In the Shadows

[sock]

@R00K, wow nice! it works! I played through the start map and the blood on the floor is priceless, especially when the gibs fly around the room. I did not realize how many effects you have added to all of the projectiles.

Have you considered merging the flame sprite effect with the model? Like have the flame model but layer the glow effect at the center? It feels very bright, is there any entities parameters I could add to tweak the effect? Maybe add some variety to the effect? use less/more sprite overlays so if you see many torches in a room they look slightly different.

The stuff that is missing (teleporters and grates) are func_walls with skip textures on them. I use a compile utility to shift the skip texture surfaces to another part of the BSP. Maybe the entity surfaces are defined weird because of this?

I used the following command line to get it working:
-game shadows -mem 128
You don't need the texture filter command, the MOD forces the filtering when the maps loads or the amulet is enabled/disabled.

@Seven! Wow glad to see you comment, I was wondering if you had a chance to try this MOD yet? Did you try it with Darkplaces? Try out the stealth mode? Was there anything you thought could be changed?

many engine devs modify their engines to be able to support it.

The list of engines that support ITS is growing! I have been busy talking to a lot of coders to iron out any bugs. I plan to release a list of all engines that support the MOD in the next couple of weeks, so anyone wanting to try the MOD can find an engine that will suit their tastes.

It is also very good and important that the old guru�s of Quake (like Necros and friends) support you and your mod, which makes it even more beautiful.

Could not agree more, this MOD would never have got off the ground if necros, preach and negke had not helped. The Quake source maybe ancient by todays game standards but it still has a lot of quirks about it which does take time to discover. Luckily I knew people who could help.

[Spike]

@sock
you can get it to work in fte with these two cvars:
pr_maxedicts 32000; debug_pext_replacementdeltas 1

strictly speaking, the second isn't required, but you'll get invisible ents without it - fte's default network protocol is limited to only 2k ents. however, the updated network protocol isn't quite finalised yet so its disabled by default. Still need to ensure that its a proper superset for the things that matter.

[R00k]

@sock
well i didnt mean to have decals enabled though they are by default
nor the enhanced particles, but it wouldnt be so out of place IF the particles were pixelated. some of the gfx at load time like the menu do not remip aftr the texture loads that and im not overly happy now with the cubic lightmaps either
still need to tweak things to have it 'shadows' ready out of the box
maybe ill add a '-its' command line parm or something

[sock]

@sock
you can get it to work in fte with these two cvars:
pr_maxedicts 32000; debug_pext_replacementdeltas 1

I downloaded the win32bit experimental version first because I thought it might have some extra stuff that would be cool to see. I love the extra stuff you have added to the video menu, for some reason it did not read my Quake config file (in same directory as exe) and I had to redefine all my keys again. It seems to be doing the win thing of using the correct game directories (under profile) which caught me by surprise. (most engines just use the quake directory) This was especially confusing because I could not find the screenshot files initially.

For some reason all of the textures are blue!?! (screenshot below)


My command line is as follows:
-game shadows -pr_maxedicts 32000

I could not find any memory command, I tried helpsize and host_mem_size and nothing came up. I really love the auto complete on console commands, about time someone added that to a custom quake engine.

I downloaded the stable win32 client build and the textures are still blue (screenshot above) and I am not sure what else to do?
I ran through the first level (start.bsp) and all of the animations seem to play slow, it looks like every frame has a delay, it is obvious on anything that animates.

Any thoughts on what to do?

[sock]

@sock
well i didnt mean to have decals enabled though they are by default nor the enhanced particles, but it wouldnt be so out of place IF the particles were pixelated. some of the gfx at load time like the menu do not remip aftr the texture loads that and im not overly happy now with the cubic lightmaps either still need to tweak things to have it 'shadows' ready out of the box maybe ill add a '-its' command line parm or something

I liked the blood trails everywhere and it certainly would be better if they were pixelated like the rest of the environment. The torches being replaced with the glowing flame sprites is very bright, it certainly would be awesome if it combines with the torch model because then it looks like the glow is coming from something. At the moment it is just a glow floating in mid air.

For some reason the lighting has sharp edges and looks odd underneath torches. I have used overbright on most of the lightmaps in order to get a better light range around torches so that they feel white hot.

Personally I would prefer if you just give me a set of command line parameters rather than a special 'its' command line. I can certainly give people using Qrack with ITS certain instructions which is something I want to do when I put together a list of all engines I know work with ITS.

