Restore the vanilla Quake startdemos functionality. 

You might already know this, but you can get the functionality by adding the commandline argument -fitz when starting QS. 

That does muck with a few other minor things tho. 

Yup, one of the more noticeable ones is by default QS's tab-menu status bar has kills, secrets, and skill level, while -fitz reverts it to kills, secrets, and time elapsed. 

What are the other effects, exactly? 

Ooh what other scary effects are there? 

Going off memory here, because the readme only includes "o To disable some changes, use "quakespasm -fitz" which is less than helpful for finding exact changes:

-QS by default drops the player straight to the console screen with a new grey background, -fitz enables the old id background and demo reel (vanilla Quake behavior)
-Status bar info changed (mentioned previously)
--fitz re-enables the 'Press Y to quit' prompt, while QS will otherwise let you immediately exit. Note it's just a plain 'QuakeSpasm 0.9.whatever by <author list>' message even with -fitz enabled, not a full credits list with 'press Y to quit' all the way at the bottom like WinQuake, or the various Doom-style insulting quit messages ("Are you gonna quit this game just like everything else?") of DOS Quake.
-Possibly changes updated entities, although this one I'm not sure of; Quakespasm's own .pak file still includes .ent files for five maps, but I don't know what they change offhand and it's not listed in the readme. QS does include an external_ents cvar for loading of external entity files, but it's set to 1 by default with and without -fitz. I also thought one of the changed entities was E1M1 to get rid of the obvious Z-fighting on the lift for the quad secret (by moving the lift down slightly, as original Quake always drew world brushes in front of brush entities so there was no Z-fighting there), but that's not included so maybe I imagined it?

Also of note is that the console background is in the .pak where it should be, but the HUD layout itself (the time/skill switch up) is apparently hard-coded. 

Who is the QS curator anyways? I get the impression it's a community effort. 

Judging by the source code, -fitz prevents loading of the whole quakespasm.pak, which includes alternative default keybinds, conback picture and ent files.

Speaking of features, it would be cool to refactor the menu in such a fashion that menu controls could be anything else than arrows. But damn, this looks like a lot of manual labor. What are the chances of breaking something important in case of menu controls altering, I wonder. 

I basically always run in -fitz mode? 

No, because there are hard-coded behaviours in the engine that don't depend on content. 

Going through the source code, the exact and only differences -fitz applies are:

- Don't load the custom quakespasm.pak
- Run the normal demo loop (QS otherwise goes straight to the menus at startup).
- Pop up the Quit prompt (QS otherwise just quits immediately).
- Revert some changes to the solo scoreboard layout.

If you delete the quakespasm.pak you'll get the first of these; you will not get the others so you will not be always running in -fitz mode just by doing this.

It's also the case that future revisions of QS may add more.

Don't let this become one of those stupid items of "Quake lore" where the entire Quake community becomes religiously convinced of something that's actually flat-out wrong. 

startdemos is called by quake.rc. If QS has its own .pak to overwrite settings, it can ignore startdemos by simply omitting it from quake.rc. Does QS actually ignore startdemos in the engine itself? 

Hardcoded in the engine 

Does QS actually ignore startdemos in the engine itself?
Yeah, QS disables the "startdemos" command, unless -fitz is used.

MarkV's approach seems better to me; it has an archived host_startdemos cvar default to 1, if you want to disable startdemos for all mods you can add "host_startdemos 0" to your id1/autoexec.cfg or launch with +host_startdemos 0. 

Not sure if this is solely related to QuakeSpasm, due to it being the only port I use, but there are some bugs when playing Quoth, such as the Trinity/Reflection flashblends not getting cleared after loading a quicksave or the view offsets and roll being misaligned when quickloading during an earthquake effect until either restarting the engine or letting the effect play out in its entirety. Also, is it intentional that monsters aren't interpolated when they are on a moving platform, or is this not implemented yet? Last thing of note is that the "give a(rmor) x" command is bugged in QS and Mark V when playing with Dissolution of Eternity. The amount entered is properly set, but the armor icon doesn't update and for some reason it makes you able to fire lava nails without having the SNG. 

I just downloaded 0.93.0 after using 0.92.1 for a while without any issues and my mouse is skipping around a lot. I'll be looking straight ahead when suddenly I'll do an instant 180 and be looking behind me. Sometimes I end up looking at the floor or any other random direction, and it often leads to blowing myself up when using an explosive weapon.

Apparently I seem to be the only person experiencing this but after doing two fresh installs, I can't seem to get rid of the problem. The only resolution is to continue using 0.92.1, but any help or suggestions would be appreciated. 

Do you experience this on both the SDL 2 and the SDL 1.2 .exe? 

A Windows 10 update broke that. The SDL2 version should still work though. 

@Poorchop
Funnily enough, I get the same mouse problems with Doom 64 EX, which also uses SDL 1.2, but not with Quakespasm SDL 1.2.

@Kinn
Sorry for getting off-topic, but ironically, regarding Doom 64 EX, there is a Windows 10 fix for the mouse issues, but I have Windows 7 and mouse issues anyway. The fix doesn't work for me either. 

Also, is it intentional that monsters aren't interpolated when they are on a moving platform, or is this not implemented yet?

This bug existed in Fitzquake as well, I never could figure out why.

Also falling scrags in demo1.dem seem to not interpolate their fall. 

Last thing of note is that the "give a(rmor) x" command is bugged in QS and Mark V when playing with Dissolution of Eternity. The amount entered is properly set, but the armor icon doesn't update and for some reason it makes you able to fire lava nails without having the SNG.

This command doesn't exist in the original Quake engine and the bug is inherited from FitzQuake. The Rogue/DoE mission pack uses different defines for armour, and the original defines are instead used for some weapons.

In your specific case, the original IT_ARMOR1 define has a value of 8192; in the Rogue mod that's actually RIT_LAVA_SUPER_NAILGUN, so hence the behaviour you see.

Engines implementing a "give a" command should test for "if (rogue)" and use RIT_ARMOR1, RIT_ARMOR2 and RIT_ARMOR3 instead of IT_ARMOR1, IT_ARMOR2 and IT_ARMOR3. 

@Poorchop, which .exe did you experience the bug with in 0.93.0?

The naming convention changed so quakespasm.exe is SDL2.0. This one should be mouse bug-free because it uses raw input, and the other one - quakespasm-sdl12.exe (and all SDL1.2 apps) have known broken mouse input since the Windows 10 Fall creators update. 

I know we had a brief Q&A about this upthread, but it really does seem like something needs to be done with that SDL 1.2 version. If not getting rid of it entirely, then isolating/renaming it so that people only use it if they really need it (i.e. are playing on Win95). 

something needs to be done with that SDL 1.2 version. If not getting rid of it entirely, then isolating/renaming it so that people only use it if they really need it (i.e. are playing on Win95).

The bad thing about SDL-1.2 on Windows is that no one has backported the bug fix for Fall Creators Update (Win10 v1709) SetCursorPos() bug to it yet: someone should -- I tried myself but got lost in the mess and gave up.. Other than that it still works OK, and it's still good for systems where SDL2 is not available.