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? 

 

I used the extar4 for burning barrels, which gave a fine effect on shooting them. Also had a fountain in it, but after five sprite emitters I got an eddict error. These particle emitter is a real memory assult.
The savest way to avoid it was to last it only for a minute.

Mostly used it for the better balanced func_train in PhantomPholly.
The func_water is rarely a real switch for mapping effort. Sad it won't last on spaces longer than 256 units and lacks animation. 

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@topher too bad - i was hoping this would be a good fix.

@Qmaster - that + Ogre nades sounds wild. This part of the mod does open up some interesting possibilities. But I was most interested in the sound trigger features. I hope to test the extrasR4 limits soon but if AD has something similar I may just use that for a project. I haven't reviewed the docs for AD yet.

re: particles for torches and similar - Instead of having proper entity based particles if you could have animated alpha textures you might be able to create a similar effect - wonder if this is possible? 

An previous version of that site had a dedicated extras R4 page with a ton of detail and screenshots and descriptions.

It would seem that page is no longer there. Maybe has to do with the PlanetQuake abandonment. 

Most likely the reason you gave. I do remember the previous page years ago and with all the information your describing. It was very cool, too bad it's gone. Maybe it's archived somewhere. 

Contains an html readme. Maybe its the same? 

At least the page lives on in the download ;-)