IIRC the only reason for -quoth is to allow it to support the Hipnotic HUD, together with Quoth content, together with an (optional) additional gamedir for a mod which requires Quoth.

-quoth is just a hack, in other words. But it's a hack that the community has come to accept and expect.

This is clearly a "survival of the unfittest" situation. A simple-to-implement, adequately robust, but not necessarily full featured solution will always win over an elegant, extensible, more correct solution but that is significantly more difficult to implement. 

EF_STARDUST in the DarkPlaces source looks nearly identical to EF_FLAME, except that it uses pt_static instead of pt_flame.

Is EF_STARDUST needed for a model to emit, say, sparks?

Is or EF_STARDUST redundant because the same effect can already be achieved through other means? Hence its non-inclusion in "Spikespasm".

/I'm looking at smc and thinking about extracting an effect or of it for a tutorial later in the week or on the weekend. 

its either '-quoth' in an engine that hardcoded a specific mod, or '-hipnotic -game quoth' for vanilla, but yeah iiuc its just for the hud.
DP didn't add 'double-gamedirs', it has multiple gamedirs, because limits suck. As does FTE. of course, when you have more than one, order matters. I handled 'game foo -quoth' by parsing the list twice and then re-ordering. And if you want to mess everything up for everyone, all you have to do is to put a space in the subdirectory name! yay!

EF_STARDUST is what exactly?.. Its a specific effect that you wouldn't have a clue what it really looks like until you've actually used it so that you can see. I don't see the point of it because its a specific effect. Its just not significant compared to the more generic stuff like r_effect or traileffectnum.
Iiuc, it predates custom effects and stuff, dating back to the time of hardcoded effects. Same with all the extra TE_ effects.
Yeah, it might be simple enough to rename it to 'ef_customeffect1' or something lame, but that's just lame.
So yeah, you might want it for compatibility, but moving beyond that its probably not very useful, so I didn't see the point of implementing it. 

If I remember correctly, it's an effect used on slipgates that displays star-like sparkles floating upwards. I don't think it would do for, say, electric sparks coming from a broken panel. 

That's what I thought! (It's obsolete, artifact from more primitive days). Thanks!

@mugwump - the particle system lets you set the origin and the velocity and other things. the originoffset could be instead of above it could be to the side and instead of sparkles, sparks. It's just an emitter. 

Simple effect videos

1) Sparkle: https://youtu.be/9TWUVe2_T3c
2) Smoke: https://youtu.be/K4iyK6yW8bw
3) Flame: https://youtu.be/ZH9zMBCyRFw
4) Myst: https://youtu.be/YXRx6sr-H4k
5) Rocket Trail: https://youtu.be/mOE71jc0RtI
6) Decal: https://youtu.be/3mRtTRSOKeE
7) Model Light: https://youtu.be/L8QX0TuTLTw

To be followed up maybe this weekend by tutorials. 

Hey there,
I recently dug around a bit trying to find out how to get some popular source ports including Quakespasm to look as close to the original DOS Quake as possible. Changing texturemode, particles, lerpmove, lerpmodels, etc. one can get Quakespasm to look nearly identical, but the weapon offset is still problematic, it's just too low. Using scr_ofsx gets you somewhat closer, but it's not ideal. I've seen that Tarvis/bangstk made some effort here earlier this year to change that with an unofficial fork, but I guess that wouldn't work for the most recent release. Or can that somehow still be included without official support?

Otherwise, is there any way to change the weapon offset to really get the original look, or isn't that possible right now? And if it isn't, can anybody give me some insight into why exactly that change is there in the first place?
Thanks :) 

There's a comment in the source explaining this removal:

//johnfitz -- removed all gun position fudging code (was used to keep gun from getting covered by sbar)

I believe that Baker's FitzQuake Mark V fork restores that code, but QuakeSpasm doesn't. 

Original gun is available as an option in mark v. Default is still the FitzQuake norm that Quakespasm uses but yeah you can go menu ... preferences ... set gun position to classic. 

I'd like a cvar for that.. we had a patch contributed that enables the classic gun position: https://github.com/bangstk/Quakespasm

It's on my todo list to review and compare to how MarkV implements it. 

You might as well take "fov doesn't affect gun" option too when the time comes. 

Ironically, if I recall, Mark V doesn't have gun fudging code. Original Quake did fudge the gun position. Classic weapon in Mark V calculates the right gun position for the gun to appear on top of the status bar based on FOV and HUD settings and screen aspect ratio. This calculation also has to take into consideration FOVy adjustments for screen aspect ratios.

When you think about the gun fudging code in original Quake, it sounds newbiesauce easy.

But just see what happens when you change the resolution to something with a weird aspect ratio or set an irregularly sized window resolution of 600 x 600 or 400 x 600.

The original weapon position fudging code breaks down terribly in situations deviating far from a 4 x 3 aspect ratio or with enlarging the HUD (hudscale).

(If I recall correctly, it's been a while since I worked on that.) 

Speaking about FOV, I think this option should have a threshold of sorts. Right now it always draws the gun the same, even with a very narrow FOV, which makes zooming very weird. Maybe it should take a value (in degrees) beyond which the gun stops changing. 

Hehe, I noticed that once but thought that I was only the person that actually created such a bind.

You could actually modify your zoom bind.
+zoom "fov 70; r_viewmodel_fov 70; wait; fov 50; r_viewmodel_fov 50"
-zoom "fov 50; r_viewmodel_fov 50; wait; fov_70; r_viewmodel_fov 70; wait; fov 90; r_viewmodel_fov 90" 

Good to know, thanks. 

will Spike's code be integrated into the next Quakespasm release or it is intended to be a stand-alone piece of software? 

Thanks for the explanation about the weapon offset. I hope the patch or another kind of fix finds its way into a release eventually :)

Regarding Mark V, I noticed that it's better there, although unfortunately the beta release of the mark_v.exe crashes on my computer, unlike the latest stable release. However, I've used the WinQuake port of Mark V for playing through Quake the first time only recently and it worked flawlessly :) Now onto Arcane Dimension with Quakespasm. For the time being I'll stick to scr_ofsx -2.8. 

Mousewheel weapon switching is broken on macOS 10.12 due to a SDL2 bug: https://bugzilla.libsdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3432

The SDL1.2 version seems to be unaffected.

Icaro: I'm not sure.. For the time being, it's a fork / branch. 

If I were to modify gl_model.c to allow for more animated textures (beyond 10 per surface) would I also need to modify the compilers to save the extra textures (beyond +9) to the bsp file? 

You can add the textures the manual way by including a brush in the void with the desired textures. That's how we used to do it in the old days before compiler did it for you. 

Is this a change that the guys would be willing to see incorporated into the engine? I don't want to fragment the engine ecosystem for such a small change.

Especially with spikes modifications being released too. 

My music has spontaneously stopped working in quakespasm. I have the tracks as ../ID1/music/trackXX.ogg, which used to work fine. But now I get no music and a message in the console saying

Findfile: can't find music/trackXX.mp3
Findfile: can't find music/trackXX.flac
Findfile: can't find music/trackXX.wav

Any ideas what might have caused this? 

animated textures ... beyond 10 per surface

It is 20 per surface already according to this ...

http://www.celephais.net/stuff/texturefaq.htm

Which was written by metlslime, hehe. 

Pretty sure that 20 is regular + alternate anims. 

0-9 for regular animations. a-j for alternative animations. the limit is due to the base animations using digits, although the alternative anims could be bumped to 26 chars.
more than 10 (or 26 for alt) requires getting people to agree with a single consistent naming system within the 16-char name limit, and that all gets far too political...