I've been looking at MH's home work, and because I want any speedup I do to render identical to FitzQuake 0.85, I think I'm going to try this:

1) Instead of drawing the sky first, run through the sky texture chain + sky entities and see if any sky surfaces are visible. Set frame_skyshown to true or false.

2) Provided frame_skyshown, at end of drawing instead of beginning, either do a sky surface stencil pass or draw with glColormask (FALSE, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE) using sky surfaces + sky entity surfaces.

3) Then use the drawing code more or less as-is.

I understand the trickery of handling the skybox, ironically the software engine Makaqu supports skyboxes in WinQuake and draws the skybox only on those brushes (and it looks perfect too).

While tempting to give that a shot in Fitz, I think I'll try the more simple method outlined above at least at first.

Hopefully, it results in some fps. 

Stencil buffer sounds like a reasonable way to do it. At the time I didn't want to introduce a new hardware requirement but since every card for 15 years has had stencil, it's probably safe :) 

In Fitz 0.85's Host_Game_f (), do you remember why this is commented out?

//Cbuf_InsertText ("exec quake.rc");

We were discussing re-adding it in Quakespasm. Not doing it creates a disparity between the "-game" flag and the "game" console command, where "-game" will exec the mod's quake.rc possibly with custom settings, but "game" won't. This is a problem for some mods, e.g. those that set an increased max_edicts required for their maps in their quake.rc.

The only issue I can see is execing quake.rc might trigger a video mode change, if the gamedir you're switching to has some different vid_width/vid_height saved in the config.cfg. But it's easy to work around that with the vid_locked mechanism. 

@ericw
startdemos
stufftext
both are annoying every time you change gamedir. and yeah, engines that unconditionally shove a vid_restart into configs are annoying too.

if you can change gamedir without any side effects then you're a miracle worker.

your current settings getting wiped is pretty annoying too, if you bind your controls then change gamedir.

changing gamedirs without restarting is actually quite complicated if you want to to do it properly. plus its annoying if its not done properly.

FTE checks if the various configs change over the gamedir change, so it doesn't oblierate settings if there was no point in doing it in the first place. this helps reduce how annoying it is. There's still other issues, but they don't appear as often thanks to this. :P 

I originally added that line for the same reasons you want to resurrect it; to help make the mod's configuration closer to intended. But I disabled it because i encountered a lot of awkward problems as mentioned by Spike.

I decided it's better to do to little rather than too much, in this case.

I still think the config behavior is awkward, due to the fact that it only saves when you quit, and this means only one mod dir gets the updated config. I had plans to save it before switching mods, so the mod you are leaving gets any modified settings you created while in that mod.

It's still weird, though; and there are some settings that should probably be engine-specific vs. mod-specific, like graphics and audio settings. So there really should be two configs, one that is always stored in id1 and the other that is saved per mod. Each cvar would know which config it belonged to. 

A system where engines effectively intercepted the "exec config.cfg" command and converted it to the moral equivalent of "exec config.cfg;exec fitzquake.cfg" could work, especially if engine specific persistent variables got saved to that custom file instead of config.cfg itself. 

It sounds like the best option for QS right now is not changing anything and just document the behaviour/bug. 

So much old mods that can be broken by these sort of changes. 

I saw an interesting bug report on quaddicted by NoNameUser, here:

Also, "r_lerpmodels" is set to 1 by default, but the weapon models lose their smooth animations outside the start map; monsters are ok, though, and everything else seems fine too. I've had this problem with the weapons animations with other mods too (Warp Spasm, The Horde of Zendar, and others).

I was able to reproduce it in two big maps (warpd.bsp, zendar.bsp) on various Fitz engines (0.85, QS 0.90.0, MarkV). What was happening was, this condition in CL_ParseClientdata was firing every frame, even when I wasn't changing weapons:

if (cl.viewent.model != cl.model_precache[cl.stats[STAT_WEAPON]])
{
cl.viewent.lerpflags |= LERP_RESETANIM; //don't lerp animation across model changes
}


The cause was, the above check was done before handling the SU_WEAPON2 byte, so only the bottom 8 bits of cl.stats[STAT_WEAPON] were set, which would cause the test to always fail if the weapon model was > 255. I just moved the if() statement to the end of the function, seemed to fix up the issue; here's the diff.

