Explore Jam. No monsters on skill 0. 

That would be awesome - great idea. I always wanted those features put into id games like Doom 3 and Doom 2016 so I could admire the levels without monsters. 

I would love an explore jam 2. However, is it wise to organize yet another jam so soon? I remember some MJ8 talks where people complained about not having time to work on their personal projects between jams. 

I would like to complete what I am working on (off and on for a year!)

But perhaps it's time for jam organizers to agree on a schedule for 2017?

And BTW another Jam idea would be Co-op jam. Would require a lot more playtesting but would be cool to get more mappers working and playing together. Different design challenges too. 

i can get into one explorejam this month

with no monster placement or gameplay tweaking i can focus in learning to use lights and level architecture and try crazy designs

correct me if i'm wrong, but a explorejam wouldn't be much less time-consuming than a full classic map?
you can add some puzzle elements, and refine them if there is time; if not then it is a place to stroll around. 

i tried to play ad_swampy with my brother through lan and it didn't work well
lots of packet overflow (whatever that is), the breakables were already broken on the client (my brother notebook, with wifi) and the sounds were desynced.
i tested a e1m1, e1m2 and e1m3, with ad. in e1m3 happened the same thing

how can i make it work? it's a problem of the game? it's the wifi and i have to try with cable?
i tried disabling particles (in quake.rc) but it didn't help 

I'd be fine with another Jam event...I would just make sure it is 4x smaller than my previous one.

Explore jam would be cool and certainly a challenge if that is what is being considered. 

A few things: check the heapsize in your launch options. Both clients would have to have increased heapsizes for AD.

info here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=120426294

It could be the game engine. Pretty sure Quakespasm is geared only toward SP. I see that Mark V has pretty solid Coop features. Try that one? I just downloaded Mark V but haven't played around with it much. It screwed up my config.cfg so back yours up. 

QS can't currently do co-op on AD maps (swampy at least), even if you turn off AD's particles. (max unreliable message size is too small). Last I checked MarkV has the same limit.

DarkPlaces might work for AD coop. 

nitpick: QS defaults to a 256MB heap size since the last few versions, so you don't need to enlarge it for AD or any mods I know of 

Quakespasm Spiked, DarkPlaces or FTE is your best chance for co-op with Arcane Dimensions (with the particles being off).

Only those 3 engines offer network compression right now. Quakespasm Spiked has a method for packet fragmentation in the network traffic. 

Good to know thx.

@ baker QS Spiked? Never came across that before. Man this game, even after 20 years. So much development going on! 

guys, i love all of you. go map, the old and the new ones!
my life is in a grinder these days, its my fault and its a new girl involved.
forgive me ad_team, i have no time atm, new scents to be be had :)

i'll be back someday with new stuff, be sure..

right now its hard, sorry sleepwalkr, i miss you too... 

Why is the particle code so storage / network intensive?

Does it record / transfer the location of each particle every frame? 

In standard Quake, QuakeC tells the client to emit a particle (1 message). And the particle system takes it from there.

In Arcane Dimensions (I haven't looked), to make things look fancy, every single particle is an entity.

So imagine a room with 800 monsters where each monster has a position xyz, a frame, angles, etc.

Arcane Dimensions does particles in a way that each little yellow particle is essentially a monster.

That's why an Arcane Dimensions demo is 600 MB after 30 minutes with the particles on, for instance. But it does have ability to be turned off.

Sock and the guys working on Arcane Dimensions are smart. It's perfectly ok to do it "ok" the first time and then later on "do it right".

It's just part of the learning curve.

But the way they are doing it right now isn't efficient. But also part of the problem is that the classic engines can't do what sock + company would ideally like.

I think Quakespasm Spiked could probably move that all client-side.

But would require work on the part of Arcane Dimension and also wouldn't work with DarkPlaces because the particles systems are very different.

So will be interesting to see how things go.

But certainly raises the right issues for discussion. 

This is really interesting. There was a mod called extras4 I downloaded that had a some particle effects. I'm am not a coder but curious if they implemented their particle system differently? You can download this here:

http://www.quakewiki.net/quake-1/mods/extras-r4/

I was considering using this for a project myself mainly because of the sound capabilities. It's pretty well documented and has some nice additions that are already in AD. 

Rather than every particle being an entity ideally some sort of a "particle emitter" entity should exist and handled client side.

Just feed the emitter the quantity / duration / angles / velocity / colours / world interactivity of the particles and let the client do the rest. 

@dumptruck - If you want to learn more about that mod, the actual homepage for that mod is http://quake.chaoticbox.com/ . 

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38502720 

Time to whip out that clip tool. 

Not that you will learn much from the one short basic paragraph of info about that mod on that site.

@dumptruck, you're better off just downloading the mod and going through the readme and the Qc source which looks like you already have. 

i checked the source and docs
pretty neat stuff

i quote:
------------
Particle systems with QuakeC - packet overflows made easy!
These were modeled after particle systems in high-end 3D apps, they are not the most user friendly entities around...
Emitters generate a "particle" (either a .spr, .mdl or .bsp) and toss it in a direction between the set angle limits. They can use an optional "death" model to simulate anything from rain, falling rubble, blasts of flames, forcefields, whatever... Note that these have absolutely nothing to do with Quake's built-in particle system. When the word "particle" is used on this page, it refers an instance of the model assigned to the emitter.
Effectors change the behaviour of particles that touch them (the emitter must have the "USEEFFECTORS" spawnflag set).
Emitters can be attached to a func_train_ext, for some really neat shit :)
------------

the implementation is different but both are entities emitters and similarly inefficient 

Ahh, what a gem. I still love the gravity well effect that sucks in nails and curves them around. Would love to see this in an arena where some wells were by some sort of equipment that warps your bullets. Would make for some interesting ogre fights, esp. flak ogres. 

Is it b0rked for everyone?