RiftQuake

[Dutch]

have to say i agree with seven about the ammo-boxes.

Yeah you guys are right. I've decided to offer different skins and code some spawnflags for setting those skins. I'm really partial to the way it looks now, and it might be fitting for a clean base level. But in a hellish level where shit's going down, it definitely needs a darker contrast and --of course-- blood stains. I'm kind of ashamed I didn't add any to begin with, gore seems to be my trademark now

I'll let mappers decide if they want clean or filthy items based on the theme of their maps. I'm going to do this for all items. I'm working on the rotten health box now. I also plan to add small health packs that give 5 health each, and possibly armor shards like in q2.

Today, however, all I accomplished was finding and fixing bugs that started popping up with the FrikBots on the vanilla engine. A little modification within the bot QC to address the new RiftQuake player models was the culprit. Figured it out after hours of trial and error. The biggest lesson I've learned so far is don't test your mods with enhanced engines if you want faithful engines to handle it too.

I have a question for Seven or Spike or someone who knows QC much better than me. I successfully coded 2 new commands for the Deathmatch side of the mod: "weapon" (<= 0 spawns player with Shotgun, > 0 spawns with Assault Rifle) and "switch" (<=0 allows classic Quake weapon switching when picking up a 'better' weapon, > 0 disables this entirely). Having only focused on DarkPlaces up until recently, I thought nothing of creating the new cvars through the engine. However, as I found out today, this is a DP feature. As far as I can tell, you cannot create custom cvars in vanilla engines such as QuakeSpasm. I can't use the "saved" or "scratch" cvars, as FrikaC's code uses all of these for the FrikBots.

So my question is this: Is there a way I'm not aware of to set new cvars in faithful engines, or is this handled exclusively in the engine's source code? If not, is there a way I can implement these with Impulse commands? (these commands need to be toggled on or off, and Impulse commands only fire once).

Sorry to sound like rookie, but...I am And I've been banging my head against the wall here. Any advice would be great.

[Spike]

no.
either the engine supports the 'set' command as an extension, or you're screwed (this is the most portable cvar creation extension).

quakeworld supports localinfo which can be used as an alternative, but vanilla NQ doesn't provide anything useful like that.
you might be able to 'steal' a cvar from the engine, like one that is always going to be 'true' in your mod and define 2 to enable some mod feature. just add 1 to ensure that its never 0 or so, or use a bitmask with 1 always set. the engine does have a few cvars that are always checked if (foo) so you can get away with that.

you can repurpose registered, skill, temp1, noexit, nomonsters, gamecfg, savedgamecfg, scratch1-4, saved1-4, samelevel, fraglimit, timelimit.
you might also be able to use deathmatch, coop, teamplay, pausable, com_port, com_irq, com_baud, com_modem, modem_dialtype, modem_clear, modem_init, modem_hangup.
of course, documentation is a real fecking pain.

[Dutch]

Thanks for the response Spike.

I can easily combine the two commands into one cvar using combinations (shotgun/switch, shotgun/no switch....etc.). And so far I've been nothing short of OCD meticulous in drafting my readme file, so documentation isn't going to be a real problem. People will just need to actually read lol.

So it sounds like I have 2 options: specialize commands for enhanced engines with the set command, or go the hack route and repurpose the registered command, and alias its value options to give it a name of sorts. I'll probably repurpose in order to maintain cross-engine compatibility. That's kind of my goal now. Thanks man.

EDIT: Badass. I incorporated the spawn weapon and weapon switch command into a single "weapon_(option)" command, where option is 1 of 4 acronyms (like "weapon_rn" for Rifle, No switch). These 4 commands are aliased to different values of the "temp1" cvar, which was only called for randomizing player death animations (I simply overwrote this with a random() function call to avoid issues).

I used the exact same method for a "gibs_(#)" command, where # is 0 through 4 and will change gib behavior to allow players to adjust the entity load of gibs given their engine of choice (for example, "gibs_4" removes ALL gibs upon impact with the game world, and "gibs_0" maintains monster-specific gibs but removes non-specific gibs after about a minute). Players who like enhanced engines can crank the gibbing entity count up, players who prefer vanilla engines can remove them extremely quickly. This preserves the gore but allows players to adjust entity load. This is aliased to the "nomonsters" cvar, which was never used anyway.