Does that look sensible? The lerping if() block used to be inside
if (cl.stats[STAT_WEAPON] != i), but I think it should be safe to move it outside of that, because the lerping if() is also testing that the weapon changed. 

Good catch. Your fix makes sense to me. 

Sounds like a great catch. 

Is there a way to code in so modders can choose which models can and cannot cast shadows, and which weapons/enemies are lerped?

I am using a bunch of models in one of my maps and they cast unwanted shadows. 

Fitz/Quakespasm/Mark V all have r_nolerp_list.

Mark V has r_noshadow_list too. 

Huh... how do you add to this list? Rc file? Cfg file? 

They're just cvars so you set their values the same as any other.

It would probably be a usability improvement to have commands to add individual items to these lists rather than having to require the user (or moder) to respecify the entire list. 

yeah, it's not very user or modder friendly, but for modders adding it to quake.rc is the best idea. (alternate idea: use stuffcmd)

In the case of modders, you should be able to create a full list of what should have shadows and what should interpolate (since you wrote the mod!)

As a player you end up creating a really long list that applies to multiple mods, since most mods do not provide their own lists.

The ideal would be an extension to the model format or new fields on quakec entities for the modder to define the behavior for each model or entity. All of those things require engine support, plus either a tools change or protocol change.

Hence, the hacky config file method. 

who's idea was it to add all this stuff to console commands anyway? can we change this to some text file where we just put a full path in from the mod dir (eg: progs/flame.mdl) and anything in that text file is not lerped?

config files are infinitely easier for modders and users alike. 

necros, it already works like that, you can set up the list in your config file. 

Darkplaces has a EF_NOSHADOW flag (4096) for the 'effects' entity field that you can set from qc, but it won't work in protocol 666 which only has 1 byte for 'effects'.

r_noshadow_list sounds like a decent compromise, thinking of adding it to Quakespasm too. 

We got a bug report for QS that the changelevel triggers in Xmen TC are harder to hit than with winquake. The changelevel triggers are point entities with an mdl model set on them.

What's happening is in Fitzquake, calling setmodel() also sets the mins/maxs based on the contents of the mdl, while winquake just sets them to '-16 -16 -16' '16 16 16'.

The Xmen code was calling setmodel() as the last thing in the setup code for this entity (xmen_teleport), so they were relying on the hacky behaviour of vanilla quake to set a 32x32x32 bbox.


Anyway - just thought I would document this for future reference; I suppose there could be a sv_gameplayfix cvar to revert to Winquake compatible behaviour, but it doesn't seem very urgent - lol. 

Oh... That would explain some seriously annoying issues I had with qc in the past 

sv_gameplayfix_setmodelrealbox
if 1, uses the model's bbox. if 0, uses +/- 16 for mdls.
just using +/-16 for *.mdl means that dedicated servers need not bother loading mdls at all, note that the vanilla quakeworld server does not support loading .mdl at all.
FTE uses +/-16 purely based upon the filename extension, while uses the real size in other cases. This means that replacement content still gets a suitable size with things that were originally .bsp (where they always got the bsp's size) while .mdl entities get their +/-16, and convieniently sidesteps issues that are so problematic in DP with replacement content.
Depending upon the filename extension like that is a bit of a hack, but it does indicate the original expectation much better than anything else.

quakerally is similarly (and severely) broken by mdls not getting size +/-16. 

That would explain some seriously annoying issues I had with qc in the past

Same! I figured it out after vtos() printing sizes of misbehaving things in desperation and getting non-power-of-2 dimensions. I started always calling setsize after setmodel assuming it was another QC quirk everyone knew about but me, and not something specific to Fitzquake. 

Haha, ages ago Spike and some QuakeC modders discussed that.

I did notice that anomaly in the FitzQuake source code last year when carefully comparing versus WinQuake.

I thought about it 10 seconds, and decided no one ever complains about FitzQuake.

This may be the first time someone has spotted a behavior difference in the wild and brought to someone's attention. 

Personally I'm baffled that engines still use this style of MDL bbox handling when all the code needed to handle them properly - including full rotation support - is there in Quake 2 - https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-2/blob/master/ref_gl/gl_mesh.c#L373

It's not hugely difficult to port that to Q1 and all of these problems just go away.