Does QS support .scale? I wonder if it would be fun to make tarbabies merge when they touch each other, forming a bigger tarbaby with each merging, all the way up to becoming a huge shambler-sized tarbaby. 

That would be an horrible "the thing"-like experience! 

 

I'm fairly confident that if you tried to use DarkPlaces .scale on an Ogre...

If you doubled his size, his feet would be in the floor.

Also you know Quake hulls (collision) ...

Maybe for Quake 3 map format .scale would work, but any feature using the Q1 map format shouldn't be called ".scale" but rather ".broken_scale". 

Hmm, that would require a protocol change then. Or a modified model, or CSQC.

The protocol method would send the mins&maxs from the QC physics bounding box to the client, so the renderer can offset the position of the model correctly. It's the most general-purpose solution and would make .scale more intuitive to use. 

scale is supported by the rmqe/999 protocol, as well as fte+dp's protocols of course.
QS supports 999, I don't recall if it supports the scale part but QSS definitely does.

.scale is just as 'broken' on q3bsp as q1bsp.
For it to work properly, you need to bias the mins_z value to compensate. Obviously this will look seriously broken in engines that don't support scaling...
On q1bsp you need to refrain from changing mins_x and mins_y though, which limits the range of sizes you can get away with (otherwise a large monster will walk through walls in one direction, but not its opposite, and values that differ from the hull's size will make it more extreme).
maxs_z can be changed freely, at least. the monster might ignore ceilings but that's not a problem if you just avoid placing upscaled monsters in places with low ceilings. 

I don't think .scale is a good idea for reasons outlined by Spike, with which I'm in full agreement.

It's important to remember that the RMQ engine was a tech demo. One of it's purposes was as a semi-experimental test-bed for new ideas, not all of which should be expected to work well. Another of it's purposes was to become obsolete as ideas that did get bedded-in and nailed-down were picked up by other engines. It's a natural consequence of those two purposes that sometimes the implementation might be a bit wonky, or might simplify to a special case, or whatever. The point is: RMQ engine's implementation of .scale might not be a great model to work from. 

RMQe's behaviour is fine, and is consistent with DP_ENT_SCALE, so that's a good thing.

But yeah, the hull issues make automatic scaling unworkable, so scale without qc is generally a bad idea.

So imho RMQe's scale is fine, and more robust than hexen2's... 

"Hmm, that would require a protocol change then. Or a modified model, or CSQC."

Nope. Neither.

1) Open up, say, QME and double the model size.
2) Change the .qc setting the box -- you might need to add a new monster. This would at least get the Ogre's feet touching the ground appropriately.

3) If you decided to make a monster too big for a Quake hull (Shambler size?) -- you better add some invisible func_walls to box the bastard in too hide the lack of proper collision.

You can do what you want to do today and it would work in any Quake engine including and be done in 30 minutes.

Just don't get forget the asterisks. ** Any proper map using a "too big" model like the QTest dragon (Once Upon Atrocity, for instance) needs to "no clip block him in" to his area and close the door behind the player so he can't be sticking his dragon wings through the walls.

The Kurok engine actually had a special brush type "monster_clip" for special clip brushes that instead of blocking the player would block only the monsters instead --- in the case of Kurok, it was a helicopter shooting missiles and the monster clip kept it in a defined box.

The Quake map "Source of Power" https://www.quakewiki.net/archives/underworld/quakerev030624.html ... had baby Shamblers in GLQuake -- and I can't remember the name but some map had a 2x sized fiend or Rogue gremlin or something like that. It was also a map that ran in WinQuake/GLQuake just fine.

The short version is that ".scale" is and always was ".completely_broken_scale" that sounded cool unless you knew how broke it was.

It doesn't solve any problems and creates false newbie-sauce visions of grandeur -- and you can manually create a double sized or half sized fiend that works in WinQuake/GLQuake.

/Someone should find the guy who came up with the idea for ".scale" and slap him with a wet fish. 

You can do what you want to do today and it would work in any Quake engine including and be done in 30 minutes.

My idea was to use .scale in an animated way, and with non-arbitrary sizes. There would be a maximum size, but the tarbaby would also have any size between the minimum and the maximum.

Using multiple models would kill the model interpolation and wouldn't provide non-arbitrary sizes.

The animated shadows in Fightoon were created using animated scaling. The higher in the air the player gets, the larger (and more transparent) the shadow gets. This would be absolutely impossible to create in a regular engine. 

And here's another example of animated scaling usage. This effect dynamically resizes the model to the intensity of its entity's lighting.

I just didn't try figuring out uses of .scale for solid objects before. But for purely visual effects, it's a clear improvement. 

Using multiple models would kill the model interpolation and wouldn't provide non-arbitrary sizes.

You could author a new animation of "growing" from size N to size N+1, in each model. Play in reverse to shrink. This means he can't do anything else while he grows/shrinks, though. 

Also, the vertex compression would still cause the transition from one model to another to be jittery.

Using multiple models would still be a hacky & inefficient method. But the bigger issue is that the physics would likely end up even more hacky.

A proper solution for the physics would probably be to use the Q2 BSP format, which uses raw brushes for collision. But this means that such gameplay ideas aren't suited for Q1 anyway. 

why does the minigun skin in malice get messed up in both quakespasm and glquake?

also the probe wont fly about in quakespasm either... 

Would you consider a "devkill" command? (short for "developer kill")

It would function like "kill", in the sense that the map and entities are all reloaded. However, it would preserve:

player position
player view angle
the current state of god, notarget, noclip.

When doing a lot of very rapid iteration on part of the level design, I realise most of my time is spent noclipping over to the place in question to test out the changes :/

I could fudge this in QC but then I think it would better if the feature was available engine side so you can use it in all mods.

For world geometry changes only, I can fudge it by just using save/load, but that doesn't work for any entity changes.

Just an idea. Would anyone else find it useful? 

 

I'd use it. 

Save the state of the player entity only, minus dynamically referenced fields like entity and model references, and overwrite the current player state with it.

This could be implemented as "saveplayerstate" and "loadplayerstate" commands, giving the advantage of retaining the player state between engine sessions. 

I like the cut of your gib. Sounds like an elegant way of doing it :} 

I would use this as well. +1 

Quakespasm has an setpos command to teleport you to a specific spot in the map, if I recall.

Type viewpos to get an x y z or you could type r_pos.

Those commands happen to work in Mark V. In Mark V, type viewpos and then typing setpos without the x, y, z will teleport where viewpos was last typed.

Short version: I think you can do what you want to do in Quakespasm already. 

Turns out it didn't help too much because it's not really a case of me needing to teleport to the same specific area a lot, it's more to preserve the player's current arbitrary location and view during reloads when doing very rapid design iterations, where my location is jumping around all over the place.

The time it takes me to type r_pos, then note the coordinates, then type setpos X Y Z, means it's something you only want to do occasionally, and probably bind it to a key, which only really makes sense if you're spending a lot of time in that same area. But I zip around rapidly working here there and everywhere like a nutter.

If I just wanted to set up shortcuts to a bunch of fixed locations, it would be better to create a testing hub with teleporters to ten or twenty key areas in the map I reckon.

Without someone looking over my shoulder watching exactly how I work, I'm not sure if I'm really selling this to be honest :{ 

Sorry I didn't read the critical bit here:

Those commands happen to work in Mark V. In Mark V, type viewpos and then typing setpos without the x, y, z will teleport where viewpos was last typed.

Ok, that's actually pretty useful. 

Does the engine support custom images for the player HUD? It's for a mod.