GLQuake Help a Noob Out

[Quaker Oats]

I'ma start by sayin I'm a huge noob. There.

Now I've recently been told that I'm missing out on a lot of advanced features by not using GL quake, so I got it like yesterday. I've just ran into mountains of problems and every time I seem to have something figured out, something else goes wrong.

I swear, every time I change ANYTHING at all, it just gets shittier and shittier. It came to my attention that it's probably just my lack of a video card. I have some gay internal graphics accelerator, but I didn't think it would take a beast card to run a game this old (again, what do I know). My average FPS was like 120-180... yeah it was that broad. It always changed and never seems to sit in one place, and changing more settings seemed to worsen this.

So you tell me! Should I just ditch quake til I get a vid card, or is it worth tweaking GL quake til it looks and runs ok?

(oh and I've been told that there's someone else around here pretending to be me... well that's not me. I'm the only oats)

[Spirit]

Try this:

Go to mhquake and grab the latest release that is not the RMQ engine on the right. At the moment it is "Release 1.8.666b".

[MH]

With an internal card you're might get better FPS in software Quake than you get in GLQuake, especially if it's an older Intel. GLQuake itself is not an improvement on software Quake; true, you get filtered textures and all the rest, but it's at the expense of a lot of other things. Skies, water, lighting, certain textures are all messed up.

It certainly doesn't take a beast of a card to run GLQuake, but there are a lot of things wrong with it's use of OpenGL (not to mention elsewhere in the engine) that tend to cause trouble, particularly with Intel graphics and occasionally with ATI. These are really only coming to light with modern hardware and are mainly due to the fact that GLQuake was originally written to run on a $25,000 workstation 3D card, then ported to 3DFX cards, and has picked up a lot of weirdness and suboptimal code paths along the way.

DirectQ is a good engine to use with Intel graphics; it was originally designed to run well on this kind of hardware and will give you a much better overall experience than GLQuake while remaining reasonably faithful to the original look and feel of the game.

[Quaker Oats]

Well I tried it. Everything is really pretty, and the animations look cute, lol. It's like Squishy Quake! And yeah, it does run a helluva lot better than GL... but I don't think I could play competitively online with it because it'd just miss the old rustic and dark look and feel of winquake. GL quake was even a bit much for me, but if everyone else is using it, then I'll just get used to it. By tweaking enough things, it can almost look like winquake.. so that was my goal. Oh, also with DirectQ, for some reason it took a second for the game to point where the mouse actually was. It was like delayed. I'm sure that could be fixed, and while I appreciate the advice, I think I'm going to bare with GL quake.

My priorities (in order):

1.) Use the same client and settings that everyone else is using. And by everyone else, I basically just mean the people I see on multiplayer everyday, and they all claim to use the latest version of GL quake and advised me to get it.

2.) Make sure it runs OK. Right now though, it doesn't. It's basically just sluggish issues with all the fancy settings turned on.

3.) Make it look like original quake as much as possible.


So I've done my first priority, and I'm working on number 2. I've basically decided to just purchase a video card... my question is now: what would be the best option? I don't need anything crazy at all; I've been fine with my onboard one for all other games. I just basically just want this for GL quake.

[MH]

Most folks would use ProQuake online these days I think; there's a DirectX 8 version of that which should work well on your integrated.

One of the GLQuake problems I forgot to mention is that it doesn't work at all when playing online through a firewall or most broadband routers - anything that does NAT (network address translation). This is pretty much any modern internet connection. So I'd definitely not advise it as a longer term idea. This also applies to the original WinQuake, by the way.

If you do want to bite the bullet and get a dedicated 3D card I'd recommend going for a decent NVIDIA. The OpenGL support on these tends to be a lot better (and more forgiving of coder error) than anything else. Which to get depends on your PC specs, whether you have AGP or PCI express and how much you're prepared to spend.

[Phenom]

Oh, also with DirectQ, for some reason it took a second for the game to point where the mouse actually was. It was like delayed.

This is dew to your low powered integrated intel video card. Once you shell out 35-$70 for a video card that should go away! You'll also be able to make Quake look SUPER SQUISHY with higher FPS!

Right now I'm running with an outdated Nvidia Gforce 7800GT with (256mb?) ram. It can pull off anything I throw at it Quake wise with good FPS (with an exception to unnatural stuff like DP cranked to insane quality).

Basically most people who don't know about PCs but always say things like "my PC is slow opening and closing progams OR "my game runs choppy/sluggish/slow/bumpy/poor its 95% of the time the lack of video card power. Since I know your an integrated video card user my suggestion to you would be either what MH & Spirit said or throw done some cash and buy your self a good ole video card that doesn't come with a mobo

[MH]

DirectQ actually does run well on integrateds, and is capable of timedemoing at over 300 FPS on recent Intels, with in-game peaks in the 500 region. Not up to the standard of a dedicated 3D card for sure, but a lot better than GLQuake can manage.

