Multiple instances on same program...?

[Izhido]

I know this is more of a programming question than anything else, yet...

Do you know if any of the recommended engines have support for creating more than one instance of the game per program? That is, having multiple Quake sessions open in a single program?

As far as I know, vanilla Quake was not created with that in mind - there is an awful lot of global variables intended for single-instance usage. Has this issue been tackled with modern engines?

[Spike]

I'm not entirely sure why you'd want to.

fte has splitscreen support, if that's what you're after, but it uses protocol extensions that are typically undesirable on public servers, so its generally only available in coop. it can only connect to a single server.
there might be some weirdness with xinput, I'm not sure as I can't test that, but with rawinput enabled it can also make use of multiple mice or keyboards, or you can use modifier keys in binds or per-player groups of keys, though those can take a lot of setting up.

it is possible to compile fte servers with some 'cluster' mode enabled. this experimental feature is currently only available on windows (I'm too lazy to implement support elsewhere). essentially the server process forks(as in the unix system call) itself. the original process becomes a 'gateway' server that forwards clients to the various children. its also possible to transfer players from one child to another, as well as sending messages between children.
of course, there's no mods that can make use of this, so its kinda pointless.

if you want multiple client connections, jogi made some 'thin client' quakeworld client that just gives you a system console instead of anything graphical. Alternatively FTE has a headless mode which skips all the actual rendering (setrenderer headless to activate, right-click the system tray icon that it creates to switch back to the gl renderer so that you can actually start playing again later).

I also have an unreleased c++ reimplementation of quake that can connect to nq servers which would be fairly easy to tweak to maintain multiple connections at once (also, playing demo1 gets an average of 5000fps), but it has far too much that is not implemented thus its not really useful (read: sound, particles, sprites, console, binds, hud).

there are also various proxy projects that are designed to be able to deal with multiple connections at once. the one I wrote a while ago (qtv, available in fte's svn) connects to qw servers and shouldn't be too hard to tweak to do something useful with it.

so, urm... what are you trying to achieve?

[MadGypsy]

You can run as many instances as you want of my completely unfinished and long-way-to-go engine If you actually mean multiple quake instances inside one instance of an engine, I'd have to ask why you would ever need that? How could you ever use it?

edit well, maybe only 2 instances:


edit: it popped in

[Izhido]

Don't worry about it, guys. You already gave me what I needed. Thank you so much!