Thank you for the notes on the emulator, it looks very interesting!

no problem. I was having a lot of fun with the version that supports multiple games and having my own private server via HOSTS that i maintained via a serverlist.txt. A while back QTracker went down for almost a week and I realized that there should be some sort of open source solution out there in case QTracker disappears someday.

That's good news. I stopped playing battlefield2 because they turned off their server (they eventually found a workaround), but it's not open source so it's a matter of time until the client is no longer fully compatible with future Windows versions (unless Dege continues his work indefinitely).

I should start playing Quake again regularly now that there is a simple server browser, thanks to your work.

BF2 and later games that are newer than encode type 0 aren't supported because it requires an extensive SQL database for the player logons and statistics tracking and there are separate servers for cd-key authorization. All stuff that is over my head and would have to be some tight multi-threading and bulletproof code. The emulator I wrote was intended for older games that have small, but dedicated communities so they would have their own personal solutions.

All the more reason to spend time with the classic fps.

QW doesn't have a menu browser yet, but slist2 works. There's a slightly hidden feature that you can set s_gamespy_sounds to 1 and use the original gamespy3d waves if they are in your gamedir/sound/gamespy directory. It will use the abort.wav and complete.wav.

The in-game browser for Q2DOS took me 3 days to get it right. Menu coding really sucks, and I wanted it to be able to scale OK on low resolutions as most of the computers I've been tested this on are period correct hardware. Mostly MMX P1's and P2 300-400mhz PCs. So the res is usually 320x200 or 400x300 SVGA. It would have been a really cool feature back in 1998 in DOS. I still remember having to write down IP addresses and having them littered all over the desk via post it notes and on the back of manuals 😀

I remember just connecting to 1 or 2 different servers, at least until the gamespy application was released. My favorites are Quake1 and UT2004. I mainly didn't play Quake2 because I was so bad at it. I did try your server browser and was amazed how well it works in-game. I have to try that hidden option, too. I remember those sounds fairly well.

Here is the gamespy sounds for Q2DOS. Just extract to the root of your Quake2 directory and use s_gamespy_sounds 1 to enable.

Thanks!

ggorts wrote:

I remember just connecting to 1 or 2 different servers, at least until the gamespy application was released. My favorites are Quake1 and UT2004. I mainly didn't play Quake2 because I was so bad at it. I did try your server browser and was amazed how well it works in-game. I have to try that hidden option, too. I remember those sounds fairly well.

The only flaw is WATT32 (or DOS?) has a problem where it starts to slow down after a few passes of the loop. It took me a week to get it where it is now where it can usually do it in about a minute to ping 300 servers on a Pentium 2. On the P1 PCs I tested it on it usually takes about 2 minutes. Before I had it slightly optimized it used to take over 5 minutes to grab the entire list. I don't know if DOS or WATT32 has a problem with a lot of file handles going on for the sockets or what. In Windows it takes me about 30 seconds to grab them all.

That seems plenty fast. There is a guy around here who may have suggestions, I think bbrutman is his nickname, I'm sure you know or recognize the name. He wrote a Dos tcp/ip package and has a recent thread on it in this subforum or a neighboring one.

Update: The next mTCP update is coming soon ... last call for bug fixes and ideas!

Yes, mTCP suite is some really good stuff. I don't know if he's using WATT32 or a custom solution. I assume it's something custom because his target machines are PCjr's so the size of the binaries need to be very tiny.

The benchmarking and bottlenecks in network performance are interesting itself. I didn't realize how cpu dependent the speeds are, at least at the Pentium I/II level.

Also, slightly back on topic. Where did you find out about Chaos and 3zb2 mods? I have never seen chaos running on a public server before. If I get some time, maybe I can get a PCMCIA card and run a dedicated server on a p2 laptop I have in DOS for fun.

ggorts wrote:

The benchmarking and bottlenecks in network performance are interesting itself. I didn't realize how cpu dependent the speeds are, at least at the Pentium I/II level.

DOS has no true multi-tasking which might be part of the issue and I may be doing some things wrong. When I tried to use the original code in the SDK a lot of packets would timeout after a few passes of the loop because it couldn't handle the multi-tasking going on and I had to rewrite a separate version for DOS.

Another funny thing I saw was playing on a Weapons server someone had some kind of custom model that was crashing the software renderer and Knightmare and I found a previous issue that was present in stock Q2 software renderer with xatrix. In Xatrix the game would crash on resolutions higher than 400x300 on xswamp.bsp immediately from the spans array not being cleared. He added some bounds checking and cleared the spans array which solved the issue with no performance hit.

With this model I was clearing the appropriate spans array and it worked great in windows. Later on I tried in DOS and it cut the framerate in half on the P2 and on the P1 it was completely unplayable. The code might still be in the ref_soft commented out. I'm hoping to catch the bad model again someday on that server so I can find what bounds need to be checked. Oh well, live and learn.

I scoured the internet many times to thoroughly explore all the mods, the ones open source, and which ones had bots. It took a while because google seems to find the commonly read pages. Also, had to use the "wayback machine". The 3zb2 was highly rated and considered better than acebot, so that one was the most interesting. However, ChaosDM was not discussed much, but eventually it was the only mod left unported, and was amazed how diverse the gameplay is. I think it's the best of the lot, outside the vanilla modes.

ggorts wrote:

I scoured the internet many times to thoroughly explore all the mods, the ones open source, and which ones had bots. It took a while because google seems to find the commonly read pages. Also, had to use the "wayback machine". The 3zb2 was highly rated and considered better than acebot, so that one was the most interesting. However, ChaosDM was not discussed much, but eventually it was the only mod left unported, and was amazed how diverse the gameplay is. I think it's the best of the lot, outside the vanilla modes.

It's really cool I even saw that some models that are in the new weapons mod, "weapons of destruction" are from Chaos (or maybe Chaos borrowed it from another mod too?) Like the crossbow and smiley grenades.

The older straight "weapons" mod didn't have all the crazy shit that is on it now. It's unfortunate because the newer one is drifting really far apart from it that it really pushes the software/vanilla q2 to it's absolute limit and some newer maps don't have properly converted PCX skyboxes. I hope to get TGA working in the code someday, but it's out my league presently. I saw that leillol was also interested in doing the same thing for his engoo port too.

That's invaluable coding work. I'm not as knowledgable so I would have resorted to deleting artwork from the mod. :) Thank you for documenting that issue. Some of the Q2 mods have problems with the sophisticated maps, but I used 1998 maps for testing, unfortunately. I know this is a difficult problem, I saw mention of TGA loading on your project web site.

I didn't know much about the weapons mods. That could be interesting. I did try older versions of mods and whether the code allows deletion of problem parts, but that new weapons mod must use the extended q2 engines, which is a pity in a way.

ggorts wrote:

That's invaluable coding work. I'm not as knowledgable so I would have resorted to deleting artwork from the mod. 😀 Thank you for documenting that issue. Some of the Q2 mods have problems with the sophisticated maps, but I used 1998 maps for testing, unfortunately. I know this is a difficult problem, I saw mention of TGA loading on your project web site.

I'm also not really a mapper, at least not for original quake engines. I did some stuff in Half-Life 2 years ago, but I think the q1/q2 engines require a colormap for the palette for the textures in software mode and mappers testing only on opengl skipped setting the palette and just straight converted the TGAs with irfanview or a similar utility.

How long does it take for you to run an slist2 in Q2DOS and what are you testing it on? I'm curious if it's much faster on a modern machine. I haven't gotten around to making a bootable USB.