Small Mod compilation

[NightFright]

After over a year of letting Darkplaces rest untouched on my hard drive, I switched to the latest build, updated my highres files and added the latest SMC to it. And what do I have to see? What couldn't get any better GOT better. The particle effects on some items are more beautiful than ever, especially on the runes and keys. This is amazing stuff!

What I don't like so much are the effects on armors. They shouldn't have any particles just like the weapons since I don't count them towards powerups like the invisibility ring or the Quad, buuuut since Seven always provides full means of customization, it's not a problem to adjust everything just the way you want it.

Praise to everyone involved in this project - but please, consider to finally remove the "SMALL" from the mod compilation name. It is anything but small by now... ^^

[jakub1]

to nightfright

about the armor particles - seven and i had a long discussion over that topic. i wanted to add an effect only for the runes and power-ups. they are magical... it makes sence. particle effect for armor was just an excuse for playing with the posibilities of the timed effects. i started with the sparks and the animated particle ring developed over the course of time somehow. it was just a try... and then i wasn't able to force myself to delete that effect. i took too much time to calculate the coordinates to throw it all away just like that.

on the whole, the armors levitate in mid-air spinning around so maybe they are magical after all.

jakub

[talisa]

i totally love the armor effect myself. soo pretty

[Seven]

Hello NightFright,

First of all, the "small mod compilation" only scratches the surface of what can be done with qc. I think for the majority of the quakeone members, the inside3d forum is not well known. That is the place where the coding people gather and that is the place where you can see what really can be done with qc.
Sock recently opened the door a little bit into this world and unleashed things which are really huge and beautiful.

Having said that, I would like to point out some things, which might be interesting for you:
You seemed to use V3.61 until now.
To jump from V3.61 to V4.15 is quite a big jump.
Most important is, that you read the main readme.txt and "change history.txt" file.
It explains you all the new things and features in detail.
The more you read, the more fun you will have with the "small mod compilation", as it has many features which are hidden/disabled by default (which you might find interesting).

V3.61 had 18 MB, while V4.15 has 224 MB.
That has a reason and you should also look into the included subfolders.
The jump from V3 to V4 goes really deep and makes it necessary to delete your V3 autoexec.cfg.
You must/should start with the included new V4 autoexec sample (which explains again all features in its comments for your convenience).

The multiskin/multimodel feature seems to be quite popular and seeing that you are one of these "High res" stuff lovers, you might want to enable it…
Please read the multiskin/multimodel readme.txt in the subfolder for more details.


In the end, I would like to mention:
If you are not afraid and open minded to unexpected things and like to try new things, I would like to suggest trying the V4.21 update. Maybe you like it, it is just 1 single file.


And as always:
Dont forget that there are other things beside Quake...


Have fun,
Seven

[NightFright]

Actually my last version was v3.80... but still quite a difference.

A humble request from my side:
Maybe in a future version, you can add the option to completely turn off the armor sparkle effects? You could just make it so that it's like
0: Effect completely off
1: Subtle effect
2: Full effect

Right now, if I understood it correctly, you can only choose between subtle and full effect.

Would be really great! ^^

[talisa]

@nightfright

you can also choose to have no effect at all for the armor by commention out both of the effects in the effectinfo.txt
if you comment out both effects in the effectinfo.txt you will see no effect

its really simple. lemme tell you how to do that

open the effectinfo.txt with notepad or such.
scroll down to line #4754, where you'll find this part :

////////////////////
//////armors////////
////////////////////

add /* right below this line.

then scroll down to line #8856, where'll you find this

//red armor lower sparks
effect armor_red_20
countabsolute 15
type spark
tex 40 40
color 0xB22222 0xB22222
size 0.2 0.3
sizeincrease -0.05
alpha 50 150 230
bounce -1 	
originjitter 5 5 0
velocityjitter 12 12 2
originoffset 0 0 10
velocityoffset 1 1 -17
airfriction -0.6
lightradius 100
lightcolor 0.698 0.1333 0.1333

add */ right below the last line, and save it. voila now you'll have no particle-effects at all anymore on the armors

[NightFright]

Actually that's what I was trying to do, but I have to say it didn't work... Green armors just had red sparkle effects after that, while red armors had some weird smoke effect. It was like the game was using the red sparkle effect for everything (except for the red armor itself, which was kinda weird xD). I was double-checking if I had commented out all necessary lines properly. No clue why it didn't work.

[talisa]

hmm... it should work. lemme check by trying it myself

[NightFright]

Only thing I did differently was that I made the /* comment ABOVE this big "armors" headline thingie. I thought it wouldn't matter, but maybe it does.

[talisa]

just tried it and it works fine for me. check again if you did it correctly.
make sure you added /* and */ correctly. it should look like this:

////////////////////
//////armors////////
////////////////////
/*

//red armor lower sparks
effect armor_red_20
countabsolute 15
type spark
tex 40 40
color 0xB22222 0xB22222
size 0.2 0.3
sizeincrease -0.05
alpha 50 150 230
bounce -1 	
originjitter 5 5 0
velocityjitter 12 12 2
originoffset 0 0 10
velocityoffset 1 1 -17
airfriction -0.6
lightradius 100
lightcolor 0.698 0.1333 0.1333
*/

.

EDIT: nah it doesnt mattter if you put /* above or below the ////armors/// headline

[NightFright]

Ah, one thing... Would it matter if I try commenting this out after loading a savegame which had the effect activated before? Cause that's what I did last night. I will try the same config while loading E1M1 after starting a new game, maybe that was the problem.

[gdiddy62]

@NightFright
Absolutely save games will do this. Start fresh.

[talisa]

@nightfright
no that shouldnt matter at all. particle-effects have nothing to do with savegames or such.
particle-effects arent something that is stored in a savegame. but you could try anyway.

it should work just fine to comment out the lines in the effectinfo.txt, i tried it earlier and it worked for me

[NightFright]

OK, I can now say that gdiddy was right. The issue WAS induced by trying to change the effect before starting a new level.

The attached screens were taken after loading a game which had the effect turned on in effectinfo.txt before. As you can see, green and yellow armor are completely messed up after commenting out everything. Red armor is not much different btw. After reaching the next level, everything works just fine, no effects on the armors at all any more.

So this is not a bug, just demonstrating that it actually matters whether or not you change the effectinfo.txt file while playing. At least, you won't have to start a new game, just reaching the next map will be enough to fix everything. ^^

[hgdagon]

How about a frontend for SMC??? 'Cause there's so many features already that editing each one manually takes a litle longer than one might like. I went through the cfg effectinfo's and ent's in about 2 hours. A frontend (configurator) would be great IMHO)))