering. I suppose the same effect could be applied to the fake fog layer in ad_necrokeep. It just seems like the engine has no support for alpha channel in textures, e.g. various trees and vines in AD and Jam 8 are broken, with solid white where they should be transparent.