Depending on how crappy and old the integrated is, it will - of course - run less well. But it is designed to run on integrateds and designed to solve the performance problems that people get on integrateds; that was the reason why it originally existed.

The mouse stalling bug is most likely coming from somewhere else, and setting m_directinput 0 will probably fix it.

[bta.monster]

Hi Quaker Oats! Glad DirectQ has worked for you well so far... I use it along with Darkplaces. Don't think MH had mentioned this - if you want to make it look more like winquake - try typing in your console GL_TEXTUREMODE GL_NEAREST.

I also still like the old school winquake look too... that should do the trick for you. I even use that GL_NEAREST setting with the graphics cranked on Darkplaces. Hope to see you around the servers some more!

[MH]

Hi Quaker Oats! Glad DirectQ has worked for you well so far... I use it along with Darkplaces. Don't think MH had mentioned this - if you want to make it look more like winquake - try typing in your console GL_TEXTUREMODE GL_NEAREST.

I also still like the old school winquake look too... that should do the trick for you. I even use that GL_NEAREST setting with the graphics cranked on Darkplaces. Hope to see you around the servers some more!

This is actually a good point, and applies to all hardware accelerated engines. Part of the visual difference is that texture filtering loses the grungy/pixellated look that WinQuake had.

GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_NEAREST should also work, will look slightly better, and run faster too.

[bta.monster]

This is actually a good point, and applies to all hardware accelerated engines. Part of the visual difference is that texture filtering loses the grungy/pixellated look that WinQuake had.

GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_NEAREST should also work, will look slightly better, and run faster too.

Sweet, didn't know about that one. It does look much better. GL_NEAREST sometimes looks odd with the Rygel textures in Darkplaces...

[Quaker Oats]

(ah hey phenom and monster. So this is where everyone is and I definitely will be around the servers more as soon as I get a stable client going again)

Cool cool, great info here guys, I appreciate it.

COOOOUPLE more noob questions:

1.) What's vsync? I heard that turning it off is better?

2.) What's the difference between m_directinput 0 and 1 ? Which one would I want for better performance?

3.) Any other speed or performance tricks I should know about?


YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME!

[bta.monster]

Not a problem, always glad to help out. We need as many Quakers as we can get . I'll try to answer your questions here:

1) Vsync caps your framerate to your monitor's refresh rate (I *THINK*, it may just be 60 period). Usually this is 60 frames per second. I for one never play with Vsync on in any game, it always slows my mouse movement and I can't nearly get the precision and speed that I need. Some people can't stand the "screen-tearing" issue with framerates above their monitor's refresh rate, but I barely notice it.

I'd recommend not using vsync for online play, and instead capping your FPS using "host_maxfps 200" in the console (If you're using DirectQ). Also, the command to disable Vsync in DirectQ is vid_vsync 0. Anything above 250 or so may hurt your ping and make it spike all over the place. But you can experiment to see which you like. Oh, and one more thing... host_maxfps above 72 in singleplayer games may break certain things (lifts not moving right, entities not being where they should be). So if you're going to play single player, try and remember to cap that maxfps to 72.

2) m_directinput largely depends on your mouse, drivers, etc. Sometimes no directinput causes all kinds of weird things for people (mouse lag, mouse acceleration)... So just experiment with it on and off and see which one gives you the most precise and fluid mouse control. Many people end up having to play with it on.

3) Can't think of anything speed/performance really... DirectQ should run great for you even on integrated graphics. I used to know a few picmip commands and such that made the textures really ugly looking, but did help increase FPS... back in the day when I was an HPB I'd try anything to lower my ping/get more frames.

[MH]

One speed tip for a lot of GLQuake based engines is to disable multitexturing; especially so if you're running on an integrated. This is because the way GLQuake updates dynamic lights with multitexturing is basically screwed, and does just about the worst possible thing at every opportunity (it's not as badly wrong as Quake II here though). If your framerate drops to really low every time a rocket explosion goes off or you see a flickering light you'll need this.

You'll need to edit your GLQuake (or other engine) shortcut properties and add -nomtex for this, like so:



There are a few engines that fix this and do it right (DirectQ is one) and don't need this hack. Relatively decent and relatively modern hardware shouldn't need it either.

[Quaker Oats]

Awwwwwwesome... I'm definitely not nearly as lost as I was last week, haha. And sweet cmd line thingy, I'm deff gonna try that out!

Some people can't stand the "screen-tearing" issue with framerates above their monitor's refresh rate, but I barely notice it.

OH MY GOD. IS THAT WHAT THAT IS? When I saw that, I nearly gave up because that was so ugly and distracting and made me think my comp was just a heap of junk.

So I won't get that if vsync is on?......... ehhhhhhhhh..................... might have to deal with it....