Let me know if you have a new version and I can do some more tests.

[sock]

@sock
you can get it to work in fte ...

It seems the experimental version of FTE left config files in my windows game directory (annoying location for files) and once I deleted the directory and let FTE re-create everything from scratch it worked! I love what you have done with the lighting and the fog is really moody, visually the engine is gorgeous!



I updated my command line as follows:
"C:\Games\Quake I\fteglqw.exe" -game shadows +set pr_maxedicts 8192 +set debug_pext_replacementdeltas 1

For some reason the gun and part of the portal at the beginning of the map flicker not sure why. I walk across the room, pick up the silver key and open the door. Then the game crashes.



Here is the condump and crash file the engine leaves in the windows game directory.

www.simonoc.com/files/misc/its_fte_condump1.zip

I assume I need to tweak another console parameter but not sure which one, any clues what the crash is about and can it be fixed?

[Spike]

NQWriteByte: bad protocol 0
NQWriteByte: bad protocol 0

those two messages are the real issue. You're using some writebytes/etc that it somehow doesn't recognise.
background: FTE is actually a quakeworld engine with a quakeworld network protocol. It runs NQ mods by reading all the NQ-specific network protocols that the mod attempts to send to the client and rewrites the info in such a way that the client can actually make sense of. For the most part its simply a translation layer (like removing one of the bytes on svc_cdtrack), thus not all svcs are actually implemented.
'bad protocol 0' can be triggered by bytes, chars, shorts, or longs where the first byte of the message is 0.
I have no idea how you're getting that result. I didn't see it with svn builds at any point.

v1.0 of fte is pretty old now (plus debug_pext_replacementdeltas exists only in svn builds), so really you should just use the svn builds for it.

I tried to figure out what the packet dump actually contained, and it made no sense.
Firstly, bytes 16-32 are not shown readibly. One of them contains a \r character and that messed things up. The payload starts at byte 10, and appears to be an 'svc_disconnect' command... followed by 3 0 bytes.
Set cl_shownet 2 (in any engine) to debug such issues in detail, which gets the engine to show you which svcs it sees and where.
But like I say, might as well just ignore old versions (like v1.0).

[sock]

like I say, might as well just ignore old versions (like v1.0).

I went to the FTE site and there are two tabs for download, stable (fte v1.0) and experimental (svn). I originally downloaded the SVN version (see my previous thread, page 14) because I assumed it would be latest version. This version has no texture detail. (see screenshot below)

For some reason all of the textures are blue!?! (screenshot below)


I don't get the strange crash with V1.0 (stable) but all of the animated entities have a strange slow down moving between frames. Are you doing something to the animations frames? Are they being played at full speed? or are you adding delays or blend frames?

Can you play the ITS mod with the latest version (win32) of your engine?

[Spike]

ah, sorry didn't notice your earlier post.

lightmap-only walls looks like r_drawflat is set. Use a different 'fps_preset' option. You probably want the middle one.
r_drawflat uses r_wallcolor and r_floorcolor cvars for the colours of the respective surfaces. I *think* v1 wrongly had the same default value for both types of surfaces. Sadly saved defaults linger in configs (which is why that pext cvar has a debug_ infront of it).

regarding the animation: AHA! I'M NOT IMAGINING IT!... Think I found it, there's an optimisation causing it to think the entity is new when a different entity is removed or added or something blatently obvious with that many particles, which means the engine has to guess its animation rate again etc. There we go, smoother, thanks.

Small note: you can use the path command to see the exact paths any quake engine is using, plus the ordering of pak files etc.
Another fun fte command is 'flocate $FOO', which shows which pak/path the file is in. That one can be handy.
You can use -nohome in both fte and dp to disable the homedir stuff, if that helps any.
Also, fte prints out the system path when you take screenshots (and a couple of other things), might require an experimental build. You can right-click-select to copy text into the windows clipboard if you want to enter it into explorer etc quickly.

fte uses a stupidly large hunk size by default (at least in windows). Its required for certain maps... I would have rewritten most of that by now if the model code didn't expect the hunk functions to allocate sequentially *sigh*. All things in time. Either way, technically its -mem MB if you want to be explicit, but there's no real need to do so in windows builds.

