to be the case unless there are special engines used or summat. 

the squad shadow by making an object above the sky is the same issue. 

Yes, but it's a purely visual thing, your actual location on the server does not wrap around -- just the coordinates sent to the client. 

Are you sure about that? If you jump off an unsealed level and loop a few times, you can still land on the level itself and have proper collision which would imply that you are, in fact, wrapping around in terms of your coordinates... 

Hi,

Does anyone have any information on the metrics / dimensions used for the Quake world ?

I'd like to understand what each unit represents and how big fixed size entities are, in terms of real world application.

Thanks

-Mic 

I've heard it's 8 Quake units is a foot, but I don't know for sure. I just fool around until it looks right. 

It was actually ToeTag that prompted this question as I was wondering what size the grid squares represented and how you knew what size to draw the 'fixed-size' entities etc

-Mic 

Yep, just found confirmation on this page ...

http://toolz.nexuizninjaz.com/shader/shader/section2.htm

Unders the measurements section.

Will now work to this scale.

Thanks

-Mic 

Well, the entity sizes are specified in the .QC files and the models and things that are read in are automatically scaled correctly since the entire editor runs in Quake coordinate space. 

Thanks for pointing me to the .qc files ... that'll come in handy.

You see that's where I get confused, you said above 'I just fool around until it looks right' but now you say 'models and things that are read in are automatically scaled correctly since the entire editor runs in Quake coordinate space' so in order for that to happen you must use some sort of measure/unit size ?

-Mic 

It's a 1:1 mapping. 1 unit inside of a model file is 1 grid unit. That doesn't relate to the real world, it's just how it's mapped within the editor. I use the same scale as Quake which, internally, is 1 unit is 1 grid unit. 

Ahhh ... now it makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up.

-Mic 

8 units = 1 foot doesn't literally translate. The player is 56 units which would equal 7 feet, and can jump 32 units which would be 4 feet.

Even then if you create a room 80 X 80 and spawn in it, it doesn't 'feel' like a 10' x 10' room. 

 

Indeed, if you're asking what I think you are then the answer is 'it's irrelevant'.

The units in Quake don't really translate that well into 'real' units of measurement. It's just an arbitary unit. What you seem to want to know is standard sizes, in which case;

128 units is standard for a medium/small corridor width. It's also the standard height of a floor/storey (ie, there'll be 128 units from floor to ceiling).

64 units is a thin corridor or a large crate.

16 units is the height of a step.

Of course, a lot of these, such as floor height/corridor width can be expanded/contracted depending on the size of room wanted, I'd suggest finding the source files for some maps and having a look at the scale of them in editor (I know Vondur releases all of his, as do various other mappers...) 

Also you can determine in game by some of the textures used the size of a room since most textures are either 64 or 128, unless they were scaled. 

I think in terms of approximation, 1 foot equalling 8 units is about right.

7ft for the player doesn't sound to outlandish. Dolph Lundgren stands about 6ft 6in and I would have expected the player to be about the same physique as him.

And I would also expect someone of this physique to be able to jump about 4 feet.

-Mic 

The reason I'm asking for this is because I'm currently working on an .skp (Google SketchUp) -> .map converter, but the maps when loaded after conversion are too small because SU works in inches & feet and 1 foot doesn't map to 1 Quake unit. Therefore I need some sort of scale to work with.

-Mic 

If you jump off an unsealed level and loop a few times, you can still land on the level itself and have proper collision

this actually isn't the case. if you loop around, the geometry is drawn as if you had looped, but everything is non solid and monsters cannot attack you, even though they look as if they are able to.
any geometry that goes beyond the boundary though, will be solid to you when you loop over. but it won't be visible.

it's like the client is running on floats but the server is running with doubles. 

maybe this is for hl/hl2, but i believe they do 1 unit = 1 inch which works out good for like stair heights and such, but i think the quake player is shorter than the hl2 player. 

even shrter than the q2 guy 

necros

Oh yeah? Weird, I could swear I remember doing that but maybe I never actually tried it. 

it's like the client is running on floats but the server is running with doubles.

Literally, the server is using floats and the nework protocol sends them as 16-bit fixed-point numbers, with 13 bits for the integer part, and 3 bits for the fractional part (so the smallest representable difference is 1/8 of a unit, and the largest possible value is 4095.875) The client converts them back into floats, but of course you've already lost the extra range at that point. 

you can see this 1/8 thing if you stand on a slope (like the beginning of e1m1) and zoom in on the wall nearby. As you slowly slide, your view ratchets forwards and downwards in noticable increments.

When working on protocol 666, i tried various techniques to add range to the coordinate system without increasing packet size. They were all very complicated and still made packets bigger. The simplest is just to always send floats, but this makes packets much bigger and I didn't want to pollute the protocol that way (as it is now, the packet sizes are about the same as 15 until you need to send special data like alpha, 2-byte modelindex, etc.)

I still have plans to support this in the future, I just wanted to get a functional version out and that requires locking down the feature set at some point.

The packet size limit is the toughest part, and there's not much I can do about it (but I should add a cvar so you can attempt larger packets on a LAN, which might have higher MTU than the internet at large.) 

angles are another thing where the precision is incredibly low.

the hanging corpses that slowly rotate in quoth are animated in the mdl because the engine's angles round to like, nearest 5/360th instead of nearest 1/360th degree. when you start doing rotating brushes, and the brushes are large (or are placed far from the origin) it can get incredibly ugly with this gigantic gaps between rotations.

it would be nice to beef up whatever handles angles if possible.