I've had instances where the surface lights didn't line up with the texture. This has only happened on nonorthogonal constructions. Was wondering if you have encountered this and how often to you play with the -surfacelight_subdivide parm? 

I don't know a way to see the generated lights to check for misalignments. I just trust it works. And I never played with surfacelight_subdivide, tbh. I just tweak the light entity. Need to follow one of your tutorials to see those :P 

I still want definable fog volumes via brush (func_fog) or something

and decals 

Thanks for the great info guys. I love the smoother feeling of higher frame rates but hate how many plats and trains hurt the player when HOST_MAXFPS is above 72 in most engines.

@dumptruck_ds
Love the mapping tutorials. Keep it up.

@Shamblernaut
I would love to have decals and multiple fogs. It would make maps with multiple distinct atmospheres easier to make. 

decals can be faked well enough with fence textures in my experience. Multiple fogs = multiple settings for fog depending on where you are in the map? If so, AD has it.

My 2018 dream at the moment is actually making a complete map... 

We have a lot of this stuff if you are willing to use engines like FTE, DP and to some extent QSS.

For example, decals are very much a thing in those engines.

If these are just posts requesting QuakeSpasm to introduce more and more graphical whizbangery, then it needs to be specified really. 

Yeah, that's quite true. Also, isn't the point of QS to be a faithful port that runs the game without any bells and whistles? You can argue that things like decoupling framerate and physics still fits within this mission objective, but I don't think that QS should be adding things like (proper) decals... 

isn't the point of QS to be a faithful port that runs the game without any bells and whistles

Yes, well...kinda. I suppose there's a sort of vague, entirely subjective "yeah that still feels quakey" filter for classifying something as "fits the QS philosophy" as opposed to "unnecessary eye-candy shite".

For example, no-one here will say fog or coloured lighting shouldn't be in QuakeSpasm.

Tough call really! 

Forgive me if I'm forgetting my 'Quake Engine History 101' lessons, but aren't most of the features that QS has that aren't 'standard quake' inherited from FitzQuake? It wouldn't make much sense to try and remove those, but the argument I feel can be made that treating that as the feature cutoff point is a sensible idea.

At least, having such a point is a good idea if you want to be seen as the 'core' engine that provides the basic expected functionality for modern quake. It could be declared today of course, or for QS 1.0... 

It's a really tough one to call and ultimately we should be grateful that QS is curated by people who have sensible opinions on what is "quakey" and what is "not quakey ahhhh my fucking eyes".

I do not agree in having a "not in fitzquake therefore we shouldn't do it", cut-off because there's loads of really good potential future things that would benefit quake and still be quakey.

For example, I would looove at some point to see proper static meshes with lightmaps that integrate with the rest of the world lightmaps (to avoid nasty obj2map abuse).

But it's all down to the QS coders and as I said we're lucky that these chaps tend to be on the same page as us. 

no one here will say fog or coloured lighting shouldn't be in QuakeSpasm.

Fog shouldn't be in QuakeSpasm. It's not featured in any of the official versions of Quake (Quake, GLQuake, QW, GLQW, Saturn Quake, Quake 64, and the obscure official ports to dead hardware accelerators). Coloured lighting, however, is present on both Saturn Quake and Quake 64. The Saturn port doesn't use the Quake engine but still is an official port of the game.

That said, community-made maps uses non-Quake features such as fog and skyboxes in too many maps for these features to be ignored. I don't remember a single AD map not using fog. So, they shouldn't be, but they need to be. 

 

Fitzquake isn't just an engine for playing id maps. It is also for playing custom maps. Those features were added so you can play most custom maps as mappers intended. When mappers added fog, colored light, external textures, entity alpha, extended entity limits to their maps, I wanted to be able to experience those maps correctly. I think fence textures and bsp2 support (which QS added) are in line with this philosophy. They don't make existing maps look wrong, they only allow new maps to look/work the way the mapper wants. 

Go map! 

They don't make existing maps look wrong, they only allow new maps to look/work the way the mapper wants.

This is why I am more interested in QSS than FTE or DP. From a mapper's POV anyway. 

Fog is perhaps the single greatest feature ever added to these source ports. No better way to instantly create a beautiful atmosphere.

https://i.imgur.com/cwakFVt.jpg 

Oh absolutely.

BTW - it's possible to make FTE look really, really like Quake - more like Quake than QuakeSpasm currently does actually, because you can enable a lovely 8-bit colormap lighting mode, and mdl lighting that's almost identical to WinQuake (the Fitz/QS mdl lighting is still too bright).

But "out of the box" it has a load of silly stuff turned on (as does DP), so I understand why people are instinctively turned off by it. 

The destruction of my config.cfg file is what REALLY turns me off about FTE. 

@Kinn
depends which preset the user picks when they first run it.

Note that you can force cvars to some specific value in FTE using worldspawn keys, eg: _cvar_r_shadow_realtime_world 0 to cripple any attempt by the user to use rtlights on your map.
Whether it works properly with cvars that need a vid_reload is a different matter, but disabling world lights is fine, and probably needed if your map has lots of lights that use the delay field.

@dumptruck_ds
Destruction?!?
FTE does NOT write a config.cfg - it writes an fte.cfg instead. And it usually writes it to your home dir somewhere too (although you can disable that part with -nohome if you really want). 

Note that you can force cvars to some specific value in FTE using worldspawn keys, eg: _cvar_r_shadow_realtime_world 0 to cripple any attempt by the user to use rtlights on your map.

Ooh, that's pretty good to know.... >:} 

Sorry if I am getting confused but I recall my configs and settings being borked the last time I tried FTE and then went back to another engine. I was a while ago. For recent testing I have an isolated FTE install.

So does FTE keep all my video settings and key bindings untouched if I switch between engines? 

that's the idea yes - so long as you use the cfg_save command (or quit via the menu and pick 'yes' to save, or set cfg_save_auto 1). 

Thanks for that tip, I'll definitely need it for my maps.

I really should spend more time with FTE. It was by far the easiest solution when trying to set up LAN coop on short notice when I was at a friend's house - other engines had socket errors - and I enjoyed my time with it, as brief as it was.