I just noticed that the build bot has stopped again, so those svn builds are a few revisions old (10 or so). Revision 4176 is current, with that interpolation fix.
Gonna try and do a manual build. This may take a while.

[sock]

Testing with SVN build 4177 (latest download from website)
* When selecting menu, player camera view is upside down
* Every time the engine starts asks for profile type
* No settings (especially key binds) are saving, unless forced from the menu
* Textures are working now (no lightmap only view)
* Weapon and various entities flicker at the start of the map
* Torches are rotating wrong (lerp problems)
* AI entities are linear texture filtering when the world is nearest
* Switching 2D filter mode to nearest fixes AI entities but breaks lighting
* Changing 'Disable model lerp' to on fixes the torches rotating wrong but then all entities animate really slow (eg books opening)

command line I used:
"C:\Games\Quake I\fteglqw.exe" -game shadows +set pr_maxedicts 8192 +set debug_pext_replacementdeltas 1

I think you need to create a snapshot build which is not labelled experimental, because the stable build (v1.0) does not work properly.

[Spike]

the upside down menu is just some missing glsl, an easy fix.
flickering is due to visedicts limit extensions. I'll tweak it to be more preemtive.
the torches rotating is technically correct in that its fully interpolated even when switching between different parts of different framegroups. the torch models rotate by 90 degrees during their animation thus snap back when the animation loops. so far I've considered it a vanilla content bug, as I really don't have a decent solution other than to edit the model itself (either on disk or in code). I'll add a cvar (r_noframegrouplerp) to disable interpolation within framegroups, but that's not the best result.
settings not saving is because you're meant to use the menu to quit if you actually want to save anything (the menu prompts). if you use the console to quit then you're expected to also be willing to use cfg_save or something after making the changes you want. And I suspect the quit console command needs to always prompt like the menu does.
If you have a lot of options, you need those options in the menu. If you have options in the menu then they need to be saved at the same time the other settings are saved. If you have a lot of options then its really easy to change something, forget what you saved, and have to reset absolutely everything in order to recover from it, hence the explicit-config-saves-only stance (consistant with other qw engines).
The quit command doesn't prompt because most people who use the console to quit will want to quit quickly without a prompt. Which is annoying.
That said, changing binds without changing any cvars doesn't trigger the 'do you want to save settings' prompt, which is an oversight that I had not noticed, thanks for that one.
the non-nearest filtering is a weird one. works on md3s but not mdls, so I'm not sure what's going on there. 2d should be _just_ 2d, not skins+lightmaps...

Edit: Is it a known issue for ITS vanilla weapons to not animate properly, or is that my fault? They only animate for as long as attack is held.
Axe ng sng lg work properly. sg ssg gl rl don't.
the rl animation goes out of sync with the actual firing.

[sock]

@spike, I have seen the torches do weird rotation in many mods, I am going to replace them with a proper rotating model. I assumed they were a standard thing because of the ID/Fitz setup but that is not the case.
Don't worry about the quit/no save console command, it is exactly right. I was surprised when I changed so much on the menu that it did not save, especially the key binds. Now I know how to save it does not matter.
The ITS weapons have changed so that when you run out of ammo they do not auto switch to higher weapons like LG. The SG/SSG/GL/RL use a different routine now and that is probably why they go out of animation sync. I will have a look at making sure the weapon animations reset.
At MODdb I get people asking for a UNIX engine that can run ITS, does the FTE unix client work with ITS ok? I don't have UNIX so I cannot test to find out.

[Spike]

fte should run on linux the same as it does on windows. with a couple of exceptions.
1: it generally needs -mem 128 or something if you want to match windows.
2: x11, fullscreen modes, and task switching are a real pain, but should otherwise work.
I cannot offer a macosx port at this time, as I don't have one to test/debug/compile on.

[R00k]

[sock]

@r00K, wow that is awesome! At first I was looking at the screenshot wondering why the lighting looked so bright and flat. Then I looked at the shadows under the torch and thought they need to be smooth and finally it hit me the torches have an awesome sprite on them! This is something I would have loved to do with Fitz, if the damn sprites were not so large! Now that looks a million times better than just the glowing sprite ball.

@spike, cool I will add this to my engine page. Will you be replacing the stable build download with a newer version? Most people will not download an experimental build and the 'stable' build does not work with ITS mod. I also have a mac if you want someone to do testing but I have no idea how to get games working on a mac!