8. Other

8.1 Transparent Water and Vispatch

The game variable "r_wateralpha" allows for water transparency - but most maps don't have the necessary "vis" information. There are two ways to get this. After setting r_wateralpha < 1.0, issuing the console command r_novis 1 enables the game to calculate it's own vis information at the penalty of cpu cycles. Alternatively, vispatch is a utility that patches your Quake/QuakeWorld levels to support transparent water.

To do this you'll need the vispatch utility, as well as the vispatch data files for the game you are patching.

Vispatch was originally written by Andy Bay but has not had much support since and is finicky to use. Old Linux binaries on the web won't work, and the utility itself has a rigid structure. To patch the main data files in "id1" - from your Quake directory - type vispatch -dir id1 -data id1.vis

Vispatch Homepage (outdated)

8.2 Nvidia Tweaks

These tweaks are for users with a GeForce video card (or better) and Nvidia's proprietary drivers. They are accessed using the bash command export {variable}={value} and then starting the Quake engine from the same command line. Alternatively, recent drivers have a nvidia-settings command which starts up a user-friendly control panel.

Full details of these tweaks are in the Nvidia README, normally installed at "/usr/share/doc/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0/README"

Full Screen Antialiasing

export __GL_FSAA_MODE={value}

video card              effect                  value
=====================================================
all                     disable                 0
-----------------------------------------------------
GeForce, GeForce2       1.5x1.5 Supersampling   3
                        2x2 Supersampling       4
-----------------------------------------------------
GeForce4                2x Bilinear             1
                        2x2 Supersampling       4
-----------------------------------------------------
GeForce3, GeForce4 Ti,  2x Bilinear             1
GeForce FX              4x Bilinear             4
-----------------------------------------------------

Synchronize Picture Redraw

export __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=1

Synchronizes GL output with your monitor's vertical refresh, giving a more stable image especially on slower video cards.

8.3 FreeBSD

The author has limited experience with this OS and currently uses FreeBSD 5.3 with Nvidia's proprietary drivers. Darkplaces and Hammer of Thyrion work well with this system.

QuDos has recently ported several engines to Linux and has recently started work on FreeBSD compatibility. His great Quake II project is also now BSD friendly.

For basic GLQuake support, you can find a hacked FreeBSD binary and source tarball here.

QuakeForge is a comprehensive Quake project, but may have installation issues with newer FreeBSD releases. The memory allocator routine "alloca" is not correctly detected on FreeBSD 5.3. The fix is, after running "configure", to add "#define C_ALLOCA 1" to "include/config.h" and undefine other ALLOCA variables. Another issue is the opening of plugins. If the project builds, but you can't get the console or menus, you may have to enable static plugins using configure LDFLAGS=-lpthread --with-static-plugins.

8.4 QNX

QNX is a commercial real-time operating system, probably most notable to hobbyists as being a successful microkernel OS. SDL Quake-1.0.9 compiles and runs on QNX-NC-6.2.1 after running configure --host=QNX and then making these changes:

Makefile:  -LIBS =  -L/usr/local/lib -lSDL -lm -lph -lasound
           +LIBS =  -L/usr/local/lib -lSDL -lm -lph -lasound -lsocket
net.h:     -extern unsigned long htonl (unsigned long hostlong);
           -extern unsigned long ntohl (unsigned long netlong);
sys_sdl.c: -#include <sys/shm.h>
           -int psize = getpagesize();
           +int psize = _SC_PAGESIZE;

8.5 Quake Inspired XTerms

Quake's in-game console is a great feature and has been adopted by many other games. Now you can also use the 'tilda' key to access X terminal windows. Both Yakuake and Tilda are projects inspired by this idea.

Unfortunately neither are easy to install from source. Yakuake is a KDE application and needs the KDE development packages, and compiling Tilda is more complicated. It requires a couple of unusual libraries, and gave this author compilation errors, so perhaps looking for a RPM package is a better choice. The author can recommend Yakuake as a very handy X terminal.

8.6 Miscellaneous

• Because of the way the original game renders the sky, any map with numerous outdoor enemies suffers a big performance hit.
  
  
• You can jump further when strafing than when going forward or back 8-)
  
  
• The timedemo demo1 command is a great way to benchmark your system.
  
  
• Rocket-jumping is the technique of using a rocket or grenade explosion to jump further than normal. For a demonstration see the Scourge done Slick speed run.
  
  
• Popular games derived from the Quake engine include - Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Half-Life, Star Trek Voyager - Elite Force, Soldier of Fortune, American McGee's Alice, and - distantly - Doom III.

8.7 Quotes

• John Carmack -
  "At this time (march '97), the only standard opengl hardware that can play glquake reasonably is an intergraph realizm, which is a VERY expensive card"
  
  
• From the original Quake How-To -
  "Hardware-accelerated OpenGL Quake is Quake the way God intended it to be. There is no substitute, and once you've experienced it there's no going back."
  
  
• Func Message Board -
  "... This Will Produce A Fully Functional Bouncing, Exploding Zombie."
  Sounds like fun :)
  
  
• Quake Wikipedia -
  "Quake and its three follow up games, Quake II,Quake III Arena and Quake 4 (which many do not regard as true sequels), have sold over 4 million copies combined. In 2005, a version of Quake was produced for mobile phones."
  
