I have finally come across a solution to my problem. It turns out that I actually didn't have pak1 and pak0.pak. I thought I did, but I didn't check my ID1 folder. Long story short, I found something which contained both pak files and copied them over.

I love it. It runs like a charm:

https://i.imgur.com/WMxEBLv.png

I'm so sorry for wasting your time over such a dumb mistake of mine. 

>uses markv
>looks like glquake 

Missing PAK files was the problem?

How does that happen? If I remove my PAK files and try to run Mark V, I immediately get a popup error message saying it can't find the pak files.....

Maybe corrupt pak files? 

@killpixel
My laptop is 10 years old, I'd rather not...
Also, it's my first time using this sourceport, so I haven't tweaked all of the settings yet. Though, I'd love that to change. :)

@Gunter
Funny thing is, there were no .pak files at all in my ID1 folder.
The .pak files' contents were actually extracted to my ID1 folder, but the .paks themselves weren't there. Interesting. 

Interesting! You may have found "an issue."

I tested with unpacked pak files, and Mark V does indeed just crash without any meaningful error message.

These alternate engines I tested work just fine with unpacked pak files:

fitzquake 0.85
DirectQ
fteqw

Unpacked pak files should be an acceptable setup... so... Mark V should be able to handle that.




Anyway, if you're interested in tweaking Mark V with all kinds of setting which make it look better (in my view), I have a page with downloads and settings to alter: http://www.fvfonline.com/fitzquake.php

Then come play FvF :D

www.fvfonline.com
connect fvf.servequake.com 

Any interest in bumping Mark V's limits to make it Sepulcher-capable? cf. comments 1661/1662 above.

Also, can anyone say "sepulcher-capable" five times fast? 

@Johnny - Some day ... whenever I do the next version of Mark V, which doesn't feel soon. 

And just when I finished compiling a nice list of bug reports and suggestions. Disappointing. 

Gotta love the internet.

So Baker writes "not yet but I will" and you interpret that as meaning "it's dead", eh? 

What's this I hear about Quake finally being dead? Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I guess we can all move on to Unreal Tournament now. 

....Quake Chumpions lololzor 

I think you've posted some well thought-out comments, including some refreshingly detail oriented ones. This thread is intended as permanent record of feedback so none of the information is lost.

NightFright could tell you stories, there is an obsolete older Mark V thread here with 2500 posts and his observations about obscure mods + crashes, a few which have led to improvements in Mark V and also Quakespasm -- over time ... it was not quick at all! Ironically, maybe 2 which ericw pointed out solutions, ericw didn't actually do them in Quakespasm until way, way, way later.

In free projects the author is always vastly outnumbered and with limited time and a real life.

@adamer - I'm glad you determined what was up with that (your pakless setup). Sure, in theory it "should" work (except it doesn't in Mark V) and it sounds like it works with other engines, but in practice an actual Quake install whether from Steam or the CD or shareware has pak files -- so yeah ... I'm glad that mystery is solvd.

@QMaster - re:Marcher --- I like the attention to detail/testing/thought it sounds like you are doing with your Uber mod. 

I hope that one day I can do another test run as intense as the one I did before that big Mark V update back then. ^^ IIRC there is still at least one issue kinda pending with the final map of Malice when fov changes after reloading the game. It must have to do something with the boss attack and how the port handles the short-term fov changes. It was supposed to be fixed, but a few months ago I managed to get the problem again/still. Need to see what became of it. 

is the mod adjusting the fov or is it standard quake
progs.dat? 

oh reread the post i guess its an evil thing malice does
mods shouldnt ever change the users fov. could bean easy fix 

In case you decide to pick up your work at some point in the future, here's my final bucket list for the current version of Mark V. Some bugs, some missing features, and a few things that I think would be beneficial to implement.

- BUG: death camera doesn't reset if you quickload at least once, die and press space to restart the level from scratch.
- BUG: game stutters for a few seconds at launch (or every vid_restart), sometimes leaving the audio permanently cracking.
- BUG: parallax skies are noticeably darker than vanilla GLQuake.
- BUG: vid_multisample does nothing.
- BUG: r_bloom makes textures look grainy, maybe the bloom pass is set to nearest neighbor?
- BUG: adaptive FOV is smaller than it should be, I need to set my FOV to about 96 to get the same FOV as 90 in QuakeSpasm and DarkPlaces (using a 16:9 display). Basically FOV 90 should adapt to FOV 106 in 16:9, not 100.
- BUG: TGA alpha mask isn't properly supported, e.g. font replacements have white outlines.
- No protocol 999 support, crashes when loading Orl's maps like Ter Shibboleth or oms3_2.
- Remove the whole "opengl32.dll found" shenanigans, in this day and age it is most likely a graphics wrapper like ReShade, not the 3dfx driver from the original GLQuake package from 20 years ago. Don't make people hex edit your .exe to get some post-processing effects going on.
- Unlock the OGG support for external music, Mark V already supports it internally, why comment it out on purpose?
- Add optional HUD filtering, nearest neighbor looks bad at non-integer scaling values.
- Add PNG support in addition to TGA.
- Add the "N64 style" minimalistic status bar layout as seen in DirectQ/qbism/RetroQuad/etc. Crazy convenient.
- Add (integer) HUD scaling for the software renderer.Some info on this:
http://forums.insideqc.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5152
https://sourceforge.net/p/uhexen2/discussion/425207/thread/9fb29d84/
- Add alpha/fence texture support for the software renderer.
- Switch the software renderer from 8-bit to 16-bit to have enough colors for colored lights and proper transparent water. This is what RetroQuad is doing. Or Half-Life for that matter. 

Baker, do you have some public repo for this project, or just this zipped sources? 

4 player coop with quake spasms controller support is my only wish list item 

- Switch the software renderer from 8-bit to 16-bit to have enough colors for colored lights and proper transparent water. This is what RetroQuad is doing.

It isn't. Retroquad renders everything in 8-bit color, using 8-bit tables to access a single 8-bit indexed color palette. The tables are generated from 24-bit color data upon booting up the engine.

Retroquad doesn't use 16-bit color anywhere, and it doesn't do any direct-color transformations in realtime. 

Baker, do you have some public repo for this project, or just this zipped sources?

The source code is in .rar format. ;-) 

Silly noob question time:

Can Fitz Quake happily coexist in the same folder so as to share the same Id1 folder and the like? 

Mark V and Quakespasm.