Maybe something on Philip Buuk's channel would help you out?

Also, I don't think baker is insulting you, rather, giving you some tough love.

Listen to baker, you probably are putting out the "helpless snowflake" vibe unknowingly. I'm guilty of it and it's an easy trap to fall into when you're stuck and really don't know where to begin. Ultimately, that's going to 1) cause people to be disinterested in your cause and 2) distract you from what you ought to be doing. Also, don't dismiss advice because you find its content or presentation repugnant. This shit is hard and, more often than not, the truth of the matter is usually what you don't want to hear.

might be the way some people do things, but its not for everyone.

I can relate, but that way of thinking is ultimately a crutch. There is no shortcut from a to z. You're going to have to put your nose to the grindstone and work your way through. If I had taken this advice some time ago I would be in a much better position now. Maybe my advice isn't applicable to your scenario, maybe it is, who knows. Just my 2 cents. Best of luck! 

Thanks for your link, started watching it, seems very appropriate. Something like that may "fill in the blanks" for me perhaps. Thats more like proactive posting and providing possible solutions based on the real common goal, which is definitely more constructive.

As for the "helpless snowflake" insinuation, it all depends on how much research you do on me. Check my profile, I have a website though outdated regarding a QC mod. I am an active QC coder and also just recently started a Quake C support Email list fr the casual newcomer if need be. Im active in Quake as best as I can possibly be given its hurting circumstances. I have interacted with Baker before on other sites, but obviously theres only so much cooperation possible there. Aside from Quake, sometimes I get to have a real life, and Im not ashamed to say its been a lousy one lately for lots of reasons I could lay out here, which would most likely make people sick to their stomachs, so I wont do it. Its also off topic as well. There is a tendency on the internet in general these days for forget there is an actual imperfect human being on the other side who may feel "helpless" or "powerless" at times. To me, thats fine and despite me feeling that way lately , Im still able to help people if asked, and also do things for the possible new person trying Quake, so I think Im not as helpless as was implied. Thanks. 

good, I hope that material will prove useful!

It sounded as though you may have been going down a familiar path. I just wanted to take the opportunity to save you some time and grief if that were actually the case. No insult was intended. 

No problemo KP, understood.

Already watching the 2nd vid, and it does make me remember part of what may be my "special snowflake mental block" here so to speak. Its regarding Visual Studio. I have 2008 and 2010 installed on my main desktop PC, and when I tried compiling an eng straight from original known good src, (without making a single change) I could never get a good compile without an error. Checking further, I saw LOTS of complaints and remarks about inconsistencies back and fourth from different versions, and its well known I guess in the coder communities about these problems. I guess I could have gone to those sites and waded through tons of material to find my particular issue, but since I have been a sorta active member in some Quake Websites where there are real actual engine coders, made more sense to ask for the help there. But I think this video will def help alot for me. Glad to see some poeple are making vids about modding or coding Quake, could not find any when I looked. The internet is becoming a real vast place packed with so much content, sometimes its pretty easy to get lost...or overwhelemed. Maybe thats also part of it.

In case you or anyone else wants to see some of my Quake modding experiments etc, heres my Quake only youtube
[ https://www.youtube.com/user/teknoskillz/videos ]

Maybe we can 1 day create Quaketube? :o) 

Sadly, Fodquake doesn't have a server implementation. Only client. :( 

technically it does... it just doesn't work. :)
even if it did, it still wouldn't run mods properly (being a qw engine) without a huge amount of work. Even getting the official mission packs working properly wouldn't be trivial. 

Posted by Sgt-PieFace [108.63.148.236] on 2016/06/28 18:16:56
I made a short video show the changes that have been made to Quake via client updates and mods over then 20 years of its existence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImlgOmSUF4M 

Sgt-PieFace can take a faceful of poo pie. 

Kinn you might explain why ... he's not going to know unless you give him the "straight up" from the level designer point of view. 

Both look bad.

1996 seems to have been made at a lower resolution and/or picmipped down, probably the latter judging by the relative size of the sbar. The original Quake textures may have been low-res but they were also quite crisp. no fullbrights or overbrights either; GLQuake may not have had them, but software Quake did and software Quake came first.

2016 looks even worse. It's the typical DarkPlaces baby setup: a horrible mixture of high-res textures and low-res content. Looks in no way cohesive and the whole setup just seems to be designed to appeal to those who want to look at the pretty normal maps rather than play the game. The Quake high-res mod community still doesn't seem to understand that if you have normal maps then you need flat diffuse maps.

Yuck. Next. 

Well, if you have a Mac with Xcode and the latest version of everything, you could switch the left part of the video with my soft-rendered OSX port. You would get the crispiness of low resolution textures as rendered on a 2880x1800 screen (or whatever resolution you have) - or even in a small window if you prefer. Might make for a fairer comparison. 