  
• Moby Games
  (by Pathogen)
  "... Quake was the first FPS to introduce realistic lighting and shadows. Of course, this came at a price. Quake has taken a lot of flak because it's all dull brown and grey. This was necessary because it was the only way to get the lighting to work properly. Since each surface needs a wide variety of reserved colors for displaying darkened/brightened portions of the surface, the game was limited to just a few colors and all their respective shades."
  (by Ashley Pomeroy)
  "Almost incidentally, Quake introduced the now-standard concept of a FPS 'console', and popularised 'mouselook' as *the* absolute standard control interface. Although the specifications required a Pentium, Quake ran acceptably well on a 486 DX4/100"
  
  
• Slashdot Tenebrae Forum -

  ... this ... now officially labels this guy as a badass graphics programmer. I can hear it now:
  
  MR. BURNS: "I need a programmer! Get John Carmack on the line!"
  SMITHERS:  "He's unavailable sir."
  MR. BURNS: "Then get me his non-union Belgian equivalent!"
  

8.8 Links

ID Software

http://www.idsoftware.com

The Linux Game Tome

http://www.happypenguin.org

Icculus

http://www.icculus.org

Icculus Gamers FAQ

http://www.icculus.org/lgfaq

Linux Gamers

http://www.linux-gamers.net

Planetquake

http://www.planetquake.com/quake1

Quake Terminus

http://www.quaketerminus.com

Retro Quake

http://www.planetquake.com/retroquake/quake/index.html

Quake Basics

http://www.quaketerminus.com/quakebible/index.htm

Quake Wikipedias

http://wiki.quakesrc.org/index.php/HomePage, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake

Jörgen's GLQuake Site

http://mfcn.ilo.de/glxquake

Quake Forge

http://www.quakeforge.net

Darkplaces Game Engine

http://www.icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces

Linux Hexen II project

http://uhexen2.sourceforge.net

SDL - Cross platform hardware API

http://www.libsdl.org/

ALSA - Linux sound project

http://www.alsa-project.org

Lowercase utility

http://filerenameutils.sourceforge.net

Func_Msgboard - message board from hell ...no, I mean it

http://www.celephais.net/board/forum.php

8.9 Glossary

ALSA

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.

API

Application Program Interface. The computer libraries which are used when programming, and link the game to the hardware.

Bot

A computer generated player with artificial intelligence (cough), in a multiplayer game. Used to play multiplayer when no-one's around or not connected to a network.

Client

This word is used in two subtly different ways. In single player, the Quake game is known as a client, with different clients using their own graphics libraries (for example, the GL client "quake.glx" or the X11 client "quake.x11"). The usage is similar in multiplayer games, but also means the per-user program which connects to a single "server" program which lets all the players exist in the same world.

FPS

First Person Shooter. A shooting game viewed from the "first person" perspective.

Mod

Modification to the original Quake game varying from a complete game overhaul (total conversion) to simple map/model reworks. Quake was designed to allow for ease of platform portability with it's own computer language "Quake C" giving mappers control over most every aspect of their Quake world.

Noob

Newbie. Someone new to a computer related topic.

Patch

A software patch (or diff) is a single file used to alter a source code tree before compilation. It is often used to fix bugs or add new features that the original author didn't include.

Usage of the GNU patch utility is of the form patch [--dry-run] -pNUM <FILE where NUM is the number (usually 0 or 1) of directories to strip from the patch file. This number is not obvious except to unix gurus, but using the "--dry-run" option will let you test run patch so you can find the correct NUM. ...Using the wrong number will make patch output all sorts of cryptic messages which can be terminated with a control-C character.

Of course you could always type man patch and learn for yourself how to use this powerful unix command. ;-/

SDL

Simple DirectMedia Layer cross platform hardware API widely used in Linux games.

Segfault

A broad term indicating a program is faulty and terminated abruptly. Depending on the bash shell's ulimit -c setting, a dump of the program's image (coredump) may be left behind for examination with the GNU debugger (GDB).

Server

A program central to multiplayer games to which every player connects.

Tarball

An archive file such as somefile.tar created by the "tar" program. It is often compressed using the programs "gzip" or "bzip2", in which case it will normally end in the letters .gz or .bz2. The extension .tar.gz is often shortened to .tgz.

8.10 Credits

Thanks to:

• The Linux Documentation Project.
• Linus Torvalds for hacking together his free operating system kernel.
• ID Software.
• O. Sezer for pointers to some of the many things I'm clueless about.
• Quake modders great and small.

This webpage was constructed using Linuxdoc-Tools-0.9.20 (currently unmaintained), Vim and Bash.

8.11 Todo

impulses, ezquake.

8.12 Changelog

2.04 (November 2006)

Added some troubleshooting hints for Quake IV.

A new section for (gcc-4.1) compilation issues.

Links to the Quake III Cell Shading project.

2.03 (July 2006)

Changed order of game engines, added extra compilation notes, and expanded the Tenebrae, SDLQuake and wmQuake sections.

New multiplayer entries for ProQuake, XQF and Tremulous.

Reorganised several categories in the "Other" section, including new Nvidia Tweaks, License, Changelog and Vispatch sections.

Updated the author's patched Tyr-Quake binary, with a few new hacks added to TyrQuake-0.54.

Some small changes to the featured mods.

2.02 (February 2006)

8.13 License

This document is released under the GPL.

8.14 Other Formats

The Quake How-To is also available as a text file and a single html file.

The latest version should be available here.

Version v1.0.1.14 (30 August 1998) of the Quake How-To is located at the original author's site.

8.15 Author

Steven A.

Sourceforge user page

Email