Game code in C

[JasonX]

I'm working on my engine port and i've decided to drop QuakeC altogether and use pure C, or even an external DLL in the future, for the game code. Does anyone know where to start on this? I mean, just the basics like the ScratchQC project: loading a map and putting a camera there. What are the functions that QuakeC itself calls?

[Baker]

[JasonX]

[Baker]

[JasonX]

Another question: inside SV_TouchLinks, the following is called: PR_ExecuteProgram(touch->v.touch). What is this for? There are some other calls to PR_ExecuteProgram that don't seem to be functions...

[Baker]

Load map dm6

Type "edicts" in the console

Look at edict #8

You can just type "edict 8" in the console to see just edict #8. One of the fields you will see is "touch" ... and that specific entity has something in that field.

(I mean I could answer the question directly, but it is better if you use the edict command and directly view what is going on. Doing the above will give you about everything you need to know on handling that. You'll need to use that "edict" command a lot with what you are doing.)

[JasonX]

[Spike]

pr_strings is just an offset into the qc string table. if you're serious about running C code, just treat it as ((char*)NULL) and remove it when practical.
you just need to look out for dereferences, which are safe in qc as they're effectively just empty strings.

[r00k]

Something else you can do, for learning purpose, is to look at the KTX gamecode source in C. It's for QuakeWorld but then, that shouldn't matter.

https://github.com/deurk/ktx

[JasonX]

Thanks a lot for the info, guys. However, by removing the indexed calls and leaving just the char*, i still get protocol errors: Host_Error: CL_ParseServerMessage: Server is protocol 66820 instead of 15

[Baker]

[frag.machine]

I'd suggest you to have a small function or even a macro that receives the value corresponding to the string offset and returns a proper char * and use it every time a string is referred in the code. This should fix most (if not all) problems due invalid string references. Actually, forget what I said: IIRC such macros already exist in pr_builtins.c. Just use it (you may need to move it to quakedef.h tho)

Also, if you are really set with the idea of pure C for game logic maybe the Quake 2 engine would be a good reference.

[Spike]

set cl_shownet 2
see where your server differs from the version you started with.

[JasonX]

I'm a little bit lost on how the pr_strings thing works. By default, when a server is started, anything read from *.bsp is parsed into the PR_* structures and then sent along as integers over the network? Should i just use chars instead?

[frag.machine]

pr_strings is a pool of immutable strings (ex: "You got the ", " left the game with ", "progs/player.mdl", etc), previously declared in QuakeC code and stored at the begin of the progs.dat file, concatenated with a '\0' char as separator between individual strings and "\0\0" as final marker. When the engine loads the progs.dat it reads this chunk of text into pr_strings. Every string reference in QuakeC is actually an integer offset to this pool, and every time you need the actual string (ex: when the QuakeC interpreter executes a bprint() call) the macros at pr_builtins.c I mentioned before returns a char pointer to this pool.

Note that this applies only to immutable strings. Strings built during runtime (ex: ftos()) are stored in pr_str_tmp (or something named like that, can't remember right now).

Regarding the error you are facing: most likely you are not sending correct string values. Specially in the case of the precache lists, which are read exactly from pr_strings. Maybe my explanation above will make things a bit easier to debug now.