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Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 11:03 pm
by Baker
qbism wrote:Speaking as supposedly the last publicly active WinQuake developer
I've been playing around with WinQuake lately, I just don't talk about it much because I'm trying to solve inner mysteries.
qbism wrote:Normally I would want to keep fixes turned on including framerate independent physics. However, maddening issues can occur in certain maps due to variations in engine physics, so the switches are good.
How so? I ask because DirectQ has very good separation of client and server for timing. Are you referring to animation interpolation or something? [I guess I am asking is this server physics or client rendering that is messing up?]

Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Sun Aug 31, 2014 2:42 am
by qbism
Another closet WinQuake hacker? :lol:
Baker wrote:How so? I ask because DirectQ has very good separation of client and server for timing. Are you referring to animation interpolation or something? [I guess I am asking is this server physics or client rendering that is messing up?]
In Sock's map backstein.bsp for example, framerate-independent physics fix is required to hit a certain air tube target. (Or reduce gravity or increase fps.) In the reverse case, there could be old maps that require classic NQ physics, I don't know.

Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Sun Aug 31, 2014 8:06 pm
by leileilol
Still needs a lot of work though.

Explosion particles shouldn't gravity
FOV still defaults to 100
Muzzleflash dynamic light too small and it fades out
Fullbright colors shouldn't be overbright
Water turbulence and warp too wide

Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 8:29 am
by Baker
Spike wrote:fte has no support for vis patches.
I used to think external .vis and even vispatching was silly. I don't think external .vis is silly any longer, here is why:

Let's say you have someone who wants to see what the id1 maps are like vispatched (versus using r_novis 1).

What do they need to do? Answer: Find some goofy utility. Most of them are only 16 bit windows compatible and mix with some DOS window stuff that only runs in DOSBox. Well, you can't run 16-bit Windows stuff in DOS Box. In fact, you can't run 16-bit Windows stuff on Windows 7 or Windows 8.

OR

You can use an engine like Mark V (or Engoo or probably DarkPlaces too) and just throw these in quake\id1\maps folder ( http://quake-1.com/docs/utils/visfiles_ ... 1_maps.zip )

Now --- let's say you still think this is totally stupid. It doesn't change the fact that some people are going to want to do it.

Fair or not, there are plenty of people out there that think of Quake as the original levels and the Mission Packs and don't even know what a custom map is because they think of the game as what came on the CD and aren't all that interested in user-made content. And the more have the mindset of wanting to experience the original levels and know of the vispatch option for the original levels.

When they ask, either the answer can be impossibly dumb involving utilities and other such foolishness or just throwing some files in a folder.

[Then again, some of these people will play things like Shrak and stuff so maybe they have bad taste, I dunno ... ]

/One opinion, maybe even wrong. And in this case, it probably is! :D

Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 11:15 am
by Seven
Baker,

If a person wants to play Quake "as it was" on his CD on his Windows 8, then he will be helpless.
The game will not even install without some tricks. And even then you will be far away from running it.

So, if a person who wants to play his Quake from CD, he will type into google: "install Quake Win8"
And then: "run Quake Win8"

He will then most probably end up on sites like this or quakeone or func or steam.
If he ends up on quakeone, poor guy he will be bombed with bling bling stuff which is not Quake anymore.
If he ends up on func, he might find the help he wanted.
If he ends up on i3d, he will not be able to ask because of registering issues ;)

Anyhow, a person who wants to play Quake from CD needs others to help him.
Depending on which community he ends, or wich sites he visits while searching, he will also be informed about "other" things that has been developed for Quake.
He will be happy to find that there are advanced engines that run smoothly on Win8 (this seems to be the actual Windows version, as I have heard of). :)

===================

Back to topic, and comparing FTE with other engines:

I think we should always consider what a universal engine FTE is.
Almost a handful of games is running with it, that is already remarkable.
I admire Spikes efforts to create an engine that can handle all of them.

