http://directq.codeplex.com/releases/view/67510
This is a test release which has now been made publicly available for the purposes of gathering feedback and bug reports on recent changes. A full release is intended to follow in time for QExpo.
It doesn't replace the previous 1.8.7 as the recommended release for casual players.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
1.8.8 Test Release is Out
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
11 comments:
Thank you for this great source port; I do, however, have two questions. Is the automap going to return in some form; also, using this with Malice poses difficulty. Sinking into the floor and a parachute that randomly deploys and doesn't go away often occur. Thanks again for all of your work.
The automap will very probably return in some form, but it may be slightly different to how it was (not sure, just guessing) and I can't say when right now. I needed to remove it to simplify a whole bunch of code I had to work over, and I'm just not finished with that yet.
Basically having to test and debug both the automap and the regular world drawing code doubled the workload, and the regular world code is obviously far more important. In an ideal world they would both use the same code path, but there were subtle differences that made it impossible in the old code.
I haven't tested with Malice. I do have a copy of it on a HD somewhere and it should be easy to find the cause of this bug.
Spent some time with it yesterday. I did have a couple crashes and one instance of a non-crashing hangup when I was making some adjustments in the menus. First crash occurred when I selected the video options item; the second when I attempted to set windowed mode; the hang-up occurred when I backed out of the video options menu. Rendering appeared to have halted, but I was able to exit gracefully. No crashes since, so it's possible it just didn't like something I had in directq.cfg that's since been overwritten with some other value.
FOV's looking good, though. Surprised to see that it's now vert- as the aspect ratio widens given the same FOV value, but setting it to the appropriate value for my aspect ratio got me to where I wanted to go. That's a bingo!
As far as requests go, someone commented a little while ago about the possibility of making the audio sample rate cvar available again. Is there any chance you could bring that in for the final 1.8.8 release?
(Quick note: just fired it up again for a second to take a look at something and got a non-menu-related crash. Launched it, set my windowed mode from 640x480 to 800x600, exited the menu and got myself a crash a few seconds later as it was running through the start demo.)
Tested this for a few, haven't played any DM games but everything seems to work as expected.
The addition of the time remaining for the powerups is nice, but what is really realy needed is the map timer printed somewhere in that general region, similar to proquake. Using CRMODS built in timer is not very accurate and causes me to time pent/quad poorly vs those using proquake.
Aside from that though, I think this is the current version I'll be using for DM games.
Thanks!
- Magnus
more DM feedback.
The eyes for the ring of shadows are now in the right position, but they are still nearly invisible in comparison with ProQuake and Qrack eyes. Almost impossible to see them.
Also, when I'm killed my camera gets all funky. It's almost as if I'm doing a few summersaults before I reach my final death position. Very disturbing for DM when you want to see where the person who just killed you is going, etc.. whats happening in the q/p areas, etc..
Also, we warped it to match and I got a crash message with buffer 1024, 1 1024.. sorry I didn't take a screenshot.
- Magnus
Played another 20min match.
The death camera spin is nauseating in team-play.
The particles seem "choppy". I'm at maxfps 500 and the particles just don't rise smoothly like they did in previous versions. It makes firefights seem very jagged, as if I'm playing on lower FPS again.
For now I'm going back to an older client. For DM games though, the best client I have used from DirectQ is the .666a client.
Regardless, I'm still happy with the progress the engine is making and think this engine has the most potential!
- Magnus
I did make a change to the death cam. Let's just call that one an experiment. Sometimes when I announce these things in advance I get an instant negative reaction before anyone even sees anything, so I decided to say nothing, do it, and see what happens. Being a test release gave me that luxury too.
So it looks like that's one I'll need to revert. That's OK, it was worth the try anyway.
Eyes are halfway there. The scaling in GLQuake is actually completely wrong, so it's just a matter of taking time to work through getting it right.
Particles are now gravity-corrected for any FPS, so what you're seeing is most probably the right thing for the first time ever. I appreciate that it can be a little disconcerting (especially when you're so used to seeing the wrong thing) so let's play that by ear.
I need to check out that video menu.
I neglected to mention:
directq.exe -sspeed 44100
directq.exe -sspeed 22050
directq.exe -44khz
directq.exe -22khz
Why -sspeed? Because it's what DOS Quake used. Why -44khz and 22khz? Because they're what QRack uses.
Ok, I just loaded up dq, typed map dm3, impulse 9, and was testing out the particles. I was on the second from the left setting, default i think, and the problem I was describing is I can actually see the particles as they "flicker" when they raise. I don't recall them flickering like that before. Its that flickr that makes them look choppy. Make the particles very large, fire a rocket, then move off to the side and watch your bubbles. You should be able to see them flickering. The gravity effect is nice though.
Moving particles down to the lowest size fixes that issue for me.
Then, I decided to try that out at rage (cax). "connect rage.quakeone.com", and as soon as I connect its as if I'm in noclip mode. The map looks all wierd, walls missing, can see peoples lg/rox across the map, etc..
I joined the game and it was still the same, couldn't see any players at all but could see explosions and such.
Hope that helps.
- Magnus
Played a few hours now with 1.8.8
I was gonna mention pretty much the same stuff that magnus mentioned (especially the death cam thing, which is nice for SP but a nogo for DM), but let me add that the Lightning-Gun-Beam (shaft) seems to lag a bit.. especially noticeable when standing still and moving the mouse around a bit (while keeping the attack button pressed and connected to a remote server). It kinda looks like the animation is not updated as frequently as I'm used to.. Not really a big deal for me, but still..
Also I got another one of these as well (upon loading a new map while connected to a remote server).
My client console got spammed with status messages when it crashed.. so that might be a clue..
On the bright side, pq_lag 300 now works fine without completely locking up movement (as proquake used to do), even at 500 fps, so that is a nice improvement on the original ;)
Thanks once more for all the effort you put into this client, it is really getting close to being the perfect all-round client IMHO ;)
The lightning shaft was a framerate-dependent effect. Try different values of host_maxfps and see how the animation differs (on another engine). I removed the framerate dependence; there is no lag but what you're seeing is the shaft effect as originally designed for the first time.
I'll probably cvar-ize this in the next one.
The menu crashes are - I'm reasonably certain - due to some code that prints the last few lines of console output at the bottom of the screen. There's a better and uncrashy way of doing this so they'll be fixed.
Unfortunately MSG_WriteByte is called from almost 200 places in the code, so that needs more work to trace the cause. When this problem does happen it generally means that the contents of the network buffers are no longer reliable, so sadly the status message info isn't of much use.
Post a Comment