So I figured out a mediocre solution to my organization problem. Haven't tackled my mods/maps situation yet, but I have created an "engines" folder in the Quake directory to house my engine files. Initially I tried creating shortcuts to the respective engine exe's using the -basedir parameter, but SQLauncher wouldn't see it because shortcuts aren't technically exe's themselves. So I used symbolic links instead. This preserves the exe extension so SQLauncher will see it.

So now I simply have 3 symbolic links in my root directory for quakespasm, quakespasm_ad, and quakespasm_spike, with their files tucked away in an engine container folder. Adding more engines will be simple, tidy, and they should all cooperate with SQLauncher. 

Let's get you one of these for your Quake directory!

Seriously though, good job on figuring this out. I may do the same. 

Now for the mods. 

Are there cvars for brightness and contrast? For some reason, launching mods with different engines resets my settings for brightness, contrast, and resolution. Just want to have the cvars to drop in my autoexec. 

cvarlist in console? 

The brightness cvar is "gamma" and the contrast cvar is "contrast" 

...and found this old article.

So cool to see an article written by someone John Carmack really admired touting the young upstart's work.

Quake’s approach, which I'll call surface-based lighting, preprocesses differently, and adds an extra rendering step. During off-line preprocessing, a grid, called a light map, is calculated for each polygon in the world, with a lighting value every 16 texels horizontally and vertically. This lighting is done by casting light from all the nearby lights in the world to each of the grid points on the polygon, and summing the results for each grid point.  

Was really neat! I rejoice in seeing content from the old websights I used to visit. Of them only Gamasutra is left. 

 

dumptruck_ds

for the tutorial, i think it's a good idea to do many examples of using the clip tool, vertex tool, brush tool and duplication when you are building a map, and how you should try different ways until you find what's your prefered way. 

Is there a trick to getting quake to appear fullscreen on a secondary monitor? When I go fullscreen it always moves back to the primary, even if the window was on the second monitor. Running Windows 7 if it matters. Does using a particular engine help? 

Thanks - I will include those ideas for sure. TB especially has a a lot of methods to accomplish the same task. 

Quakespasm had that problem and it'll be fixed in the upcoming release. I'm not sure how other engines work on multimonitor. 

Spread windowed is the only way I've found...helps if you have the fov cranked up too. 

Spread windowed and fan cranked up 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0V82PhiDDw 

So are the Quake monsters literate? 

I'm a mere lurker and nonmapper, but is there a place where I can suggest necros' "The Altar of Storms" as the theme for the next map jam? The Ayleid ruin style works so well in Quake but no one else has ever used it! 

This is the right place to make a suggestion like that and I don't see why not. It's an interesting idea to be sure. 

https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/ne_ruins.html 

..hit me up, I have a great idea for a boss (and the will to code and model it etc...) 

Can I also pitch a Travil Jam then? its been 10 years 

This place looks surprisingly good on my mobile.

Web 1.0 is still the best.