Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20180827202615/@comment-3547390-20190924220335

Success! After my test earlier, I was able to transport the code over pretty easily, but then realized something about that initial telefrag. Due to the way the Teamplay modification I had previously worked, telefrags don't count towards the player's score. Aka due to my whole system working around frags, it lined up perfectly! I have tested dying, changing levels as a spectator, trying different buttons to get back in... everything seems to be working quite well. After all this time, the impossible has occurred, and now the Cooperative server is set up the way I originally dreamed of. Oh, sure, we will expand as we find more mods. But this was the key set of modifications to getting it from your normal coop to a real challenge; no matter how hard we made it, the consequences never mattered since you could respawn a million times.

Oh, Shotgun Starts will be quite wonderful in this thing. Not only do we have the Rifle, which has been highly underused since nobody had a reason to pull it out before now, but we also have our Berserk Packs which allow us to slaughter zombies. Plus we have the evil pain of those backpacks, now being so lethal to take you out of commission. I think no set of modifications, no matter how radically different, could dynamically change the game while at the same time also fitting in line with what Quake is. A lot of this feels like how Quake cooperative should have been set up; as opposed to the same game but with multiple people and no consequences.

Note there are still glitches I hope to iron out, such as getting stuck on heads and finding a way to kill all cheats just out of the dislike of the potential for having them. But this is a massive step that cannot be understated.

Sounds like you got a lot of craziness going on your land indeed, never seems to end. At least not until the summer at least.

Except the Quad Rampages felt like the exact opposite of fan service to me. I know the game, watching someone find every Quad Damage and kill enemies with it didn't exactly do anything for me, especially since he would kill all commentary to focus on that. Sadly his older videos would not be my style, I noticed they were mostly on Blood and other titles I just don't bother with. As for me, well, I don't think we need to worry about that. Most people tend to dislike my style of video, disagreeing with a lot of my particular mindsets such as having a black screen or being more emotive or playing Quake in a 300x200 resolution. Luckily, I am not one to take to peer pressure, so I end up not popular. Of course, I find popularity is not really worth it. Sure, you get your videos seen more, but you also get a lot more comments about the game looking like Minecraft. Or you know, someone decides to make some weird Copyright Claim or other such thing. I know a lot of bigger Youtubers have been hit by things in the past, by staying small I never really had to worry about much. I could tell my audience to kill themselves without worrying about some lawyer because some kid decided to do it due to me!

Definitely sounds quite nice to be free from it all, having to be stuck in a place you don't enjoy and a life you can't really enjoy is never a good thing.

Most definitely, there is plenty to check out since last time. I know for sure you didn't see the armor nerfs, the newer weapon recoil, and some other little details. Plus this dynamic of course entirely changes the server and the game in general.

Precisely, that is one of the big reasons for automatic resource resetting. When 95% of what exists doesn't really link up with each other and we need some way to balance it, keeping it due to the original Quake maps doesn't really make sense, especially since the original Quake maps can become quite the fun challenge on shotgun starts anyway.

Remember, the more brutally hard it gets, the better as it actually promotes cooperation. Maybe it is just me, but I feel if you can easily play a game solo then it doesn't make much sense for a cooperative mode. Previous incarnations of the server were almost too easily, I could play through an Episode without dying most of the time. Whenever I was bored I would just load up the server, play the entirety of Episode 1 on the server to test things, and never die or encounter much danger. By making it painful to survive, it requires us to work together more, which of course means all the better for a cooperative mode.

Oh, that is pretty much how this thing works (funny to think it has been around for more than a year now). Right now it is building immensely with this mechanic, as said it took a lot of messing around with various pieces of code merged together on top of adding my own variables to get it working, but it is in there. Actually, that sums up the server in general and one thing to be proud of, it is a labor of love to get it all working together. When you need to tear it apart, constantly editing bits of code to try to stop some conflict, it gets pretty amazing to see it come this far.

Sometimes I wish I was an actual Quake modder and knowledgeable about half of what I am working with. I get there through tweaking, but it would be nice for sure to find some solutions for the various little bugs I have run across. I guess we shall see what time holds for us, we might find better alternative mods as we go along, since everyone seems to make the same mods over and over anyway.

Oh yes, ZOMBOMB was definitely a misstep. Sounded great, but the execution was definitely not the best, and taught us that enemies that explode automatically are not the best in Quake unless they aren't part of the counter to begin with. Heh, I remember when Dominus was testing out with the server with me before you even touched it and a lot of the little quirks we found, or even messing around with Seth before that. I still remember when Raadec was playing in the vanilla server back in 2012 or so.

That actually brings me to another point. Almost every time the server is played, we usually find something new, which is always wonderful since it means tightening it up all the more. That Rocket Launcher craziness was definitely fun, but so horribly unbalanced in hindsight, and far too exploitative. I have even questioned hammering out rocket jumps entirely since they weren't really made for Quake 1, but then you have to take into account that some people took it into account, so you get those weird levels that need it (plus I am not sure it is possible to kill).

EDIT:

In other news for the server, I also have found (In the same modification, which is quickly becoming a treasure trove for solutions to problems I have had for too long) a solution for not being able to swap skins. Should be able to bind keys that allow you to swap skins and ideally even pick a skin that the server sets you to by default. A lot better than the hardcoded method I have been using, it will allow for better player agency at least.

While the player has more agency, the list of player textures shall still be a thing, since you can only have 32 player skins in the game at any one time. Any more and the game crashes. In fact, 32 on the dot prevents skins from looping backwards, meaning you can't go from 1 to 32, you need to go forward through the list to get there. So I set it back to 31.

Now the problem is that the player changing skins between levels, the main reason for doing all this, stopped working when I added extra skins. Except removing the skins did nothing. Replacing the mod did nothing.

Weird, I tested it before doing anything drastic and it was working with the original set. All I did was change the number and now I can't seem to fix the issue. Literally two lines are touched elsewhere, one of which I am assured is existent and should be functional (the other not mattering with this issue and is there). Yet now it broke on me...

Let's hope this doesn't become another solid bodies modification situation. Been trying to find a solution to the "getting stuck on heads" issue for quite a long time, but the mods that do work just work in different ways to the point there would be massive downsides by changing them (such as needing to jump on a solid bouncing box instead of being able to push the head). The difference is the Multiskin code SHOULD work. It mostly does, outside of this one little issue.

If I ignore that it somehow worked previously, this might be due to a rather confusing section of the code. Currently, by the default settings, the skin is only set to trigger a restoration when on the Introduction map. How that makes any sense is beyond me, especially since it seems to work differently in-game. Why would there be no parameters set upon changing a level? I can understand the initial spawn, since a player doesn't have a skin by default, but that doesn't explain the lack of support for changing levels. While the original code wasn't set up in such a way, it is an experiment, which is what I need at the moment. Pretty desperate to get it working.

Not that... this will require more thought. Not sure what I am missing, or what broke it.

Well, after a lot more fighting, I figured it out and got it working. Seems one of the spectator parameters that is in turn connected to changelevel is actually SHARED with the skin one. This means that by changing around the values to make it work, I in turn broke it on the Mutliskin side. I have redesigned it so that each works individually, now it seems to work fine. Multiskin is now a thing and we can freely choose from 31 skins at any given time.

Now to begin part 2, trying to figure out how to get the additional modification that allows a skin to be set prior to joining a server so we don't need to pick it every time we join the server. Currently I get error messages about the command not being there, which I don't get...

A bit later and a bunch more messing with code, I figured out that portion as well. Now you can set a skin, spawn into the server with the skin, change it around as needed, all without having it hardcoded. Definitely a lot better of a route than the older solution.