Don't worry, maybe you don't get what you think you want, but maybe you get more than you bargained for ... and then some ... 

Wait with excitement. 

O_O 

Is it possible to set fog parameters before the map is loaded? Then the fog parameters could be specified in the quake.rc file.

Can you add a fog distance command? Like at say 1024 units the fog does not affect surfaces? Then really tall ceilings could be black instead of the colour of the fog. Also make this a new fog command like 'fogdist' or something, don't add this feature to the existing fog command, it will cause problems with mods that use the fog command already. 

Can we get masked textures (like grates, chainlink fences) to have a value key in a similar way to how the "alpha" key works? This would be much better than having the texture start with a curly brace "{"

(which pissed off SleepwalkR to no end) 

@sock ... I think it would need fade or something otherwise surface at 1023 looks strikingly different than surface at 1024 distance.

FitzQuake expects the fog to be in the worldspawn and resets it on level load and I think new cvars are almost always bad. Better would be backwards compatible way to allow one more fog parameter in the worldspawn keys.

I also think it would require more tuning and testing to make sure it looks rights than I can do in the next few hours, but I'll think about while I'm trying to get the engine out. The Kurok mod (also an engine modification of FitzQuake)used an alternate fog formula, but I haven't been thinking about fog much lately so ...

I'll see if I can integrate the Kurok fogging for you to look with the engine release.

@elephant ... you mean like a worldspawn key to put into bsp to indicate alpha texture prefix? The idea isn't bad, but would be better if the mapping elite got to together and planned out things like that ...

I think me just putting something in that hasn't been discussed and argued about is how "really ugly hacks" happen. 

Download | Read Me

@sock: type fogex 300 12000 50 60 76 to enable distance fog <z-near> <z-far> <red 0-100> <green> <blue> ... worldspawn key is "beta_fogex"

@Ricky ... see readme. 

Where the new FitzQuake at... metl, give me a fix! 

@Baker, I downloaded the new beta and I like noclip, notriggers :) good for testing. I LOVE the command auto-complete, my god about time! It even does map names within gamedir folders :)

What is r_stains? I saw it mentioned in the readme file but could not see any difference and the readme does not say what to do with it.

I had a play with the new fog and it feels back to front to me. I want original fog up close and then fade to specific colour at distance. Maybe I am not getting the parameters right but I tried for a while and could only get black at distance and no fog up close or white fog up close and glowing at distance.

Say for example I have fog 0.05 0.1 0.1 0.1 defined which is a nice wispy fog. On surfaces at distance (1024+) this gets brighter instead of darker regardless of light, I want to have a fog up close and then fade to nothing. I assume the distance fog would have a different colour to the foreground fog. Ultimately I want fog in a room but when looking up at a high ceiling 1024+ units it is black because there is no light, does that make sense?

One possible idea for alpha textures is to link the process to the texture. If the mapper specifies external textures and they have an alpha mask defined (tga/png format) then load and use it. This does not require fancy name changes or lots of effort by mappers just an external texture directory with alpha textures. 

Just have it as a brush entity key. 

External .vis support. No more vispatching maps.
what? so it just loads .vis files generated by vis.exe now? 

Ok, let me clarify a little more.

- It would be a brush entity key.
- It would use palette number 255 (the pink one)
- It would be a normal texture. (no tga/png needed!)

Why a brush entity key? Well we have this support with alpha, why not just set the key to something like "alphamask"? You could even have it as "alphamask 1" or "alphamask (insert palette number here)" and specify which colour of the palette can be the alpha texture, this way you could still make a texture look nice in both ordinary quake engines that do not support alpha masks and ones that do!

I like shipping .bsp files only, I really hate cluttering up my quake directory for the sake of one or two maps in a .pak file or any of that kind of nonsense. My quake dir is in enough of a mess!

What do you think? 

exe. doesnt start at all for me. just getting the usual "starting quake" window, then it just flushes out, no warning nothing.
:(
running xp sp3 on intel Chip ati video 

@mfx Hmmm. Does a previous version work ok? And flushes out = it exits or crash? I added multisample support that abuses that window, but seems your graphics card no like. I'll see what I can do to resolve that.

