Darkplaces Ideal DM Settings?

[Baker]

Excellent. Thanks for all your help with this. I'll be documenting this and spreading the word.

[Sajt]

Glad you had success

I hope you're not still using the 2005 build though!

[Baker]

Glad you had success

I am glad as well.

Today I played 6 games with DarkPlaces. Won 5 of them, 2 of them handily, was called a bot/cheater dozens of times, entered a game real late and won anyway. In Rocket Arena, had some very solid performance.

I'm not using the 2005 build, but the latest one seems to give me gamma issues occasionally, especially if I close/reopen.

Do you have a suggestion for one of the better betas that won't have this issue but still has the "good shaft"?

(And I need to play with the settings yet a little to get it perfect, but has nothing to do with the smoothness. Those were the smoothest games I've ever played, not one hiccup ever the whole time so apparently I'm getting a more consistent frame rate than GLPro. It was like playing on a LAN or single player in the sense that I never once got any even split second hiccups, which usually happens in GLPro about 1 every 10 minutes in intense action, and even though that isn't common I *still* hate it. Never happened once in DP in an hour.)

[Sajt]

The alt-tab gamma issue has been there for a long time.

Usually I make a bind to reset the gamma when you re-enter the game. If you like a gamma of 1.5 (my preference), make a bind like so:

bind g "v_gamma 1;v_gamma 1.5"

And press G everytime you re-enter the game. That's the only solution I know. LordHavoc would know the cause of the problem in the first place, I'm sure it's due to bad windows gamma functions...

There's another alt-tab issue DarkPlaces has on windows (not sure if this also happens on the SDL build). When DP is minimized, it seems to often reopen even when you click other buttons on the taskbar (so use alt-tab instead of clicking on the taskbar). :p Have you had this problem too?

[scar3crow]

Baker - Are you finally seeing the real time light ? ; )

Glad to hear youre getting good performance out of it, though honestly I never did have those problems youve had... But Im running a gf4 instead of a gf2, so that is a different experience.

[LordHavoc]

Usually I make a bind to reset the gamma when you re-enter the game. If you like a gamma of 1.5 (my preference)

Or bind "toggle v_hwgamma" to a key, changing the v_hwgamma cvar causes the gamma to be updated.

I need to make DP wait multiple frames before trying to restore the gamma after being reactivated I guess.

[Baker]

The alt-tab gamma issue has been there for a long time.

Hmmm ... actually I don't recalling alt-tabbing out. I was playing using DP, then "quit". Downloaded some maps. Restarted DP and had the issue.

[Baker]

Or bind "toggle v_hwgamma"

Weird .. no effect. And the Aug 2005 build worked perfectly. Btw my Gamma slider bar doesn't do anything with this latest build. It say Hardware Gamma Control On" but the gamma slider is grayed out, although I can change it and it doesn't do anything.

I don't know if this only applies with my GeForce 2, but wanted to communicate that.

[LordHavoc]

I don't know if this only applies with my GeForce 2, but wanted to communicate that.

Grayed out means it doesn't do anything currently because Windows is saying it failed on the previous attempt.

If only I could reliably figure out whether Windows accepted the gamma ramps.

But the fact it refuses most gamma ramps is exceptionally annoying.

Just for your information, running with brightness or contrast modified from their defaults (0 and 1 respectively) is a slowdown if hardware gamma is disabled (DarkPlaces tries to emulate them by using extra rendering passes), and Microsoft made most gamma settings fail, so this problem is worse than just the wrong gamma.

[Baker]

Just another feedback note, in this latest beta I keep setting cl_bobmodel 0 and it doesn't save or something. (Hmmm, cl_bob seems to stay at 0, but doesn't appear to be in config.cfg)

Btw, nice orderly config.cfg output. I like that.

And I have to say, the total smoothness of online play is addictive. I don't like having any hiccups or lag during play (ever -- not even if rare) and I haven't received any in DarkPlaces ever so far -- particularly nice because I can pinpoint rocket shots with complete confidence even if it is a very complicated shot (nice!) or a very precise one that has no margin for error.

Also I have the bad habit of pressing fire at the end of a map to advance to the next one (both in single player and online) and one thing that has always annoyed me is that I find myself firing at the start of the next level when I do that in other clients, and in DarkPlaces this is not occurring.

[LordHavoc]

Just another feedback note, in this latest beta I keep setting cl_bobmodel 0 and it doesn't save or something. (Hmmm, cl_bob seems to stay at 0, but doesn't appear to be in config.cfg)

Ok I just changed it to a saved cvar.

