So, following that quake character re-modelling thread (see General Abuse) - I learned that the QuakeForge engine supports an .mdl format that simply uses 16-bit vertex accuracy, rather than the standard 8-bit vertex accuracy.

What's more, the guy doing the new monster models is using blender, using an .mdl exporter that has the option of writing to this 16-bit .mdl format.

My question is this:

Does support for the 16-bit .mdl format sound like something that's easy enough and worthwhile enough to be worth considering? 

Because then there's another incompatibility between engines. 

if it was implemented in a way so it's only used to replace existing 8-bit models, in the same way that external texture support only works by replacing existing quake textures...

No worse than external texture support then, right? 

if you want to mess with the format, i would highly advocate MD2 format because the grid's granularity is calculated per frame instead of per model. that right there would give a huge boost to fidelity. 

Or the inter-quake model format is already supported by a handful of Quake engines.

http://lee.fov120.com/iqm/

And yeah, works in exactly the same way as external texture support. 

That sounds like a good compromise. And +1 for IQM. 

I'm only suggesting this because it looks like that capnbubs guy is making some absolutely nop-notch and faithful remakes of the character models, which even an old fuddy-duddy such as myself thinks are cool.

So it got me thinking that it's a shame to have to be stuck with 8-bit vertex accuracy on those models if it's easy for capnbubs to export versions of those models in a better format...

Just tentatively dipping my toes into the water here really... 

There used to be an "extended-BSP" format which allowed you to bundle high-res textures etc with a bsp file - the extra data was zipped in a lump attached to the end of the file. Because existing quake engines were happy to ignore any junk appended to the end of a file, they would load in any engine.

You could do something similar with an extended .mdl format. It would be a bit fiddly to add the extended coordinates there. The way to do it with no duplicated data would be to split the 16 bit coordinates into a high and low byte, store the high byte in the regular mdl coordinate data and the low bit (offering the extra precision) in the extended data lump.

Care might have to be taken that this method didn't parse models which already have a lump of extra data on the end. Which models have that? Any saved by QME 3.0 - the extra data is things like skinnames and model groupw which the editor wants to preserve (3.1 has its own file format instead) 

Spike basically said "already doing this in FTEQW, if you run sound in separate thread is not problem".

I have the next 2 versions of Mark V planned out, but don't expect to be working on those until late summer.

There is a chance that the "ogg instead of wav" could be in the 2nd future revision.

Meanwhile, in two separate projects goldenboy and Dr. Shadowborg are targeting FTEQW which does Fitz 666 protocol and bsp2. DarkPlaces does bsp2 and IQM.

There is ample opportunity to play around with those features even now in other engines. 

I just wanted to know why decompressing oggs or mp3s is such a problem for quake. 

24 hours ago I had only considered "what might go wrong" or how someone might abuse the feature (turn every .wav into an 11 MB .ogg or .mp3 and then blame the engine and demand "you must fix").

Then it occurred to me that you can make a laggy map with bad r_speeds in a map editor. I had already changed my mind prior to Spike's post, but I had the idea of pre-emptively decompressing to .wav on gamedir change.

Spike's method is far better than that.

Not the first time someone thought "this feature would be bad" and later changing mind.

I actually look forward to playing around with this. 

How to get rid of mouse acceleration completely? It's switched off in the system and I use -dinput and m_filter 0
, couldn't find anything else in readme.
But still get inaccurate mouse input like with a bit of acceleration - depending on the speed I move my mouse with, not just distance.

It is specific fitzQuake problem, I don't have this in DP or FTE or other quake games. 

-noforcemparms
-noforcemaccel
-noforcemspd

or all 3.

http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/console/commands/quake.html#p--noforcemaccel

Both WinQuake and GLQuake have this issue, FitzQuake isn't unique. And the code causing the issue you refer to is "not well liked" by hardly anyone. But it is in WinQuake/GLQuake so like +mlook, the behavior is destined to remain in this engine so that keeps with the original Quake behavior [whatever they could have been thinking ... ??? ]. 

it seems more and more that fitzquake gets called out for behaving in some ways the same as glquake.

At the time i thought it made sense because the target user is someone who is switching from glquake to fitzquake, so their configs should continue to work (i.e. i didn't change the defaults of any pre-existing cvars.)

Many years later i guess people install fitzquake before any other engine, or they are switching from more radically different engines like darkplaces, which have very different default behaviors.

So i should probably change all the default settings in the next version to "good settings." 

There are plenty of settings that should be default without having to change the config; mlook on, mouse wheel up/down changes weapon, console speed higher (terrible with large screens) and console/sbar text changes size to match screen resolution. 

There is sadly annoying stuff in default.cfg hiding in pak0.pak too:

* F11 key zoom alias that changes sensitivity and default.cfg
* Keys could be improved to default to WASD with Q and E for swim up/down
* "Reset to defaults" in the engine has unpredictable behavior because Quake didn't reset cvars, so re-running default.cfg does not fully default.
* The +/- sizeup and sizedown keys confuse if accidentally pressed and these are in default.cfg living in pak0.pak

Also the original QuakeC source didn't support both impulse 10/impulse 12 weapon switching, some single player mods like Castle of Koohoo or Duke of Ontranto (and far more) impulse 12 does not do anything.

[Avoiding mentioning too much how in original Quake (or Travail or Marcher or ...) in coop if one player grabs silver key and dies, key is gone and map is effectively broke as no further progress is possible ... relevant to exact topic ... I suppose not]. 

In coop, the keys always stay just like the weapons (but unlike them, they fire their targets correctly). 

I hope you found PGUP/PGDN keys too when you play a demo [fast forward/rewind].
No way... Nice feature :) 

@Baker, there is certainly plenty of stuff that is wrong with the defaults and it is nightmare for anyone coming back to Quake wanting to play the game. I hope you still keep tinkering with this engine, I certainly appreciate all your effort.

+1 also for PGUP/PGDN, freakin awesome feature. I can't believe it is not a standard feature for Quake engines. 

I converted pak0 and pak1 sounds to ogg 128bit. I ran DP 20130304. Works well IMO.

Nice converter at
http://www.rarewares.org/ogg-oggdropxpd.php 

Revision 9: If you setup a coop game running, say, Marcher or Warpspasm, when a Mark V client connects it will automatically switch to the right game dir.

Mark V Server tells client: I'm running "game marcher" or "game warpspasm -quoth" or "game hipnotic -hipnotic".

Mark V Client will switch.

Non Mark V clients won't even notice the message, it is fully backwards compatible and transparent to other clients.

Also:
1. When recording a demo, it will print what gamedir is running so someone receiving your demo can figure out what mod they need installed to view it.
2. Fixed a multiplayer coop demo bug.

Special thanks to Spike for how to achieve the gamedir switching in a way that didn't require yet another protocol --- like we need more of those.

Although I didn't plan on do another Mark V update for a while, there may be one more coming in a few days. If so, this one will solely be due to some fun information from Spike. 

As I said before, please version code your zip files. 

From now on, I'll post versioned zip link to make your life easy like:

Revision 9: http://quake-1.com/docs/utils/fitzquake_mark_v_r9.zip 

 

the progs is horribly broken in coop :}