@necros --- no external .vis means that instead of vispatching your stock Quake maps for transparent water, you just use .vis you toss in the maps folder. I'm on a low bandwidth connection at the moment, in a few days when I'm back I'll upload something and show you what I mean.

@fifth -- You lost me. I can make a BSP with a texture named "{alphatexture" and it works. Why do you need external files? Am I missing something here? Or is something not working right about the engine and external textures? 

Shoot the wall several times in the same place.

Or use lightning gun. 

I didn't initially get that but Fribbles made a fish. 

Yeah the curly brace standard is actually one of the dumbest decisions I can think of. I'm saying the standard should be changed to a key tied to an entity brush instead.

(FYI, the curly brace conflicts with the .map standard formatting...)

Like I said, it really pissed off SleepwalkR and I can fully understand why (open up a .map file in notepad and realise why this was a terrible decision) 

previous ver. works fine.
this one it just doesnt Do anything than
just showing the starting window, no crash msg or sth. just disappearing from ram. 

no external .vis means that instead of vispatching your stock Quake maps for transparent water, you just use .vis you toss in the maps folder.

oh ok, i see what you mean about that. :)
changelog has some interesting things in it, thanks for doing this, baker. 

Why a brush entity key? Well we have this support with alpha, why not just set the key to something like "alphamask"?

I can relate to what your dislike of the curly braces.

I'm a decent Quake engine coder, but I know my place and I'm the wrong person to code anything that could be interpreted as a standard.

I named the experimental fog for Sock to look with an unlikeable name "beta_fogex" so it couldn't accidentally be interpreted as a standard, and likewise some of the experimental things I did with texture prefixes are console variables.

I'm not the right guy to make those kind of decisions. If I have any credibility with the 10-year engine devs (self-deprecating humor), it is that they know I'd wouldn't think of that doing anything like that.

Shorter version: Maybe ask people like metlslime, tyrann, preach and necros and such?

I'm just not the right guy. Seriously. 

Extract to quake/id1/maps folder

http://quake-1.com/docs/utils/visfiles_go_in_quake_id1_maps.zip

Then the original Quake maps are vispatched (unless you set "external_vis 0") to work with r_wateralpha.

It isn't that I think r_wateralpha is that great of a feature, but more that the vispatch process is extraordinarily painful since the original utilities will not work on Win64 even with DOSBox so someone looking to try that out can do it. 

If the mapper specifies external textures and they have an alpha mask defined (tga/png format) then load and use it. This does not require fancy name changes or lots of effort by mappers just an external texture directory with alpha textures.

QW and Q1DM players would be very upset because someone (a cheater) would use replacement textures with alpha to make walls "see through" that shouldn't be. 

people do that for a 17 year old game? 

@nitin
Yes.

@fifth
{ prefix is compatibility with halflife, but also distingushes between alpha-blended alphas, and alpha-tested alphas. Which is especially useful if you have both active on an entity at once.
In the case of internal textures, palette 255 is a valid palette. While unlikely, its possible that this particular palette index could be used on other textures not intended to be transparent upon the same brush entity. Additionally the image loader will likely need to replace this palette index with an average of its still-visible neighbours in order to avoid colour leakage (yay! HALOS!), which is not something that can easily be done without walking through the ent file and checking each model in a really slow and hacky way on a per-surface basis (with multiple copies of the texture - things get even more fun if the qbsp reused the surface in two separate inline models). Which is why a flag on the entity is a stupid way to do it.

That's why we use a { prefix for alpha tested surfaces. 

but it's incompatible with the .map format because curly braces are clearly already used for a different purpose (which appears to be containing sets of information together). This makes certain map editors (namely Trench) take a huge shit when the open curly braces aren't closed properly. :P

I'll leave it up to you coder types to sort out this mess, but I wouldn't mind having alpha mask textures for some of my upcoming maps (I have some nice ideas for them that I haven't seen yet).