ggorts wrote:

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.

I'm a big fan of the weapons mod because even a noob can get a cheap kill or two in 😀. I'm more a coop guy myself because I haven't been playing DM every day of my life for 15 years so as soon as I spawn I just get fragged and then I get bored quickly. Intsagib is fun for me too because it's more about precise aim and moving around quickly while trying to have that precise aim as opposed to map control like standard DM. There's a really cool instagib CTF server with hooks that shows up on the serverlist called ACMEWARZ InstaRailz. Those guys can move incredibly fast, it's insane to just spectate it. If you connect to it, be sure use the latest q2dos code or else it will try download wrong files due to an overflow exploit the mod uses for the statusbar. R1CH had a fix in R1Q2 for this issue and i merged it in and it's been able to run nonstop for more than 10 hours spectating that server through multiple map rotations so I think it's safe to say that it's mostly stable.

I guessed they were targeting the opengl modes. :) I know less about the mapping, although I follow closely the mapping work via quakeone forum or Spirit's (?) web site. I'm sure that will be an invaluable feature and bring modern engine capabilities to Dos.

I have to test Q2Dos on real hardware. I tested solely in dosbox, although I have a custom build with expanded memory limit and LFN (thanks to Wegnier, my spelling may be off a letter).

ggorts wrote:

I tested solely in dosbox, although I have a custom build with expanded memory limit and LFN (thanks to Wegnier, my spelling may be off a letter).

I was unaware there was an LFN-enabled dosbox branch. That's good news as Q2DOS pretty much requires it for online play and custom mods. I thought about trying to do a call to doslfn if no LFN driver is detected but I was concerned it might corrupt the stack or cause other funny issues so I never bothered to implement it.

That's incredible. I sifted through all that additional code, like from R1Q2, and the number of possible exploits seems very high.

I'd probably do better spectating the instagib than actually playing it. I tried it in UT2k4 and it was frustrating and I thought they must be cheating since I'd last a second or so on spawn. I was never that good with the grapple and couldn't adjust to the ideal key bindings or stringing keys together by mapping.

He has the LFN branch in the Patches subforum, but the code is kind of difficult to parse, although there is also a build. The downside is the build wouldn't have the uncapped ram.

If you scoured the web for some maps and mods, maybe you know of some good ones for coop? I have a very basic coop mod I added to the branch that has respawning items and starting off with a shotgun and keeping your inventory on respawn. I have a heavily customized QW server that freewill coded with over 300 maps. I'd like to bring something like that to Q2 as there doesn't appear to be a single decent coop server. The only one I saw that was customized was coop or die, but it requires a lot of custom libraries to compile and connects to a persistant server and requires registration. And quite frankly. it wasn't THAT cool that I wanted to port it to Q2DOS so I just added the coop tweaks with hopes of finding some good maps.

I did search for coop mods yesterday and noted that you added that one to q2dos. That's the only one I could find. I think I found source code, but as you said, it had dependencies like that. If it was that fun a mod, then it may have been worthwhile to find older versions and patch out the registration stuff.

Edit: your coop addition sounds interesting. I'll take a look at it.

His code is too much of a mess I tried to stub some of it and spent about 30 minutes on it and decided it would just be better to make my own basic mod for it. Having persistant game worlds with stats tracking is something I personally don't care for.

That certainly doesn't help in any porting effort. I think your idea of the useful bits is ideal.

I think Alien Arena and Warsow are based on Quake2(1?) code. I looked at it and if they have any coop gameplay, then that may help.

I was unable to connect to any alien arena servers properly. I assume AA and Warsow probably have an expanded limit protocol and are geared towards opengl.

I'll search further. Thanks again for sharing your projects.

Attached is a potential quake2 mod for coop gameplay, both the original and the incomplete port. The networking code is for Windows and there is a reference to a function named "time", presumably another Windows specific reference. I wonder if this mod would fit the bill.

I looked at the CoopOrDie code, I think that some of the code is not available? :(

Update: made several time functions posix compatible but didn't convert all of them. However, the remaining may mirror the ones already converted. I started to convert the Windows sockets, but I don't have a setup to easily test. It seems like there are few unique functions to convert. Also, used FSU pthreads to start to convert the Windows threading. At least there is this code available and it looks possible if there is a need for a coop mod.

I recall this partly originated from the "Quake2 Cluster Project". I wonder if the CoopOrDie mod relies on this code, too, although unreleased to the public.

The Windows binaries are attached, so it could be evaluated as to whether it is worthwhile to run on a server.

Attached a patch for Quake2 (Dos) which has a working 3d-Cam (3rd person view) and also incomplete code for study which is for loading 24-bit TGA textures. The code is self-documenting.

The cvar to activate the cam: cl_3dcam 1. (And for the other related settings: cl_3dcam_angle; cl_3dcam_dist.)

You could study Engoo for some of the things it does for 24-bit texture processing. It also has a spans function that renders the world in 15-bit color with an 8-bit dither lookup. This may/may not be useful

Here's a shot of the said spans dealing with Half-Life paletted textures converted to the 15bpp surfacecache. This is still 8bit color and still the Quake palette.

My concern is if there's a huge performance hit with it. It's also out my skill level to implement something like that by myself.

ggorts wrote:

Attached a patch for Quake2 (Dos) which has a working 3d-Cam (3rd person view) and also incomplete code for study which is for loading 24-bit TGA textures. The code is self-documenting.

The cvar to activate the cam: cl_3dcam 1. (And for the other related settings: cl_3dcam_angle; cl_3dcam_dist.)

What's the deal with the 24-bit code why is it incomplete the tutorial looks to have what it needs. But you do need that dat file, which I don't see.

I couldn't make it load textures, even though I had the dat file in /pics/. I tried copying /pics/ under Q2/ also.

I used the html code to follow the code better because the web browser mangled some symbols. I did make two changes by removing "ri." during testing; the above code could probably have that reverted to tutorial.

I put the patch up before fully testing in the hope that leilei or someone could share insight. However, the 3dcam worked on the first try!

By the way, I was reading djgpp faqs and I recall it's recommended to disable the dj_near_pointers on exiting from program. As you said, the sbrk_unix handles it internally where there's malloc or such calls.

I had planned on trying this later, but please consider this instead. I think for sure you will have more insight on this.

Nevermind, I got it working. It will load TGA skyboxes currently