Whew. That took some figuring out

[Dutch]

Made a couple new skins for the health box. Is this a little more along the lines of what y'all are looking for?

[Sza]

Nice could be very useful for MP. Different skins is a very good idea!

[Seven]

Hello Dutch,

There is one thing that I have learned: You can never make everybody satiesfied
Due to the (many times very) different personal likings of players, you make yourself white hairs and headache in trying to satisfy everybody.
Your code will also get more complex due to different cvar settings and their impact.
It reminds me a little bit of the SMC.

But it is of course honorable when you are giving different possibilities. Be careful though, just as you mentioned it yourself, that people tend to 'not reading readme�s'. That seems to be the nature of people:
- download stuff
- extract it into quake
- start it (as they are used to)
- doesnt work
- throw it away and complaining: its 'bugged'

[talisa]

that looks much better!
now they fit a lot more into the world of quake, now they look more dark and gritty

[Dutch]

Hello Dutch,

There is one thing that I have learned: You can never make everybody satiesfied
Due to the (many times very) different personal likings of players, you make yourself white hairs and headache in trying to satisfy everybody.
Your code will also get more complex due to different cvar settings and their impact.
It reminds me a little bit of the SMC.

But it is of course honorable when you are giving different possibilities. Be careful though, just as you mentioned it yourself, that people tend to 'not reading readme�s'. That seems to be the nature of people:
- download stuff
- extract it into quake
- start it (as they are used to)
- doesnt work
- throw it away and complaining: its 'bugged'

Yeah I know what you mean lol. I thought about people not reading the readme, so I tried to default the settings. Fortunately, no cvars I've created are critical to the game, they just add minor conveniences for people who will take the mod a little more seriously than 'just giving it a shot.'

Thanks talisa. Each item has its own model, so changing the skins shouldn't confuse anyone hopefully.

And thanks Sza!

[vegetous]

Made a couple new skins for the health box. Is this a little more along the lines of what y'all are looking for?

Oh, that's sweet!!!

[MadGypsy]

I'm not a fan of these health boxes. Both versions look crazy to me. I mean that with all due respect and in the spirit of telling the truth. I DO like the concept of only the red lights being seen in the dark though.

It's easy to make something with little or no comparison and think the work is good. This happened to me with my original Bob head. For like two days I was stoked about how it looked. Then I really started comparing it to things and I realized it was garbage.

I'm not saying these health boxes are garbage, I just don't think they are very good and judging by examples of your earlier work, I think you could do a lot better.

[Dutch]

@vegetous Thanks man! I'm going to try to polish them some more, they don't sit quite right with me.

@Gypsy I admire your honesty. They've been kind of bugging me the last couple days like your Bob model. I kept looking at the picture trying to convince myself I was satisfied, but they are missing something.

Things I like: Multiple skins, fullbright lines, overall shape of the box.

Don't like: The skins themselves and the exaggerated size of the health cross.

I don't want the poly count to be too high. I'm working on another box right now for the 15 health box. Let me modify this one and finish the other one then give me your opinion again.

In the meantime, tell me exactly what you don't like about this box. I need some feedback.

Then I really started comparing it to things and I realized it was garbage.

This is exactly how I started feeling about my weapons. I was damn pleased with them when I first made them in qME. Now I flat-ass know I can improve them significantly in Blender, which is what I'm going to do.

[MadGypsy]

I do and don't like the exact same things you do and don't like about them. I mean exact too. What you said nailed it.

Ooppee (LambentHammerBurst) made some remakes a few years ago that were very good. Maybe you could use those or borrow from them inspirationally.

http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-mod...html#post83766

Seven also did the same thing (made boxes)

http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-mod...html#post83051


I think where your boxes lose track is

a) they are just too simple looking
b) They don't have the toughness of Quake
c) The texture is just "textures" assigned to plane segments. Bboxes are textured more with images. For instance you used "Bloody White" but These boxes use more like "Side Of Box"

Note: I knew you were going to start questioning your box models. I knew it cause you are good and they are not (well, not for Quake). That's why I waited a couple/few days before leaving a reply. I wanted you to already be rethinking them before you met an honest/considered post that agrees.

