Quake MOD - In The Shadows

[Baker]

*tips hat to Sock*

[sock]

@leileilol, I think the BrutalDoom thing is good because it is a crazy old game and it is a thriving community of players who just love playing Doom. If something existed like that for Quake it would be awesome! lots of people wanting to play and test new Quake level/mod content, that would just rock!
@frag.machine, yeah money sucks, I always thought if I did stuff I enjoy I could survive, not this time.
@Dr. Shadowborg, this has been a long time coming, I just been hoping things would change, but reality is a bitch sometimes.
@qbism, I just want to tidy up all my source files and do one final release.
@Seven, yeah it has been cool how many custom engines have helped me get the MOD working. Just shows the community can pull together sometimes.
@r00k, good luck with your engine, you now have some extra level candy to play with!
@Baker, thanks for all the help with the Mark V engine and the pimpage at Quakeone

[Baker]

Sock, sorry I don't check my email and pretty much no one has an email address for me anyway (I more check private messages and my box here). Apologies for not checking it.

re: Mark V "Baker, Is there any plans for another update soon? "

I hadn't planned on it mostly because I'm more or less assuming a far less active role in Quake and concentrating on private projects (I'm writing something of a multiplatform +iOS minor 2D/3D programming language -- a self-documenting programming language, which is kinda fun but at times a bit of a 5 dimensional chess game at times).

Yeah I can make the small change you requested. Here @ I3D were a small enough close-knit group you can feel free asking me in this thread about anything you'd normally do in a private message. I won't say what you told me in private messages, but that's very neat.

[sock]

[Baker]

Make one and I'll add it in. This sounds like a rather good idea that is better than engines which disable the register check (DarkPlaces, for example, since many total conversions have targeted it).

The registered check is important because if someone is truly running shareware, you need those start map gates that won't open so you don't try to play a map you don't have (then again I'm a tad Quake rusty and maybe those happen anyway via the registered cvar).

[Spike]

adding support for a second pop.lmp to enable support for -game etc is pointless. you might as well just disable the check entirely (and avoid including the copyrighted file to check it against inside the gpled engine).
(you could also open the gpled source and dump that chunk of data to disk, of course).

if you use the shareware assets with something that violates the terms and conditions of using those shareware assets, then you are in violation of those terms and conditions whether the engine cares or not.

Really, the engine should enable the shareware protections when it finds pak0.pak (and not pop.lmp) rather than merely because it can't find pop.lmp.
The problem is that I'm lead to believe that there are multiple versions of pak0.pak. So maybe if id1/pak0.pak exists, whatever its crc.

the registered cvar is used to signify to the mod that the extra content isn't available, rather than any real protection. This allows you to set it to 1 in single player to gain access to beyond those doors for deathmatch to work on the start map.

[frag.machine]

What would be the effort to replace all shareware assets and thus turn the entire mod a standalone game ? Seems to me the Right Thing (tm) to do, legally speaking.

[Baker]

@Spike - He's not breaking anything, he's got permission to do this. (note my ambigous "that's very neat" above)

[taniwha]

[sock]

[sock]

[LordHavoc]

I want to point out that based on what I have heard, Quake1 is one of the best selling games of all time, and keeps selling to this day, it has frequently been in the top 10 sellers on Steam week to week (at times being the #1 when it goes on sale), and that means something, there is an audience for Quake, the question is if there is a way to reach the Quake players and whether they want new content, perhaps more importantly if they're willing to chip in funds to make new content.

It's easy to lose sight of the nuances of the audience when you are a developer, it seems more likely this was a case of not reaching the audience than a case of the audience not caring.

Just my take on it.

EDIT: on the topic of gfx/pop.lmp, in darkplaces I simply detect the presence of the file and do not care about its contents and set the registered cvar accordingly, furthermore DP allows you to run mods without the file present, but posts a warning that mods usually require the full quake to properly function, this kept in place the mechanic of closing the episode halls in start.bsp but without violating copyright (ironic as it may be) on the pop.lmp itself. Furthermore I block downloads of any file from any pak that contains gfx/pop.lmp to prevent people from using the download functionality on the client to pull files that they shouldn't have. And if the active game is not one of the Quake-derived ones (Nexuiz or Steel Storm: Burning Retribution, or Darsana, etc), it does not post any such notice about shareware/registered Quake as it isn't pertinent. If you really wanted to check the pop.lmp contents you can replace it with a CRC comparison of the contents anyway. It was clearly an oversight of id to leave the contents in the source code.

[Baker]

[taniwha]

Unfortunately, it's not really legal to use the shareware data with mod data, but I'm not one for enforcing that.

What I want to see is some free (even if crappy) assets for quake. Fortunately, the palette seems to be free (apparently public domain), so compatible textures aren't a problem (other than creating them in the first place). The maps have been put under the GPL, so the maps themselves aren't a probllem (just need new textures: even null textures would be sufficient, if ugly). Even the QC code is GPL. That leaves monsters and items, and most items are easy enough as they are not animated. There's also the font, but that's pretty much a non issue for many modern engines (QF not included at this time) since they use freefont (or similar).

Sock, you're already partway there with your mod.

[sock]