Some confusion over single-player clients

[Iron Mew]

I downloaded a massive pack purported to contain everything official and semi-official ever released for Quake 1. I do own the original game plus several expansions (including Malice), but this seemed like a much easier way than reinstalling and configuring everything, plus it did have a couple things I never managed to buy.

It came with several clients, including Darkplaces and EzQuake.

I ran Darkplaces and saw with great pleasure that the choppiness of the original Quake models is no longer there, and everything is smooooth - but there are some irritating defects; for instance, if I fire the nailgun the flame moves from one barrel to the other instead of just appearing in front of them where it's needed.

I thought this was an unavoidable issue of Quake models made more visible by the frame interpolation (I remember looking at them in a mdl viewer a very long time ago and figuring out that moving parts can't just appear out of nowhere but must be a part of the model), but then I ran EzQuake-GL and the models are smooth and flawless, with none of these problems. I also like EzQuake's graphics better.

Problem is, I can't seem to run any mods on EzQuake; or rather, they run, but any custom weapons or enemies don't appear, which makes the experience rather underwhelming - especially for mods like Malice where *everything* is custom.

Is there any way of achieving flawless interpolated models in single-player mods?

Thanks.

[Johnny Law]

Quakespasm is my go-to for singleplayer. (Or, if you're on Windows, Fitzquake Mark V is another good Fitzquake-descendant engine.) I think that Quakespasm for example doesn't perform model interpolation on weapons when they are in a muzzleflash frame.

In general "flawless interpolated models" is a hard ask since the models/animations weren't designed for that, so anything modern engines do is going to be hacks and tradeoffs. Some do get things looking pretty good though!

[Moon[Drunk]]

Maybe you should try FTE and see if that suits you better than DP and EzQuake as it is both a NQ and QW client (among other things ) besides being "advanced"....
That said, I'm no expert on FTE and I do not know if FTE has the specific functionality you are looking for.

[Spike]

The setting he's talking about would be the r_lerpmuzzlehack cvar in FTE, and is enabled by default in the 'normal' preset or better (read: more expensive, depending on your definition of 'better').

It is a hack, which means that the threshold is actually hardcoded by modelname and thus will only really work with vanilla models (this prevents it from breaking other stuff). hacks suck, but at least it fixes it for vanilla content.

[Iron Mew]

I suspected it might be a customized per-model thing, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask.

I'll try Quakespasm and FTE anyway, just in case I end up liking them more than Darkplaces. Thanks!

Edit: FTE bugs out with a Z_BaseTagMalloc error, whatever it is, and Quakespasm indeed stops interpolation in muzzleflash frames - but I find I prefer the dancing flashes, as without them weapons like the nailgun or supernailgun aren't effectively interpolated at all. Oh well, can't have it all.

[Baker]

Quakespasm indeed stops interpolation in muzzleflash frames - but I find I prefer the dancing flashes, as without them weapons like the nailgun or supernailgun aren't effectively interpolated at all. Oh well, can't have it all.

Or maybe you type r_lerpmodels 2 in the console.

[Spike]

Edit: FTE bugs out with a Z_BaseTagMalloc error

FTE has not used 'Z_BaseTagMalloc' for a couple of years now.

you can get the current version of FTE from here: http://triptohell.info/moodles/win32/fteglqw.exe (build 4994, at the time of writing)