Therefore we should not judge it the way we judge engines which are made and tuned especially for 1 game.
There will always be slight bugs or issues with individual games in FTE because of that, but the overall performance and features are simply outstanding, when keeping that in mind.

I remember Spike saying many times that he has to be careful when implementing one request from an individual to keep his engine comparable to the other games with it.
Yes, FTE might have some small issues here and there, but the complete package it delivers is simply outstanding.
And Spike is working hard on killing the bugs (as long as people report them).

Thank you Spike !

Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 12:35 pm
by frag.machine
leileilol wrote:Still needs a lot of work though.

Explosion particles shouldn't gravity
FOV still defaults to 100
Muzzleflash dynamic light too small and it fades out
Fullbright colors shouldn't be overbright
Water turbulence and warp too wide
I suspect this vanilla mode is more a curiosity and not a priority for Spike, and tbh it shouldn't be. I'd rather see him improving and evolving the parts of the engine that are unique like CSQC. There is already a number of engines where fidelity to the original down to the ugliest detail is the main objective.

Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 4:33 pm
by goldenboy
It's still good that these things were reported. :)

FTE currently has less issues than most people seem to think... I know because I test it extensively, from vanilla Quake to indie development. As for bugs, every software has bugs.

I believe the vanilla mode is great for people who want their mod to look faithful but might also benefit from an engine extension or two that e.g. Quakespasm might not provide. I'm contemplating to use it for "Rune of Earth Magic" now instead of the RMQ engine. There have been uptake issues with faithful gamers and DP/FTE in the past, which might now lessen (since this really looks and feels "vanilla" and it's just a single preset.)

Or for just playing Quake, no fuss no muss. It's great for that. :wink:
If he ends up on quakeone, poor guy he will be bombed with bling bling stuff which is not Quake anymore.
Oh come on. That's cliche. It's not nearly as bad. :wink:

Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 6:37 pm
by leileilol
Seven wrote:Anyhow, a person who wants to play Quake from CD needs others to help him.
Depends on which CD. Since Activision it's been a Win32 installer which still functions on 7 x64 with all of the installed files exposed so it could be directly copied as well. Anything before will have to be done through DOSBox and in that case it couldn't be an easier CD-based game to install and play.


The only other way to resolve this issue is the stupid idea of source ports packed with data installers (that seek for the PAK0/PAK1 off your disc), because source ports are often seen as brands of eyecandy that magnet the curious newbie...

Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 6:43 pm
by goldenboy
I have been thinking recently that a definitive "Steam Quake HOWTO" is missing on all 3 major community sites. This is a situation that could be improved.

Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 7:20 pm
by Baker
The Steam forum has that kind of information there.

Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 8:01 pm
by qbism
Is 'Vanilla Option' is one big 'take-it-or-leave-it' setting? Hopefully 'vanilla gameplay' and 'vanilla graphics' are separate mix-and-match issues, all toggled to some level of fine control with cvars. So having crunchy graphics is not contrary to advanced csqc.

Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 12:59 am
by Spike
frag.machine wrote:I suspect this vanilla mode is more a curiosity and not a priority for Spike, and tbh it shouldn't be. I'd rather see him improving and evolving the parts of the engine that are unique like CSQC. There is already a number of engines where fidelity to the original down to the ugliest detail is the main objective.
tbh, FTE's vanilla preset is somewhat of a piss-take of those engines. For instance, I got Spirit to test it and he complained that quad didn't glow blue. Quad *NEVER* glowed blue in NQ (it does in QW, but QW has an actual EF_BLUE thing). Now, I'll admit that fte's dlights are not white like vanilla's instead taking their colour from glquake's flashblend, but its the little things like this which stick a finger up at the purists (in a snickery kind of way rather than anything else).
Really though, its more of a question of how vanillaery it needs to look for people to accept it (I refuse to disable mdl lerping in this preset) in preference to other engines.
The real issue is when people reject it out of hand simply because it supports replacement textures... Maybe I'm just overestimating the number of people in the community that would refuse to play a mod because it needs an engine that they're not familiar with.

