ProQuake updates

[Cataklysque]

Hi,

Firstly, I want to add a disclaimer as a precursor to the following text. I've played quakeworld far longer than I've played NQ. With that in mind, I'll continue.

I was curious as to why ProQuake hasn't been updated in years, it seems there are other clients such as qrack and joequake that have been worked on somewhat consistently, but ProQuake hasn't been touched. Is there simply no interest?

Of course from where I stand I would like to see more of an ezQuake type client, or atleast some of the same features - on a cheatfree server. Here are some features that I would like to see:

1. Transparent HUD
2. Pointing in team msgs i.e. %x at %y in ezquake. For instance, I might be standing at quad on DM3, and if I point at MH at mound and hit a bind it would say "MH at Mound".
3. FPS tweaks
4. Show speed command
5. In game funname creation

If someone was interested in updating the client I would be more than happy to help.

[Yellow No. 5]

As for proquake, I agree it's rather annoying that there has been no development on it for 4 years.

About 6 months ago I emailed jpg, the author. I asked him if he had any willingness to make any further updates to pq. He replied saying he could dust it off and make a quick change here or there, but other than that he didn't have the time nor interest.

There are other clients and other coders, but the reason proquake no longer being developed is a drag on the nq community, is that players are locked in to the pq standard because of cheatfree.

Also, most authors of quake engines are interested in it as a technical hobby, rather than as improving the game for the players. Proquake is a great client because it's author was very active in the quake multiplayer community. He added many great new features to the game without changing the fundamentals. I myself use Qrack for the same reason, because R00k plays quake, and has added all the proquakes improvements (to the joequake codebase) plus many more well thought out improvements. I find serveral of its features such as the custom mm2 noise, the scoreboard background, and features that improve clarity such as r_outline to be indispensible.

Darkplaces has long been known to be a technically very advanced engine, but only recently has LordHavoc been focusing more on adding features that online players want such as scoreboard pings and anytime demoing.

It seems to me the there have been more engine programmers on the QW side who actually knew the game as a online player and QW engines have been more focused on such. The good thing is that quake is opensource so any such ideas and improvements can be incorporated by others. The one glaring problem though is still the issue of cheatfree.

[R00k]

ok ezquake is nice, kind of a bloated featureset. And forget about all the teamplay GIMME that it has, u know full bright skins autoreporting, pointing, really its just Quake guys, lets not make it a 1 button game. Though I never got into qw cause the prediction just plain sux. I'd rather play on a server with ticrate 0.04 all of us at sub 100 ping (raw) than a QW server with prediction at 50 ping. The rockets arent fulid in flight the players jerk around, and i really cant stand 75 fps, even with phsy_fps its a dated scheme imho. Play warsow at 100 ping then qw and ull see what i mean. I'd rather play NQ cause of it's raw un-adulterated feel, sorry.


Maybe its my cfg but qw feels like max_fps 30 as nq feels like max_fps 120 at same pings....

I thought Fuh and Ez had cheatfree??

[Chuck]

The last I heard (which was a long time ago), Proquake was close to being updated with the ability to host 32 players. Haven't heard a peep since.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

he needs to get off his high horse and pass the fucking torch to someone willing to code proquake.

:x

[=peg=]

Lately i have been wondering about this too, mainly as i am currently putting some effort into mapping, and run into all kinds of limits on the "normal" engine (whichever that is supposed to be ).

As a result i've been using several differnt engines and came to notice all the subtle, yet fundamental, differences between them as it comes to limits like maximum eddicts/clipnodes etc. which made me wonder why there should be limitations like that nowadays.. i mean.. surely modern pc's should be able to cope with a lot higher limits.

Where it all comes down to i guess, is the netcode (protocol) that has not been updated as far as i know (qw aside that is). What does all of that have to do with proquake u may wonder? well proquake is the most used sever out there i think, so as it comes to improvements that involve the netcode, proquake is the spider in the web.

