You'd be better off writing this as a separate map launcher program that fires up quake with a random map. 

Bollocks to that idea, you could even do this in a batch file. 

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60452&start=1055&end=1070 

Then it would be OS dependant.

The idea above is to load a random map from within Quake, using the console only. This would be usefull since the player doesn't have to leave Quake, and could load many maps one after another (while staying in Quake).

If the user doesn't like a random choice, he/she could just call the random.bsp map again, directly from the console. 

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3517460/is-there-anything-like-inotify-on-windows 

Your proposal requires the ability to read info from a text file, so you are asking for an engine mod, nothing less.

If this has to work in game, then all you can do is pester the coder of your favourite engine to implement a console command to load a random map. No hacky random.bsp needed. 

To me, any solution that uses the OS instead of the Quake console isn't interesting at all.

My query here is to find a solution from within Quake, without modifying the Engine (I'm using Quakespasm).

So is it possible to make a bsp fake "map" (the random.bsp file) that could read a text file inside the id1/maps folder ? 

My query here is to find a solution from within Quake, without modifying the Engine (I'm using Quakespasm).

So is it possible to make a bsp fake "map" (the random.bsp file) that could read a text file inside the id1/maps folder ?

No that's not possible because you can't read text files without a engine mod.

I think you might be able to hack something similar with a QC mod though, but the list of maps would have to be hardcoded in a QC file, or stored in entities in the random.bsp 

I bet Preach could come up some krazy idea to make it work in vanilla progs.... 

screenshot 

This looks like something from The Matrix. 

Download - Created in 2006. 

Kinn,

maybe that hardcoded entities list could be edited using an HexEditor ? 

Do you need this to load different mods as well, or is this list of maps all for one mod (vanilla I assume) 

maybe that hardcoded entities list could be edited using an HexEditor ?

Now this is getting silly 

Even easier on MacOS: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1515730/is-there-a-command-like-watch-or-inotifywait-on-the-mac

In case you did not understand how it works, it randomises the map each time you access the file. So you stay within Quake and just load randommap again and again. 

Kinn :

for the moment, I'm not asking to load different mods. Default bsp maps from the id1/maps folder only would already be great (I have about 200 great maps in there).

If the list must be hardcoded, then HexEditing it could be the only choice left, without asking for a modification of the engine (Quakespasm).

Spirit :

while I'm a long time user of OS X, I'm really not familiar with that OS X stuff. So I really don't know how to use the ressources from your link. 

That Mod is pretty impressive ! The undergate hall is cool to move in. 

Spirit's solution is described in those posts he linked to in the Quakespasm thread. He posted an example command for Linux that will link a different (randomly chosen) bsp file to randommap.bsp each time something (like Quake) opens the file.

If you're on OS X then you'll need to figure out how to modify that Linux command like so that it uses the file-watching tools available on OS X (fswatch), instead of the Linux-specific stuff (inotifywait). 

It isn't obvious at all how to use Spirit's code. Where do you put that code ? 

Theoretically it should be trivial to add a new command to QS which would switch to a random entry from the filelist... but I'm looking at the QS source and I have no idea where to begin. 

Adding a command to QuakeSpasm that reads a textfile to randomly load a map would be ideal ! I think it could actually be awesome ! 

The list of maps. 

As indicated by someone elsewhere on the forum, there are maps that aren't actually true maps (I don't know if this is true).

I think it would be preferable that the user define a list of **favorite** maps in a text file, and the engine could then read it to load a map.

It may be more reliable. 

My favorite map is b_shell1.bsp