Btw, nice orderly config.cfg output. I like that.

Side effect of the fact all cvar names are sorted in memory, which makes console tab completion look nicer and happens to also make nicer config.cfg files

And I have to say, the total smoothness of online play is addictive. I don't like having any hiccups or lag during play (ever -- not even if rare) and I haven't received any in DarkPlaces ever so far -- particularly nice because I can pinpoint rocket shots with complete confidence even if it is a very complicated shot (nice!) or a very precise one that has no margin for error.

Cool.

I was amazed when I tested DarkPlaces QW support for the first time and it was the smoothest QW I've ever seen, I remember when I was working on QuakeForge and there was discussion of how hard it was to interpolate QuakeWorld packets, but that was really just a lack of research on their part (very different design in the QW client which was not friendly to interpolation).

DarkPlaces has been designed to interpolate very well from the beginning as I want the game to always be smooth, I even fairly recently (couple weeks ago) figured out how to disable interpolation on player teleports, and fix the interpolation when the server is constantly setting view angles (such as when viewing from another player in some mods), so it plays even smoother.

[Baker]

Well, I have to say I'm very impressed with the performance.

re: Quakeworld support

I did all my testing on NQ servers, being a mostly NQ guy, but occasionally I play Quakeworld (often in Europe, heh. No real FFA QW servers in US).

You might consider adding IMPULSE 854321 (QW style) and BESTWEAPON 854321 (NQ style) support and Quakeworld loc support (ProQuake loc files are annoyingly hard to build, that's why there are only 12-15 of them, versus 175 for QW).

If those features were added, I think the acceptance rate of DP among all but the diehards would go up significantly

(QW diehard players have absolutely ridiculous FuhQuake scripts; I'm glad none of that is available in NQ.)

The smoothness is like nothing I've ever used. I used to think that the occasional, but rare, "hiccups" were due to my connection until the last day or so. DarkPlaces disproved that.

[Baker]

I tried DarkPlaces on some QW servers and then used FuhQuake and then switched back to DarkPlaces to compare and contrast.

The DarkPlaces experience was a lot nicer with the interpolation and the smoothness (which is really hard to describe) felt like my aim was more accurate and easier to do complicated shots.

I did notice at the intermission of maps, sometimes the next map was a blank screen and I had to exit DarkPlaces and start it over to connect (reconnecting didn't seem to resolve it). It did this too me twice, once the map was Aerowalk (which I knew for sure I had in my maps folder). Most of the time this didn't happen, btw.

[That being said, I don't like the QuakeWorld's prediction but it didn't bother me as much in DarkPlaces (maybe the interpolation?) and on maps I really like such as UltraV it didn't bother me at all].

[LordHavoc]

I did notice at the intermission of maps, sometimes the next map was a blank screen and I had to exit DarkPlaces and start it over to connect (reconnecting didn't seem to resolve it). It did this too me twice, once the map was Aerowalk (which I knew for sure I had in my maps folder). Most of the time this didn't happen, btw.

Perhaps it failed to load the map, or was downloading the map (if so it would display progress below the console), in either case you can probably fix it by doing r_restart, I'll have to look into this problem.

[That being said, I don't like the QuakeWorld's prediction but it didn't bother me as much in DarkPlaces (maybe the interpolation?) and on maps I really like such as UltraV it didn't bother me at all].

Prediction (cl_movement cvar) is off by default in darkplaces, and that applies to QuakeWorld games as well as NetQuake, DarkPlaces is the only engine with a smooth no-prediction experience in QuakeWorld.

Prediction also works in NetQuake but very poorly (you need to define your ping time with cl_movement_latency, and it basically doesn't work properly, twitchy due to irregular timing).

[Baker]

Prediction (cl_movement cvar) is off by default in darkplaces, and that applies to QuakeWorld games as well as NetQuake, DarkPlaces is the only engine with a smooth no-prediction experience in QuakeWorld.

I didn't know that. I suppose I'm at a disadvantage with the prediction off. Although I was doing fine

I had done experiments in the past with FuhQuake trying to play with stuff like the push latency to get the NetQuake feel, even the closest settings weren't quite NetQuake-like.

It was a very good experience, although now I think I know why a few times I got killed with rockets when I felt I should have had the shot off first.
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I've had some interesting thoughts lately, but I want to organize them and think things through. In particular, many of thoughts revolve around DarkPlaces dedicated, but I'm probably better off doing some personal testing first (probably with some mods that are the least QCCX'd, stripping out that code).