Oh, and I found a mod that "breaks" because of "truelighting" ... My mod! FvF! heh... Ok, "breaks" is an overstatement, but the Mage class has his own, slower-firing, lighting attacks, and this makes them look very bad.

Looks like defaulting it off then, it is.

I did do testing against a few mods looking for differences, including the Zerstorer funky chain lightning gun.

After not being able to locate any instances where it made any meaningful difference.

So off will be default value in next version.

Was trying to address the common beginner complaint "Why does my lightning act jerky".

So question will remain, but answer will be "try setting cl_truelightning option to 1". 

Typing "sky" in the console does not report the help information for that command.


Thinking about the lightning bolts, the animation really isn't ideal, which is why beginners may ask why it's so jerky.

The bolt is misinterpreted as a solid object that can be swept back and forth to touch things, when it's actually a series of very fast point-to-point pulses, like a stun gun ( reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU95qvuKKMs )

Perhaps an easy hack to improve the animation so that it more accurately reflects the function would be to only draw the lightning entity for no longer than 1/20th of a second (it will currently stick around for up to 1/5 of a second if you don't fire a new one every 1/10th). That way the first pulse would vanish before the second pulse appeared, making it clear that it's a separate pulse.

It would indeed create a more functionally accurate, rapid zap-zap-zap-zap effect instead of the look of a jerky sweeping line. And it seems like it might be an easy thing to do in the engine....


More complicated effects would involve the lightning bolt actually appearing to leave the gun and flash forward very very fast. The beam would still be instant, but the visible lightning in the beam would appear to move forward very fast.


Animation tweaks like this I could get behind, because they would accurately reflect the function without ever drawing a bolt as hitting positions it doesn't actually hit.


I think I may go play with some QuakeC and see what kind of funky lightning animations I can make. I'm getting crazy ideas, hehe. 

The end point of the bolt, however, sticks to where it HITS. There is no QuakeC limitation causing this behavior -- this IS the intentional and correct behavior of a rapidly-pulsing lightning gun.
I personally like my lightning bolt to stay in my crosshair but fom a logical perspective this makes sense. If you watch real-life electric bolts, you can see that when they find a "target" they tend to stick to it for a moment before jerking to another point. 

Sky is a command, it isn't a console variable.

Commands are things like "map start" or "status" or "load mysavegame" or "noclip". They might not even need a parameter.

If you do "find sky" it shows things related to sky, for example, and it says "command" in the value column.

Yeah, the difference between a command and cvar is not necessarily clear to the user.

Like how "name" is a command but the value is a console variable _cl_name 

Ok, this turned out kind of cool....

I added my new lightning gun animation test to my little camtest mod:

http://fvfonline.com/camtest.7z

I didn't change the actual functionality of the gun at all -- just the way the lightning bolts are drawn. I think now the way they are drawn more accurately reflects how the gun actually functions. And it just feels POWERFUL! Somehow that "trueshaft" felt impotent, because it was waving all over the place but not hitting everywhere it waved. Don't you hate it when your shaft just waves around and feels impotent? heh.

Well, Dr. Gunter's Shaft Enhancer is what you need!

Rum the mod, give yourself a lightning gun (give 8) and a cell or two (give c 1) -- you only need one, I made it not use up any ammo for testing -- and go to town. Find some monsters to light up. The effect is more intense on a dark level, like maybe e4m7....

Tell me frying monsters with that thing doesn't make you feel like the friggin' god of thunder! hehe.

Yeah, the lighting passes through walls... It's just a quick hack, and currently would probably not work for online play (I'm using those very tiny time increments that are fine for client animations). The stainmaps don't like it either. Also try host_timescale .1 if you wanna look at it in slowmo.

In any case, THIS animation (though primitive) feels right, and accurately reflects the function of how the gun actually works. 

Having good times playing with this so far. I know you don't like menus but I really appreciate the extent to which you've menu-ified some of the settings.

A minor ask:

I've noticed on my system that the video stretch setting defaults to "640x480 Nearest" on first run.

Can the default for that be "None" instead?

That way if a naive user comes to the video settings and just changes the resolution, they'll get what they're expecting/intending instead of getting 640x480 stretched out to that resolution. 

The default value was supposed to 0 (none). The stretch item in the video menu is obvious. So ... yeah, exactly, next version and all that jive.

I know you don't like menus but I really appreciate the extent to which you've menu-ified some of the settings.

Haha, yeah. I'm very judgemental about menus.

Brevity is soul of wit.

Where bad design exists, it expresses itself in the form of menus. 

I have now finished uploading my complete collection of .lit/.vis files for classic Quake addons.

Check out all 32 uploads here.

Fire up Mark V and enjoy! 

