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Spiked Quakespasm Modding/Coding Help Thread
Thread for figuring out all the new particle and modding features in the "Spiked" version of Quakespasm.
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Actual QSS engine download:
http://triptohell.info/moodles/qss/

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Tutorial on how to enable rain and snow on the Quake start map:

1. Video of snow: https://youtu.be/DvqxsJChXH0
2. Video of rain: https://youtu.be/NRud8T88tDc

Steps:

1. Put this start.ent download in c:/Quake/id1/maps folder. Tells it what textures emit snow and rain.

2. Put this weather.cfg download in c:/Quake/id1/particles folder. Indicates spawn information on particles and how they behave.

3. Enter r_particledesc "weather classic"; map start in the console. I assume "weather" is the name of cfg. Also seems to work with just r_particledesc "weather".

Stuff:

Q: How do you find out the name of textures?

With Quakespasm I don't know that you can, but in Mark V just type "tool_texturepointer 1" in the console and look at a surface and it displays the name of any texture you look at on-screen. screenshot

Q: How is the external ent file made and what does it need?

Open up Mark V and type "map start". Now just type "copy ents" and the entities for the entire map is on the clipboard. Open a text editor and paste. Save it as c:/Quake/id1/maps/start.ent

The first few lines of the file look like this, add the 2 bolded lines that tell the particle system that the texture names are "sky1" for snow and "wizwood1_8" for rain.

{
"sounds" "4"
"classname" "worldspawn"
"wad" "gfx/start.wad"
"_texpart_sky1" "weather.tex_skysnow"
"_texpart_wizwood1_8" "weather.tex_skyrain
"message" "Introduction"
"worldtype" "0"
}


A devkit is also available HERE http://fte.triptohell.info/moodles/qss/QSS_DevKit.zip with source code examples of how to create your own custom HUD using CSQC. The examples show CSQC recreations of the classic HUD as well as variations for the missionpacks and should serve as a good starting point for your own creations. There's a few other goodies in there too (e.g. particle stuff), so check the readme inside the devkit.

Discord
There's now an official Discord for FTE and QSS, find it here: https://discord.gg/E6fTcgB3ev
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@spike @Qmaster Re: Code Parsing Fuckups 
Hm,so the code works when written in Notepad but not in the actual editor? I had the exact opposite thing happen to me recently when trying to add entity information to a config file in a Doom mapping program I use, so I wonder, was this program originally written for Unix compliant OSes (Linux Mac etc) or Windows? The text parser might be expecting DOS-format end of line characters and not getting them, either that or there's a bug in the code that is searching for the end of comment delimiter, I haven't looked at the code yet so I'm not sure which is the case but that is probably where I would check first. Then again I am a pretty inexperienced coder so maybe you shouldn't take my advice 😂😂 
 
@Shamblernaut
The specific patch is quite small, and if you're doing something that's sensitive to framerates that that would exist regardless of the rate at which the server runs at. So no, just the usual potential-but-trivial merge conflicts.

@nemo
QSS ALWAYS limits its physics to 72fps or less, regardless of video framerates, so its nothing to worry about with the latest QSS.
Just set host_maxfps to 0 and enable vsync and you're fine (usually - nvidia drivers seem to have issues with vsync and otherwise-high framerates).
If physics feels different then it'll be purely down to the interpolation (or if you're more familiar with higher rates - which are generally considered buggy).
I didn't add any settings to limit physics to eg 20fps as is the default on many dedicated servers. my aim was purely to smooth out the single player experience, and I personally hate 20fps anyway.

@anon
fteqcc accepts windows, unix, and supposedly also mac line endings, which is meant to match scintilla's behaviour also.
note that support for mac endings means that rogue's sourcecode does not compile as-is due to a mac line ending appearing in the middle of a single-line comment, and these being line endings means the next line contains uncompilable gibberish.
this is why I've configured fteqcc's text editor parts (a third party widget called scintilla) to display explicit line ending chars if they appear to be mixed.
While fteqcc attempts to support various types of unicode encoding, it only considers the ascii chars as whitespace, so chars like non-breaking spaces that you might have pasted in will confuse the compiler but might be invisible in the editor.
Any non-ascii codepoints are pretty much ignored - they're accepted in names, and any non-ascii chars inside strings will be treated the same way as they always have - needing eg com_parseutf8 1 in order to display them properly in-game (instead of as multiple random red glyphs). As an english speaker that's also quite lazy, this hasn't got much real-world testing, just specific cases that required annoying copy+pasted glyphs that I can't even read, so it wouldn't surprise me if the unicode crap is completely unworkable as-is.
It'd be nice to have an actual copy of a bugged file so that I can figure out which chars are actually in there, otherwise I have absolutely no idea how to progress (and I'm too lazy/paranoid to try fiddling with my system locale etc to try to reproduce it). 
More Testing 
Because I can't use the CSQC without using the new compiler version and I really like being able to edit within FTEQCCGUI for quick simple fixes so testing to help us fix this....

If I compile code that has a warning for a variable that isn't used anywhere, then // it out inside FTEQCCGUI, then compile, I get the warning about EOF in a comment on that line:
•If I then A close FTEQCCGUI, reopen and recompile, the file change is not saved (add popup warning to save edits?).
•Or If I then B manually save the file with // added within FTEQCCGUI from FTEQCCGUI's File->Save, close FTEQCCGUI, reopen, recompile, I no longer have the EOF warning.

Hmm...
If I open the same file within FTEQCCGUI and delete the // for that variable, then recompile, I get the EOF error again. I could have sworn the older version auto-saved any in-FTEQCCGUI edits before compiling, but it seems like something is screwy with that......

