I did a quick hack of my own build of Quakespasm so that it supports "-ad" and "-copper" arguments in a similar way to the existing "-quoth" argument. It has made playing AD or Copper map releases so much nicer; just bang them into their own gamedir and away you go. No manual file merging, no mixing of savegames, easy cleanup/uninstall.

I realize this is probably not the right way to do it as a general feature for public consumption. FTE for example has a generalized "-basegame" feature that seems to work for this purpose.

I don't want to relitigate "well then just use FTE" here -- often I do, there are reasons why sometimes I (or others) don't -- that's old ground and in any case Quakespasm will continue to be popular for a long time. I'm posting here just from general curiosity about whether there's a gotcha that has prevented this sort of feature from showing up in Quakespasm. I dimly remember some past arguments/discussions about why or why not to implement this. (Although I don't know why "-quoth" got a free pass.)

Also I'm kind of generally curious about the state of QS development and whether there's a process for contributing to it. I took a look at the Quakespasm repo on Sourceforge and there's activity, but it seems to be pretty buttoned-down as to who can open a ticket or otherwise contribute.

Anyway... if I had to enumerate the stumbling blocks that I see folks running into on reddit or Steam forums or GOG or wherever, the lack of a Mods menu would probably be #1, but this thing about needing to do file-merges to play AD or Copper maps would be somewhere in top 5. 

Here's an example of the (clean but hacky) approach of just adding "-ad" and "-copper" support:
https://github.com/neogeographica/Quakespasm/commit/d38492f24deffd765792d117292ddde6c54cc5a4

And here's an example of a feature supporting a generalized "basegame". Gets quite a bit messier because of maintaining backwards compat for other existing messy behaviors, so I'm not sure if this is actually the desirable solution, but it works for me. Described more in the commit comments:

https://github.com/neogeographica/Quakespasm/commit/5b849b3abe32809f7047b24b790b177a0a8dc60c 

Are there any chances to add vanilla-style underwater warp? Right now, Mark V is the only port I know that pulled it off. 

Where can I download SDL2 version of QuakeSpasm? The http://quakespasm.ericwa.com/job/quakespasm-sdl2/ link is dead. SDL1 does not allow you to change refresh rate and defaults to 60. 

http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/download.htm

"quakespasm.exe" is what you run from among the files in the downloaded archive (assuming Windows). 

I somehow had managed to find the quakespasm-sdl12.exe binary in both my gamedir and a downloaded archive, but not the "quakespasm.exe" which is the sdl2 binary. 

👍 onward! 

@NightFright, vkQuake has vanilla underwater warp and is based on QuakeSpasm. It uses Vulkan for rendering. It's my main Quake port, partly because of the water. 

Could we have a command like r_drawclipbrushes to show playerclips in a similair fashion to showbboxes? 

What could cause this? It's happening with this map, and based on the first comment it got on Quaddicted, I'm not the only one. I'm really trying to understand why this is happening more than anything else.

The map loads and plays fine, but won't reload from a saved game:

Couldn't spawn server maps/_by_humankills:__0/_79____.bsp
Couldn't load map

It kind of looks to me as if the engine is unable to locate the .sav file, but I can locate it in my id1 directory. Besides, I always thought the "Couldn't spawn server" error happened if the engine can't find the .bsp in question, and not the .sav...?

It also looks as if it's trying to find the .sav in /maps instead of in id1. And why is it looking for the third line of the .sav file (as I saw when I opened the file with a text editor), instead of "s[some number].sav"? 

With another map (retrojam6_danzadan), I get this error when trying to load from a saved game:

Host_Error: ED_ParseEntity: EOF without closing brace

I assumed this meant that the .sav file ends without a "}", and when I opened it in a text editor, that was indeed the case. Why would something like this happen?

Out of curiosity, I added a closing curly brace manually to see if that would let me load the saved game, but all that did was to give me a new error message:

Host_Error: ED_ParseEntity: closing brace without data

:D

I should note I can usually load from saved games without any trouble. This weirdness is just happening with two maps (that I've noticed). 

Looks like a corrupt save file but I can’t explain why. Is it consistently happening with this map? Or does the save sometimes work? 

The two errors I described in #3666 and #3667 both happen consistently with the respective maps: the "Couldn't spawn server" error always happens with autumn_sp and the "Host_Error: ED_ParseEntity: EOF without closing brace" error always happens with retrojam6_danzadan.

Other maps work fine.

Don't know if this is related, but I remember that back when the first retrojam was released, retrojam1_skacky had an issue where saved games wouldn't load. A subsequent Quakespasm update fixed that, though, so I'm guessing these two maps have a different problem... 

Have you also been running these maps in Darkplaces, by any chance? Darkplaces has a nasty habit of putting things into save files that are incompatible with other engines. 

I do get the same issue with Earlu Autumn, but retrojam6_danzadan loads fine from a save for me. Noticed that the autumn_sp saves don't have any kill counts, which I don't think I've ever seen before. Not much help otherwise. 

*Early* 

Have you also been running these maps in Darkplaces, by any chance?

Nope, just Quakespasm.

Noticed that the autumn_sp saves don't have any kill counts

You mean in the Save/Load menu? Heh, that's true; I hadn't noticed that before. When I open the .sav files in a text editor, though, they do have kill counts listed right at the beginning (third line from the top). 

You seem to have put a newline of some sort in the level name
https://sourceforge.net/p/quakespasm/quakespasm/ci/15a41d21693fca935e41f81d2faf29b493247974/ 

I guess you mean human[rus] (the author of Early Autumn) put a newline in their level name. :)

Thanks for the response! 

Any idea what could be causing the "EOF without closing brace" error for me in retrojam6_danzadan?

(I'm not Danzadan either!) 

Click on the "download snapshot" button here for the latest code.
https://sourceforge.net/p/quakespasm/quakespasm/ci/master/tree/
Sorry, but i don't know much about it. It's possible in some world editor CR/LFs can get inserted into level names ?? Oz said he's seen this bug/little idiocy before, but wasn't until yesterday he'd tracked it down. 

I think I've seen embedded " characters in strings cause the same error sometimes, but that's off the top of my head... 

Because that seems to be the common theme in the case of retrojam1_skacky and autumn_sp.

Still wouldn't explain what's happening with retrojam6_danzadan on my end; I checked the source and there are no odd characters, hidden or otherwise, in the worldspawn message. Or did you mean something else?

Thanks for the link to the latest build, stevenaaus. 

If you could share a copy of your save file somewhere it would help. At this stage it's not something obvious, nor is it easily guessable. 

Sure, here you go: https://pastebin.com/Ru2G5SiK