Did you say that earlier you had max_edicts at 512? Because that's lower than dosquake which allowed 600 edicts, which might explain why it caused crashing. There's an argument here that allowing people to reduce the memory footprint below what was considered acceptable 19 years ago is unnecessary today. This argument would continue that engines should prevent people shooting themselves in the foot by enforcing a minimum max_edicts of 600. 

Edict size in ID1 is 876 bytes. This can be variable because mods can add their own edict fields which are tagged on at the end of the struct, accessible normally through QC but only accessible through C code by means of some pointer jiggery-pokery.

Say 1k as a good working size and because it makes subsequent calculations easier.

So if max_edicts is 8192 that's 8mb of memory. If it's 32768 it's 32mb of memory. Neither is a huge figure today, nor would it be considered huge on a PC from 10 years ago.

Most of that memory is going to be unused though, and there's also the fact that a lot of engine developers like to have their engines run on the same (or at least similar) class of machine that the original ran on.

One solution under Windows would be to VirtualAlloc a largeish pool of memory - say 64mb (for headroom) - with MEM_RESERVE. This won't count towards memory used, it just marks pages as reserved for subsequent use. Then as edicts are assigned from that pool, another VirtualAlloc with MEM_COMMIT for each new edict will actually use the memory, and only the memory, required for however many edicts a map might need.

I'm sure Linux and other POSIX systems have APIs that allow a similar scheme, but I'm not familiar with them. Either way, this setup allows the max_edicts cvar to go away.

IMO this is a good thing. I get that max_edicts is well-meant, but a major weakness of it is that it puts the obligation on the player to do the right thing. And the player must be aware that it exists, know that it may be needed, know what the appropriate value to set it to is, and know to set it before loading the map.

That just seems appallingly player-unfriendly to me. OK, I also understand that newer mods come with their own quake.rc that sets it accordingly, but it's still broken under older mods and it's something that with a bit of thought doesn't even need to exist.

In the end I just don't see an acceptable middle-ground for players. Either set a hard max_edicts and design mods around it, or make there be no practical maximum. But putting the burden on the player to do the right thing is eventually just going to blow up in your face. 

512 sounds low, but it was a machine picking the limit because the map probably had like 150 entities.

Dynamic ents will fix.

Dynamic ents doesn't solve any issues except this one. By the time you hit 5000 server edicts you are going to have all kinds of problems with the networking limits for stock Quake.

If it isn't one thing, its another. 

Windows OpenGL | WinQuake

1) PNG screenshots might be fixed. Need NightFright to check since I don't experience issue. Changed download from GL_RGBA to old style GL_RGB before saving to PNG.

2) WinQuake large resolutions should be fine, but scaled (because WinQuake renderer can only do so many vertical lines). I don't have a 1080p monitor, so need verification as well.

3) Added Ctrl+Left+Arrow, CTRL-A, CTRL-Z (undo), CTRL-SHIFT-Z (redo) to console.

[I was going to do one level of undo. Then I thought, I'm not going to bother with undo. So of course, it has an unlimited undo buffer that compacts to words.]

4) Fixed drawing chat text if the console width was too narrow to display the whole line.

I have another batch of changes, but wanted to hit a check a "checkpoint" because I made heavy revisions to the console for auto-complete, console drawing and for undo. The auto-complete function in previous versions worked fine, but the code was embarassing cobbled together spaghetti caked on layer after layer that happened to work. 

Windows Open GL | WinQuake 

I dunno what you did between this release and the last one but music suddenly works!

Weeeeeeee..... 

I noticed that with developer 1 active the console gets spammed with messages about sound volume -

https://www.dropbox.com/s/33s43kepni4d7cc/mark_v_0000.png?dl=0 

I'm really happy your music works now! 

Cheers. This has replaced all my other engines now. I will still be using dark places too but only to make sure dark places is compatible.

Any reason why gl_texturemode settings don't save? It resets each load unless you set it in an autoexec.cfg 

It isn't a cvar. Fitz 0.85 it was a command.

[Quakespasm made it a cvar and has it save. I don't see that as something someone generally would touch except as curiousity and if they do, they wouldn't know the default value easily to restore it.] 

I can confirm that latest snapshot fixes screenshots with transparent statusbar for me.

Something else on my wishlist for quite a while is a sound resampler - especially useful if you set sndspeed 44100. I picture something like in ZDoom with its snd_resampler variable, letting you choose between "NoInterp", "Linear", "Cubic" and "Spline" modes.
Currently, I try to compensate the most annoying upsampling side-effects with converted sounds, but as we know, that's not a very elegant solution. 

the nice thing about MarkV using DirectX to play back the music is, the sfx and music are mixed together by the OS, not by MarkV. By using the default sndspeed 11025, you'll get very high quality upsampling provided by Windows, better than "Cubic" or "Spline" I'd guess.