AHH!! THAT'S IT!
If I change the file within FTEQCCGUI, SAVE IT!!, then compile, then I get no errors. That's the bug, auto-save-all before compile is disabled. Can you please add that back or at least add a warning or prompt to "Save files before compiling?"

Still wierd how if I don't save before compiling, then compile, get error, then save, then compile, the error is still there. 
World Size Limit 
What is the proper way to compile big maps for quakespasm-spiked ? The default world size limit in Quake 1996 is 4096 units. Quakespasm/jackhammer is 8192 units (beyond that limit some bugs occurs in the game, even in QSS). If I go with higher limits (16384, 32768, 65536, 131072, 262144) ericw tools don't want to compile the map. Thanks 
Afaik 
ter-shibboleth world is 65536 units,

not sure, but prolly you have to add -bsp2(or something) switch to your command line 
@ericw Tools Says 
-bsp2

Create the output BSP file in BSP2 format. Allows the creation of much larger and more complex maps than the original BSP 29 format). 
Escaping The +- 4096 Bounds 
sv_protocol 999
gl_farclip 100000 (or whatever you need)

does bsp2 have anything to do with this, other than indirectly? (i.e. bigger maps - more leafs, clipnodes etc.) 
 
BSP2 has nothing to do with the bounds. 
Yeah Thought So. 
 
There Is A Bound Limit On Bsp29 
Node bounds in bsp29 are int16_t so all of the coordinates have to be within -32768 to 32767; bsp2 changes these to float.

Not all engines use this value (fitzquake family doesn't) but winquake/glquake do use it for culling, and it would totally break rendering in those engines if you overflowed the coordinates, so it should probably be a hard qbsp error.

(talked to nemo on discord and I think he solved the issue, was too many verts on a sky polygon) 
 
thanks for the replies, i got it all !
huge maps are so cool... 
Misaligned Lumps 
Just installed QSS and im getting errors in the console about ammo crate bps misaligned lumps. No idea what that means, and I didn't get those errors in original QS... 
With A Mod? 
Which level? I don't see any with id1 / e1m1, for example.

I get some for breakables in ad 1.70 patch 1 (maps/ad_brk/wood01-4.bsp)

It indicates a bug with the qbsp or other tool that wrote the .bsp file. 
 
Yeah, it's custom bsp's I had installed for the ammoboxes, regular Quakespasm seems fine with them, as does QSS, except QSS pastes the error in the console 
 
the warning is new to QSS and won't get displayed in QS.

if its your map/bmodel then update your tools, otherwise just ignore it. it won't affect the vast majority of people so w/e.

(any maps/bmodels that get warned about will give crashes if you try running them on android/ios/rpi, or really ANY non-x86 cpu. which means that its really easy to fail to notice when tools write out buggy files - I was guilty of it too with fteqcc a while back). 
Projectile Reflection 
I'm a beginner at QuakeC, and I want to make a weapon that works like the airblast from Pyro's flamethrower from Team Fortress 2.
The airblast can reflect projectiles and launch players away depending on where the player's aiming it, here's how the hit detection is done in TF2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1g2x4b_Byg&t=13s

I suppose it would be easy to replicate this in QuakeC, I'd just need to spawn an entity with its center offset to the player and in the direction he's aiming. But this has its problems (and they're present in TF2 and shown in the video), from what I've read Quake doesn't rotate hitboxes, and this will produce some really strange situations if the player is reflecting at an angle.
Is it possible to check collisions in a cone in QuakeC? If it is, I suppose I'll have to implement the math by myself.
Are there any other alternatives? 
 
findradius will get things within a sphere, that might be less bad than an AABB

you could also math it up yourself to get a cone, by testing angle between the airblast's forward vector and the vector from the airblast's origin to the incoming projectile.

However, a sphere might be better and i would size it big enough to be more forgiving to the player -- false positives are better than false negatives in this case i think. 
@Torgo 
Not sure if the source is out there but there was a weapon called the AirFist in the Painkeep mod. It was also a stand alone mod released as a promotion for Painkeep IIRC. It's been over 20 years. But it was very cool back in the day.

+1 for making new stuff for Quake 
 
Yah AirFist was the first thing I thought of too. :-) We ran that for a while on one of the kitty1.stanford.edu servers back in the day.

Looks like it can still be got here: https://www.quaddicted.com/files/idgames2/quakec/weapons/airfist1.zip

...and that does include the QuakeC source code.

(not sure if there was ever another release after version 1) 
 
BTW Torgo, that's just nostalgia coming through... we're not trying to dissuade you from making something new along those lines.

It's always cool to be able to look through a relevant codebase though, especially if you're just starting out with something as idiosyncratic as QuakeC. 
@Torgo 
I agree with Johnny. I am new to QuakeC too so any existing code to look at is a godsend! 
 
Thanks for the help guys, I'm really against discovering the wheel again, so existing code helps a lot.

Also, I really appreciate your videos dumptruck_ds, it's actually the reason I started messing with Quake. 
You Might Need... 
Extras_r4 has some fancy particle effects, in particular it turns nails and rockets into 'particle' objects that react to forces. That mod has a cool gravity well thing that pulls nails and rockets away. Could be used to do the reverse.

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/mods/extras_r4_fixed_saves.zip 
@Torgo 
Thanks for saying that, makes my day!

There's a newer version of extras now that Khreathor fixed up. I'd suggest that. The source is included in uwjam. See here:

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61613 
 
just curious why on the first post it is raining inside?

2. Video of rain: https://youtu.be/NRud8T88tDc 
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