FTE QW engine.

[martyfender]

FTEQW SVN and Hexen II support

For months now, from time to time, I have tried Windows builds from the SVN Trunk with Hexen II and it always crashes when trying to start a new game. This doesn't happen with much older SVN builds or the June 2011 stable build. Quake runs fine with the SVN build. How can I troubleshoot this?
MSI 6570 Motherboard
Athlon XP 2500+ Barton
1.5GB RAM
Windows XP Pro SP3 up to date
Geforce 7600GS 512MB AGP

In Quake, external music doesn't work in the stable build, but it does in the SVN build. That is one of the reasons I was trying to get it to work with Hexen II.
Do you have any thoughts, Spike?
On the Sourceforge page I saw a place to report bugs, but it appeared that the last post was in 2008, if I recall correctly, so I wanted to find out where to post potential bugs.

Thanks

[Spike]

martyfender, sorry, it was a problem with baselines. It should be fixed in svn revision 4042+, which I think got noticed by the build bot as I type this.
Reporting bugs here or inside3d should work, as should irc - #fte on quakenet.

[martyfender]

How long does it take for the new builds to show up? it has been 41/2 hours since you posted and I only see 1440. Thanks. And for clarification this has been happening for several months when I have tried the lastest SVN available at the time. It is working in Quake but I am noticing some strange behavior with Music. I hear some popping and crackling, and music really sounding strange until I restart the sound system. I addition, why does one always hear the menu or switch activation sound when loading, restarting the renderer, etc. It is like a stuttering switch sound, repeated over and over again,until it is finished loading. I have seen this in other engines as well, but not to the extent I am seeing it in FTE. I hope you take these comments in a positive way and I fully realize that this is SVN and a work in progress.
Thanks

[Spike]

regarding the buildbot.
The build bot is meant to build at least once a day. Supposedly its already built revision 4406. You'd have to ask moodles for specific details.

if sound is popping, _snd_mixahead can be used to tweek it. slightly higher values will decrease the chances of popping, but increase audio latency (hence why the value is a little lower than it perhaps should be).
FTE is meant to run audio on a separate thread now, so I'm a little worried that you might get sound stalling/repeating like that at any point.
I don't trust the recent mp3 playback code. Its triggering certain interesting issues (svn currently has it disabled - actually, I need to check if oggs have the same issue).

[gdiddy62]

Spike,
Loading saved game bug seems to be fixed but I have a new bug unfortunately. I lose my grenade/rocket explosion sound after several moments of play. Also are the flames supposed to be static and not move? Mine never move at all. (Sorry)

[FC Zvyozdochka]

Have you tried to apply particle set?

[gdiddy62]

FC,
What would that have to do with the sound? I'm just losing the sound of the explosion not the effect. Sorry if I confused.

[FC Zvyozdochka]

I don't know, I just advise you to try At least this won't make any worse.
Spike is a master, he may know the cure.

[gdiddy62]

Hey, If I don't hear from him soon I'll give it a try!

[martyfender]

Spike: possible bug report. when using FTEQW with Hexen II, various menu item slider adjustments are not showing up, where as they do with FTEQW with Quake.

[martyfender]

Spike, I was wondering if this was by design, or if it is a configuration issue on my part, but I notice With FTEQW that models, such as the grunts, appear dark, as if they are not lighted or not lighted adequately. I don't see this in other engines that I use, such as DirectQ, Quakespasm or Darkplaces. Do you or anyone else have any clues?
Thanks

[Spike]

gdiddy62, I noticed that there seem to be some sort of weirdness with sounds getting replaced with other sounds. I have no idea what would have caused this. :s
Regarding the unanimated flames... old opengl version? :s

martyfender, I think that's due to certain charset issues. FTE attempts to parse text as iso8859-1 (sans char codes) by default for hexen2 (required for non-english plaques to actually be readable). Whereas the menu was written specifically for quake's charset (which means those sliders result in non-printable chars which would normally be char codes in 8859-1). I need some proper way to do sliders and things in a way that is compatible with either (and possibly with printing stuff on stdout for dedicated servers too). You can try com_parseutf8 1 for now, but I'm not sure that it'll help.
regarding 'dark' grunts... what lighting settings are you using? r_shadow_realtime_world is 0 or 1? Are they lighter if you stand on the other side of them (quake normally lacks light directions so ambient light in quake is generally applied to a fixed side, the other side is darker, but shouldn't be invisibly dark). Also I assume they're perfectly visible if you enable deathmatch.

[martyfender]

The monster models look normal In FTE when I tried enabling realtime lighting, after you said that. However, I never use realtime lighting because I am still on an old, single core, Athlon XP 2500+, Barton core, processor, so it is to slow. Quakespasm, DirectQ and others, don't have Realtime lighting, and their models look normal without it. FTE doesn't. attached are some images, one from FTE, another from Quakespasm. I did have to lighten the one from Quakespasm because it was very, very dark. Fte seemed to reproduce it fairly faithfully, though, compared to a few other engines I tried. No wonder many of the screenshots on these forums are so dark. Why don't people take the time to lighten them? It take about a minute to do that in a free program, such as PaintdotNET. Note how there are highlights in the Quakespasm screen shot, and extremely dulled ones in FTE. DirectQ and other engines looks very similar to Quakespasm. Is it as simple as a cvar that needs to be set in FTE?

[golden_boy]

Just thought I'd post images of the stuff I recently did using FTEQW and Spike's help.



Pretty water. My machine can't even run Spike's GLSL water at its full potential - activating the ripplemap choked my computer... On the upside, these large water surfaces don't seem to impact performance much, and they still have lively rippling and reflections. Screenshots don't show the realtime effect unfortunately. Take it from me, it is very pretty.



Support for FBSP map format (q3bsp + lightstyles + higher resolution lightmaps); pretty sunlight with nice soft shadowing via shader and q3map2 compiler allows for stuff like ambient occlusion and radiosity. This is really pretty for something that uses all static lightmaps. From Warsow / Qfusion.



Heightmap based terrain with texture blending and an ingame editor that works pretty much just like Crysis. Can be combined with brushwork and mapmodels can be placed via editor. I hear it can also do water.



Again FBSP, real curves and proper coloured lighting.

Again, this is all using static lighting only.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

The monster models look normal In FTE when I tried enabling realtime lighting, after you said that. However, I never use realtime lighting because I am still on an old, single core, Athlon XP 2500+, Barton core, processor, so it is to slow. Quakespasm, DirectQ and others, don't have Realtime lighting, and their models look normal without it. FTE doesn't. attached are some images, one from FTE, another from Quakespasm. I did have to lighten the one from Quakespasm because it was very, very dark. Fte seemed to reproduce it fairly faithfully, though, compared to a few other engines I tried. No wonder many of the screenshots on these forums are so dark. Why don't people take the time to lighten them? It take about a minute to do that in a free program, such as PaintdotNET. Note how there are highlights in the Quakespasm screen shot, and extremely dulled ones in FTE. DirectQ and other engines looks very similar to Quakespasm. Is it as simple as a cvar that needs to be set in FTE?

DirectQ has model-specific overbright setting, gl_overbright_models 1