^ Yeah, that's what I figured, but my angry head rant was "christ, it's like they picked an alpha color based on the average of all the others or something. ... wait a minute." 

Quake's alpha color is just a random color, and there's a duplicate of it in the default palette (which annoys me, because several custom textures used the index 255 instead of the index of the duplicate, and this gives problems with alphamasked texture support).

There were no 3D hardware accelerators when Quake was released. It was created with only the software renderer in mind, which is why it loses some of its charm when rendered through hardware.
Carmack coded GLQuake in a weekend, and he certainly would've done a lot better if he had the opportunity before.

The first Id Software game made with hardware acceleration in mind is Quake 2. 

I never saw those Retroquad screenshots before. They are amazing. You managed to push that water towards modern standards without losing Quake original charm. Way to go, man. Quake water needed this love. 

Besides those screenshots however I can't seem to find more info about it. 

(Sorry in advance for hijacking Quakespasm's thread.)

The only place with a good description of Retroquad is my Patreon page:
patreon.com/mankrip

The engine is not released yet, there's a lot of work to do. I'm currently doing some major rewrites in the network protocol. 

when you're ready. 

Hey. Is there a way to enable 5.1 surround sound in QS? 

I think DarkPlaces has surround sound support. 

It does. So does FTE (though for some reason it doesn't seem to remember my settings).

I only recently got into QS and I really like it. It would be nice to have some more audio options though.

Slightly off topic but QS also seems to have some issues with music playback too. The original game and the official expansions seem to work fine but Abyss of Pandemonium, among others, seem to skip during playback or even not play tracks at all. Messages like "CD Track 07 Not Found..." even though they're in the folder.

I'm using Windows 7 Pro (64 bit). Perhaps that's the root of the problem? :) 

Music skipping is not good, never experienced that myself. Win7 64 should be a fully supported OS. I'd suggest re-downloading the latest version from: http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/download.htm and make sure to overwrite any existing DLL's in your quake folder. It's annoying that the DLL's from different engines conflict with each other.
I'd also test both of the SDL versions (quakespasm.exe uses SDL1.2, quakespasm-sdl2.exe is SDL2).

For the Abyss of Pandemonium music issue, I'm not sure, but if the id1 and mission pack music works, then I suspect something wrong with your AOP music files. What format are they in? There's extra info about the QS music system here, not sure if it could be helpful: http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/music.htm

I'm not sure how likely surround support is right now; I don't have a 5.1 system myself to test it with, and it is something that's tedious / messy to implement. Maybe at some point, not sure. :-( 

I do have QS in its own folder. I'll try a fresh install and I'll try it on another machine too and let you know how I get on.

With regards to the Abyss of Pandemonium music. I've got both the ISO audio disc (I use Daemon Tools) and the OGG files as found on Quaddicted (as far as I know they're correctly named track02.ogg et cetera). Obviously I've only used them one at a time! :)

I have a similar issue with the Travail soundtrack too.

The most perplexing one is when QS reports not finding the CD track when playing random SP maps. To me, they're quite obviously there and working as they all play fine during the original Quake maps... 

That's a shame about there being no surround sound support. For me, audio is a huge part of the Quake experience.

I do understand though that such things aren't a priority (or maybe not even that interesting!) for you. Still, I'll keep my fingers crossed for the future. :) 

Sorry to be the typical noob posting lots of stuff but I have a small request if that's okay.

I wonder if it would be possible to add a CVAR to centre the message text? At the moment all text (including Showscores) is centred except those in shown in the top left (pickups et cetera). I know it's a trivial aesthetic thing and I know that it wasn't part of the original Quake but I just think it's a 'small thing' to tweak that would make the text aesthetic more consistent.

Hope that makes sense and hope that it doesn't bug you. :) 

You want ammo pickup text to appear in the centre of the view? 

Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I could've been. It would be nice if it could appear in the top centre rather than the top left.

ZDoom offers a similar option in the HUD menu. I just think it looks a lot nicer.

Scores are shown in the bottom centre.
Context messages are shown in the centre.
Pickups et cetera shown in the top middle.

:) 

Quake text is on the top left because it's part of the console. When the console scrolls up, the recent messages stays at the top while the background scrolls up completely.

Changing that would make recent console messages move from the left to the center when the console scrolls up, and that would be weird.

Anyway, that's a matter of preference. 

could fix in in QuakeC with centerprints maybe 

con_centernotify in fte and I believe dp.
also applies to kills, of course. and chat.


probably the best thing is to just remove pickup messages completely. they're basically just spam anyway.
flash an icon somewhere if you want, but expecting the user to read stuff in the heat of battle is folly. 

the only time I ever use pickup text is to see whether I've picked up a 15 or 25 health, just so I know for my next run if I die. Of course, the obvious fix would be to make the health box graphics display this more obviously. 

I've tried it out in FTE and it's great. The in-game text is top-centre while in the console it remains left justified.

Is that something that could be added to QS? You'd make an old man happy! :P 

There was a bug with fog in the SDL1.2 build (quakespasm.exe) - when changing video modes, the fog formula was getting reset to the OpenGL default (GL_EXP) when it should be GL_EXP2.

Quick fix is to just use quakespasm-sdl2.exe. (SDL2 preserves the OpenGL context when changing video modes, which works around the bug, but it's fixed properly now anyway.) 

- Allow for bigger weapon models, or at least winquake style weapon placement. The weapon model on winquake, and in the latest version of mark_v, allows the top of the status bar to be the 'bottom' of the screen, allowing you to see more of the weapon. Guns look silly in QS.

- Despite choosing to have music turned to 'off' most of the time Quakespasm INSISTS on playing the music regardless of setting. It's infuriating!!

- contrast and brightness as separate controls? I dunno if this is possible, it would be nice to have this level of control. I find QS to be a little washed out. 

Yeh, I second the need for a contrast cvar to avoid washed out visuals, I always miss it if I'm using Quakespasm rather than another engine. 

regarding the quakespasm website with all its "Being", "Manifestation" etc. faffery.

What's wrong exactly with the tried-and-tested "About", "Download" etc. type headings?

I'm trying to get some colleagues onboard the Quake train (by way of Quakespasm), and it's something that has been raised more than once in a not-too-enthusiastic way. 

I'm with you on the guns; on a widescreen monitor with the full statusbar showing, the SSG barely pokes out about the top of the sbar.
If you lower "statusbar alpha" to the minimum value in the settings screen, it pushes the gun up.

re: music, the "external music" switch in the settings menu seems to only take effect when you restart the level - it should stay off from that point on, but maybe there is a bug there? I usually just lower the music volume slider to 0 if I don't want it.

contrast adjustment is a good suggestion too. Raising the contrast in MarkV does brighten the image without washing it out.