Kinn you might explain why ... he's not going to know unless you give him the "straight up" from the level designer point of view.

It's like mapping a hi-res photograph of a person onto a minecraft character model. I really don't have the energy to step people through why this looks bad. 

https://67.media.tumblr.com/0e7c1399d3e144a4d4074eea2be55972/tumblr_o844ww2hAe1st4oayo1_500.png 

I take it there still aren't any truly high-def models for advanced Quake engines? 

It's not just high-res models, it's map geometry as well. The combination of high-res map textures and low-res map geometry just really really jars. Throw in the occasional spot where no high-res texture exists and it throws you even further. 

Hey guys, I've recently picked up Quake modding, and I've been looking at ways to make content that I could distribute without people needing Quake itself. I realize it would entail me making all-new textures/models/code, that's fine. I've been running Quakespasm as my engine of choice due to its relative faithfulness to the source, would it allow for completely custom content without me needing the original Quake paks?

I know only of OpenQuartz as a completely 'bare' moddable engine. 

I don't know if QuakeSpasm still requires the "proof of purchase" file to run custom content, but Darkplaces doesn't. DP has been used to create some full standalone games, even commercial ones such as Steel-Storm: Burning Retribution. 

I don't know if QuakeSpasm still requires the "proof of purchase" file to run custom content

Just checked the most recent code, and yeah, it still does the COM_CheckRegistered check.

This is actually still a useful distinction in quake, even outside of the context of running custom content, because it also ensures tat people don't accidentally blunder into the e2, e3 or e4 entrances in the Start map if playing shareware. 

well you could set "registered" to false without disabling custom content. That cvar is what locks the episode gates. 

If I'm experiencing big slowdown and framerate stuttering when there are lots of animated lightmaps on-screen, which command line value or cvar am I forgetting to set? The game runs 100% fine the rest of the time... 

Are you on the latest QS? 

I'm guessing you're running Intel GPU + Fitz 0.85 or an old version of Quakespasm?

The GLQuake lightmap upload code could slow to a crawl on some drivers, Intel in particular. MH fixed it a while ago and the fix made it in to QS 0.90.0 (iirc) and MarkV. 

You should probably also define "lots".

The animated lightstyle code in stock GLQuake and derivatives, even with my fix, just doesn't scale. All that my fix does is batch up some uploads and provide the right hints to the GPU that it doesn't need to do a format conversion, but it's still possible to construct scenes that run in the 20/30/40 milliseconds per frame range.

The real fix is to move lightstyle animation entirely to the GPU. This is actually quite simple (you can do it in GL 1.1 even) and you end up trading off texture uploads (and pipeline stalls) versus extra blend passes and draw calls (and increasing the video RAM requirements for lightmaps). The devil is in the dynamic lights, but you can do these with more blend passes and attenuation maps (if you don't have shaders), at the expense (I think) of not being able to take the surface normal into account.

The whole thing becomes significantly simpler (not to mention much faster) if you're prepared to say "screw GL 1.1" and require shaders.

End result either way is that the frame rate is levelled: scenes with lots of animated lightstyles run at much the same speed as scenes with none, and lightstyle interpolation becomes possible. Dynamic lights run roughly the same as the old code, but with much higher quality, and proper dynamic lighting of large MDLs and BSP models becomes possible. 

dynamic lights then need to become (shadowless) realtime lights, otherwise you're stuck with just flashblends/coronas.
still, if you're willing to ditch dynamic lights and non-glsl to optimise light styles, you can create a non-lit pathway through your code for almost no cost at all.
throw in texture arrays and remove the whole view-frustum-recalculation-every-frame thing, and your bsp rendering drops to almost the cost of just a pointcontents and a glMultiDrawIndirect call.
this is what I did with my 'onedraw' engine, its performance humiliates FTE on most/nearly all maps, but is also far more limited (being from-scratch doesn't help), with no dlights, no lits, no skyboxes, etc.

alternatively, you can move the lightmap updates onto a different thread - fte's 'r_dynamic -1' setting does this.
Unfortunately GL still basically requires the GL api to all be done on a single thread(as does d3d9), though presumably this could be accelerated a little with pbos. 

Shadowless real time is what I mean, yes.

As for lightstyles, when you break down the R_BuildLightmap code it clearly just becomes: texture * lightmap0 * style0 + texture * lightmap1 * style1 + texture * lightmap2 * style2 + texture * lightmap3 * style3. That's trivially easy to express in GLSL with or without additive blend passes, and not much more difficult to express in fixed pipeline GL.

End result is animated lightstyles without new texture uploads.