I think the netquake community would benifit from a newly improved netprotocol as it will allow both singleplayer and multyplayer minded players/developers to advance. This is where i feel an update to proquake would be great. Having said that i don't mean NQ to evolve into QW again.. becouse.. well, whats the point? we allready have QW

Here are some features that I would like to see:

1. Transparent HUD
2. Pointing in team msgs i.e. %x at %y in ezquake. For instance, I might be standing at quad on DM3, and if I point at MH at mound and hit a bind it would say "MH at Mound".
3. FPS tweaks
4. Show speed command
5. In game funname creation

as for proquake:
it has %l %h %a %p etc.. to communicate ur location and status.. it has show_speed.. and fps tweaks? whats the point of running quake at higher fps then ur monitor can display?

as for qrack:
it has all the features u mentioned except that pointing thing..

edit:
As for cheatfree.. well, i think it's kinda pointless.. i mean.. if ur serious about online gaming, why cheat?
I never could be bothered about being "the best" player.. for me quake is all about fun and making some cool frags here and there.. i mean, i rather make 1 cool frag in a game then 100 easy spawnkills.. but that's just me

[Cataklysque]

In regards to fps tweaks, I was speaking more along the lines of different particles for explosions for visual purposes.
ezQuake and Fuh are cheatfree - I wanted to emphasize that there are other clients out there that have some of these features but are not considered "cheatfree".

[R00k]

DarkPlaces would be the best "NEXTGEN" for a NQ protocol. As, DP can also connect to QW servers, the darkplaces protocol is supposed to be beter than standard qw.

The thing about ProQuake being the defacto, was because CRMOD was the standard for deathmatch, Proquake was made by the same author so he coded extensions into proquake that took advantage of crmod features, and vise versa.

[Verybadloser^XJ]

can't stand proquake, it just feels lagged, and fails to have the alt crosshair option, i feel no way capable of aiming when the cross hair is -4 -3 out of line.

[=peg=]

well that is what cl_crossx and cl_crossy is for

[Cataklysque]

It seems that there are clients available to use, but aren't being used by the "crmod" community. It seems like Proquake and CRMOD are married and this is the biggest reason for not changing clients, which IMO is holding the community back.

A similar thing happened in QW, every DM server used clanring for a long time, then we caught on to what the Euros were doing, which was KTeams, which became KTPro. More recently Ultimo and co have created KTX, which expanded on KTPro, so now it's very common to see both KTPro and KTX servers. I believe the relationship is similar in that both the client and server work to prevent cheating.

Does QRack or Dark Places have f_version type commands to verify clients? The big concern for the "crmod" community is cheating, so I guess what I'm getting at is in order for a new client to be utilized in this community, we're going to need an updated CRMOD to integrate cheatfree with DP or QRack. Does anybody else see any other options?

[Verybadloser^XJ]

Don't even understand why cheating is even an issue in netquake anymore. Sure if it's going to be the almighty TOURNAMENT, but other than that it's just pick up. Every1s played the game so long now that they can tell if some1 cheating. and most of the mods hinder the player cheating let alone aid him....

[Cataklysque]

While I agree, I'll wait here while you convince everyone who currently lives on proquake cheat-free servers to move elsewhere.

[=peg=]

well for me it kinda works the other way around.. that is.. since im hooked on qrack now and dont really want to go back to proquake as it just seems plain ugly to me now.. i dont go on cheatfree servers since they wont allow qrack... or at least no pak2 (even though all it contains is some 24bit textures and 44khz sounds)

edit:
there is a brazilian version of joequake that has f_system and maybe even f_version but that only works for ppl that have that client i think..

[R00k]

Basically cheatfree is for Proquake, server to client. Not really crmod to a proquake client. But, even cheatfree can be hacked by using a custom .dll that overrides opengl commands. This is a flaw in cheatfree by not checking the validity of the opengl32.dll file itself. Something that I have included in CAx is to sort of do this. True CRMOD could be updated aswell, though who plays a crmod tourney anymore?? I'm not sure how well f_version / f_modified would work in an open source engine.