In stock id quake, the lightning gun crackle is one of the only 22050Hz sounds, and I think everyone's used to hearing it downsampled to 11025. the need for a good resampler only comes into play if you want mix 11025 and 22050 sounds (in a mod, say), or mix 11025 with 44100 music in-engine (quakespasm does this). 

Good start. Now 2 of 3 known issues that I don't or can't experience are gone.

If someone with a 1080p monitor can see how the WinQuake version reacts to setting a screen resolution like 1920 x 1080.

I have another update with maxedicts gone (client always has 8192 edicts available, server will use 8192 edicts unless protocol is 15 (standard Quake) and in that case will use 600 for backwards compatibility), ericw's allocblock and double precision adjustments for lightmaps (even in the WinQuake version for the lightmap adjustments) and a few other things like fifth being annoying with developer 1 and changing mp3 volume printed.

I have dzip for .dz demos integrated in the current released build, but I don't have it doing anything yet.

I need to tweak the Nehahra handling a little and see if there is anything else I've missed. 

@ericw:
Really good advice with sndspeed 11050, thanks a lot! Didn't know that it actually sounds better with default setting. As you said, some sounds (not only in vanilla Quake, but also addons) have different sampling rates, but I guess this is a fair compromise.

I am about to finish my Travail tests. So far no issues. 

I can select the mode for 1080p, it seems to work in that respect but I can't tell if it's truly setting that as the resolution. I thought taking a screenshot would show the true res but the resolution of the .png file was 960x540 

Yep same here. I'd guess that's intended since Baker was talking about handling the problem thru scaling. It's funny that you get "fewer pixels" at 1080p than at 720p here, but if for whatever reason the renderer can't handle 1080p then pixel-doubling could be better than having to interpolate.

Is this what other SW renderers do at high resolutions? 

I loaded up Half Life and went to options->video and selected the software renderer, but my vertical resolution is 768 and it won't let me try higher.

Don't have Quake 2 installed at the moment to try that either.

[I did try to adjust by a percent initially instead of dividing by an integer, but the status bar was imperfect at some resolutions showing a line (WinQuake doesn't always draw the status bar, so it isn't quite a single surface.). So I went with the integer multiplication method because of that and the results should always be very predictable and I don't have to worry about stretching and such possibly looking bad at some resolutions, so it will look clean cut.] 

r_shared.h, change #define MAXHEIGHT 1024 to 1080.
1920x1080 works fine now, though it's pretty slow 

Touching that definition introduces a chain reaction that filters into the assembly language definitions and numerous things in the software renderer files.

That's way outside the scope of this project for me. 

didn't realize you were doing scaling.
The latest markv winquake build works well here @ 1920x1080. 

Haha, you know what ... 1080 vs. 1024, that's a mere 56 pixels. A quick look and I dug up some Engoo/QBism/Makaqu threads and it appears that isn't going to explode anything. 

Beta 12 - Windows GL | WinQuake

1) mp3 status events don't print for developer 1
2) Increased the maximum vertical resolution for WinQuake to 1080 (in theory -- can't directly test).
3) ericw's lightmap precision changes + alloc block speed up from Quakespasm implemented.
4) Max edicts is gone. As a client it always uses 8192. As a server it uses 8192 if running FitzQuake protocol 666 (the usual) and standard Quake's limit of 600 if serving a protocol 15 game.

Later on, I'll upload the Mac version and updated source.

Thanks for all the help in testing all of this! 

Interesting , because protocol 15 can handle up to 8192 edicts correctly 

that's a subjective statement. while the protocol might be able to cope with up to 32k ents, the implementations of that protocol may only support 600.

seeing as vanilla nq will safely handle its limitation, I would personally say that the server should just use 8192 even with protocol 15, because its better to soft-crash outdated clients than the server.
fte filters entities over the assumed client's limit because invisible entities is probably better than soft-crashing anything. if the client supports the proquake 16bit angles thing, you can generally assume the limit is higher. heuristics can always be wrong, of course.
of course, fte is crazy, and filtering reliably is a whole load of work that I can understand not bothering with (svc_setview! oh noes!), in which case imho your server not crashing is more important than your clients not crashing. 

For protocol 15:

FitzQuake 0.80, if I recall bumped the max edicts from 600 to 1024. JoeQuake uses 2048 if I remember correctly. WinQuake and GLQuake use 600.

My thoughts were if someone was going to run in protocol 15 mode as a server, they would probably want to ensure anything original Quake could connect and play.