Lits for Malice are a little weird. For the most part they're reasonable, but it seems that some of the textures emitting colors shouldn't really emit anything. Like warning stripes. 

...when using automated tools. The only handmade ones are from Quake and the mission packs (not done by me, btw), the others were generated with automated tools. One would have to edit the .lits to remove those which don't make sense, I guess. In most cases, it's still looking better than without colored lights, anyway.

If anyone has the time and motivation to go through all the (formerly) commercial/community release lits to eliminate bad color lights placement, feel invited to do so. 

In the recent DX version, the illusionary guy from the .ent file is no longer transparent (he previously was). He still is transparent in GL and Win. And of course, DX still doesn't do the transparent HUD. 

Is it possible that screen resolution is not automatically copied from id1 config any more when launching addons in other directories (e.g. c:/quake/nehahra) for the first time?
I am in windowed mode and have to reset my addon screen resolution to 800x600 from 640x480 even though it's changed in id1 config already. 

A final tweak of my test lightning gun animation -- it won't pass through walls now and it interacts (heavily!) with stainmaps.

http://fvfonline.com/camtest.7z

Download and give it a try, people.
It's just a tiny mod.

After playing with it for a while, I realize why it's so much more satisfying than the default lightning beam: the visual feedback lets you see that you are POUNDING the monsters 10 times per second with zaps of lighting rather than just focusing a beam on them which doesn't give good visual feedback of the hits/damage it's doing.

And it's just so much more satisfying to pound a monster with 10 lightning bolts per second!
It just FEELS more damaging.
The "truelighting" effect waters this down even more, giving even less correct visual feedback of the pulsing of the lighting strikes.

Again, I haven't actually changed the function of the lighting at all -- this is just visually illustrating how the lighting gun has always worked.

The flashing lights I added may be a bit much (and may cause seizures!), but gosh darn if it doesn't make you feel like you're unleashing a massive, powerful Tesla Coil on those sorry monsters! 

There are two blue mechanical enemy types in the game, and they both seem to consist of two models - upper and lower. The upper model is often invisible in Mark V (GL and software), Quakespasm, and enhanced GLQuake, but not in enhanced Winquake. 

Hi, I'm loving the engine so far (Former user of Quakespasm) and I was wondering what other audio formats are supported other than MP3? 

 

I think it's MP3 only 

RIP me. I guess I'll just wait for more audio formats to be supported or just use a CD. 

 

Post #14, #16

Mark V uses system methods to play MP3 that take advantage of hardware accelerated decoding of mp3 built into your processor.

Intel processors, AMD processors, the iPhone, Android phones all provide hardware accelerated MPEG-1 decoding (mp3 is part of MPEG-1 specification). Plus the mp3 decoding patents expired in September 2015.

... why Mark V can stop/pause/restart music instantly and engines using a software decoding library cannot. 

A polishing/tuning update probably within an hour.

1) Decided against printing console variable descriptions when typing a variable name in the console. Will revert to old behavior by default. Most of the important stuff is in the menu, someone new can always ask if they don't discover the "find" command first.

2) The lightning goes back to old behavior by default, someone can just turn it on if they like.

Nothing else of interest except QMB support will be in the next as an option which defaults off.

@dwere -- Probably a Malice content error that doesn't work Open GL engines. At some point I'll give it a look over to see why that would be the case. You said it shows in Enhanced WinQuake (but not Enhanced GLQuake) ... if you checked, does it look ok in Mark V WinQuake as well? But either way, at some point I'll investigate out of curiosity. 

In the recent DX version, the illusionary guy from the .ent file is no longer transparent (he previously was).

Triple check up close and personal. I just replicated a test to make sure, and in the test alpha entities are rendering in DX8 fine. But sometimes you have to get close and look hard to notice the transparency.

DX still doesn't do the transparent HUD.

That's on the to do list, I haven't forgotten. It will at some point be addressed. 

Seems that .alpha entities in DX8 are a bit less obvious than OpenGL, possibly due the lack of the combine capability in the DX8 wrapper.

Will investigate at some point to see why, but remember it has to use an alterate rendering pathway for this scenario (the one that metlslime) -- so may be little recourse. It already isn't drawing quite the same as Open GL, because it can't. 

Mark V's read early of the video mode "read early scan" only checks in the intended gamedir.

I guess I'll expand the "read early scan" to also include id1 if in a gamedir. 

You said it shows in Enhanced WinQuake (but not Enhanced GLQuake) ... if you checked, does it look ok in Mark V WinQuake as well?

Strangely, no.

A minor nitpick: the engine crashes with a generic error when provided with a wrong (non-existent) directory after -game. Noticed by making a typo.