I'll teach you a trick that is usually true

1) notice that almost no one commented on your boxes. You can almost assure yourself that this is because people didn't like them
2) Look at the replies after the "fix"

"Nice"
"that looks much better"

Notice that no one said something like "These are better than the originals" or "Holy crap, these are amazing!". In my experience, this place is like driving at night. You don't look for headlights, you look for the lack of them. You saw 3 headlights in this thread regarding your boxes, now go to the bottom of the page and look at "currently active users viewing this thread" and see how many people are on the road. Of course, I mean you should do that after a post.

There is another thing to consider but only time will give you the right answers. WHO is telling you your stuff is good? Some people here think that every damn thing that is made is "good". Others here think that a certain level is good but that level might still not be the one you want to be on.

I could give a recent example. A handful of people thought my first Bob head was pretty good (I was one of them, lol), but when I changed the head entirely TeaMonster showed up and told me it was excellent (for second version). TeaMonster is a bad-ass modeller, for him to tell me that, is identical to a pro telling me I'm on the right track. It's the equivalent of golden_boy telling you your map rules or Spike telling you you are a talented programmer.

I'm not saying that if someone isn't one of these people that their opinion doesn't matter. I'm simply saying that you should be trying to get some of these pros to give you criticism. The thing is, no criticism is probably bad criticism, to some degree. Especially if your thread is really popular.

golden_boy may be the exception. I've seen him tell people "XYZ about your map isn't very good." but the rest of these guys tend to reserve comments for when they have something positive to say. You can always count on me to lay out my opinion flat out. You can also count on me to do more than just look at a picture for 2 seconds and issue an opinion. I will stare at your work and try to find something wrong/weird with it.

I read read_me's too

[Dutch]

@gypsy That's a lot of good info, thanks man. I don't get offended by criticism so lay it on thick, I will extend the same courtesy. That is, after all, what makes me better at whatever I do, be it welding or Quake modding. I was going to re-model that health box yesterday but I had to fall back and regroup on that, and start coming up with a better idea. Also on my to do list is get Radiant up and running with your gamepack. Sorry I haven't done so already, but I want to make sure I can sit down and really invest some time into it and not just piss around for an hour here and there. So I jumped back to some quick QuakeC programming last night. I completely overhauled Chthon. Here's a quick video:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAT0hO8lOI4]RiftQuake Chthon - YouTube[/ame]

Still a couple things I might polish up, but so far I'm pleased. Maybe add one or two more pain animations and see if I can't smooth out the exploding death at the end.

Some info on his new behavior:

*Normal weapons hurt him.
*He has 10,000 health.
*Lightning pylons still do significant damage to him. On Easy and Normal, it still takes only one electrocution. On Hard it takes 3, and on Nightmare it takes 5.
*Increased velocity on fireballs.
*2 takedamage skins that depict glowing fissures cracking his skin.
*Pain animation. There is an incredibly small chance small weapons or explosives will cause the animation, but a shot from the Scout Rifle ensures an animation as a strategy to buy players time.
*Partial gib animation, regardless of electrocution or normal weapons death (he explodes from the inside).
*Exploding effect before gib. I wrote up a repeating randomized explosion function for this.

This was filmed on QuakeSpasm.

EDIT: Upon taking a break and watching it again, I definitely need to smooth out the exploding death. I need to spawn the explosions separate from Chthon, so the think function doesn't delay the next animation frame.

EDIT2: And it looks funky how his arm just disappears. This isn't as noticeable on smaller monsters. I'll need to create a gibbed arm and spawn it at the un-gibbed arm's current location. Also, I'm going to incorporate the gibbed head into the model death scene. It looks weird as a free-moving gib, and it disappears if partly submerged in lava because it doesn't have it's own ThrowGib function to set size.

[talisa]

looks pretty cool, i like it

but as you said yourself, it really needs an arm-gib cuz it seems weird that the arm just dissapears

[MadGypsy]

I like it! I always hated how all Quakes bosses are "puzzle enemies" and generally the puzzle is stupid.