@leileilol
Explosion particles *should* use gravity... just by 1/10th of what they do in fte right now. will fix.
The fov thing was kinda to make a point. Imho my point is proven now so I can revert it. This was always meant to be a temporary thing which is why it didn't make it into the preset.
I'm not sure what to do with dlights. FTE's rockets etc are a bit orange, which as noted already is too non-vanilla for my liking (same colour as gl flashblends, but wrong when its lighting stuff up). The dlights fading out is along the same vein as model interpolation, and I'm unsure how vanilla-like it really should be. Really all of these things need to move to the particle/effects system, the problem is what happens when multiple effects are used on a single entity.
Fullbrights overbrighting is problematic with rtlights. I could indeed use a different blend inside the glsl, but I'd need to special-case it to avoid alphaless lumas destroying everything, which isn't a nice thing. perhaps the solution here is to clear the base texture to black instead?
by water turbulence, I assume you mean the underwater one instead of the 'turb' textures? water surfaces should be close enough already. the underwater warp effect isn't resolution dependant (and I suspect gets stretched slightly with widescreen aspects...). I'm not convinced that its a good thing to replicate software rendering's issues, so I'm heistant to make any changes here, but I agree that its not vanilla how it is.

@baker
I'm not saying I don't see the point, only that I've not had a need so far.
Thanks for the link, I'll probably mess about with that at some point.

@seven+baker
http://triptohell.info/moodles/web/ftewebgl.html - still needs drag and drop for adding pak1.pak I suppose. :P
that's my solution to windows rt at least... disturbingly its easier to target webgl+ie than it is winrt (apart from the whole javascript thing).
apparently I still need to work on touch input events for it to be usable in phone browsers, but at least the rest appears to work.
it would be nice to get drag+drop working to install mods, but gamedirs and conflicts gets in the way of that.
might be nice to get the engine to automatically decompress from the cd if it can find that without a prior installation. different versions will probably just mess everything up.

@qbism
they're just predefined values for a number of cvars (37 different cvars, apparently), and not a single setting. use sv_nqplayerphysics 1 if you want nq physics with the other presets, the others are just graphics settings (excluding the cl_demoreel cvar, but hey, that's irrelevent once you start a game).
total conversions are generally expected to provide their own menus+default.cfg, which allows them to provide their own custom presets instead (or just enforce a single default, if desired).

Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 1:52 am
by Baker
Spike wrote:For instance, I got Spirit to test it and he complained that quad didn't glow blue. Quad *NEVER* glowed blue in NQ (it does in QW, but QW has an actual EF_BLUE thing).
Well, hopefully this experience has helped Spirit understand single player better.

At least one can hope. :D

Perhaps one day, with enough Quake experience, he will ...

Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 8:06 am
by Spirit
It's a conspiracy, I am sure of it!

Let's not get into a "oh those faithful purists are hypocrites" flame, it should be obvious that everyone has their little pet peeves of what they consider important and what not. And that many people have misconceptions, like smooth Shambler skin or eye-less fiends. My own Quake remake would have a light blue tint for Quad because obviously that's what's right! I also can't stand non-interpolated monster animations and I think the original explosions look super silly. :P

I wonder how many people would have thought that Quad adds blue tint though. Maybe a color illusion? Or from more Quads on the blue levels?

Re: FTE Vanilla Option

Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 9:06 am
by goldenboy
I'm actually guilty of the same thing (thinking that the quad glowed purple.) This is probably due to either map textures or playing with engines that support EF_BLUE.

Once you become aware of what vanilla Quake really looks like, some of those un-faithful anti-Quake improvements start looking pretty attractive. :wink:

The funny thing is that e.g. Fitzquake-based engines (what's typically termed faithful) look pretty different from software Quake. :lol: