in-need if messing around experience

[MeTcHsteekle]

[Baker]

[frag.machine]

[MeTcHsteekle]

hehe , thanks for the help cos now i have the orange i want

now i can go through and add other colors to things as well [ill try not to make it look to colorful though]

so if i do the extension tutorial, id have to hope that LordHavoc doesn't 86 this thread to get the DP ones?

//or i can try and fumble through the DP source

.. hmm i guess i could have asked this on q1.com after all

[Baker]

DarkPlaces code is radically different from GLQuake/WinQuake. It has about 8 years of changes in it. (Last I heard, 97% of it is entirely rewritten from GLQuake).

For someone just starting to learn engine coding, it would be like skipping to end of an advanced calculus textbook without doing any of the middle of the book.

There is a lot of material in those Quakesrc.org tutorials and comparing an contrasting engines like GLQuake vs. FitzQuake vs. aguirRe Quake vs. JoeQuake is a good place to start.

If you really want to learn about EBFS, do the EBFS tutorial and the FrikFile tutorial.

Here is a very simple and generic ProQuake with EBFS added by RocketGuy that also has Frik_File ().

I've not used it, but RocketGuy runs it on his RQuake server so it must be stable.

Above and beyond that, the QuakeSrc.org tutorials are a great place to start because they help you understand.


If you want to try to understand DarkPlaces and the extension system, you'd probably be best off using WinMerge to compare different old DarkPlaces version back when DarkPlaces was far more similar to original Quake.

Like such:

http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/files/2000/

I'd recommend #104

http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/ ... ine104.zip

[Spike]

[MeTcHsteekle]

[Baker]

[ceriux]

[MeTcHsteekle]

[Baker]

[MeTcHsteekle]

[Baker]

Create a folder where you'll keep all of your engine stuff.

I use e:\engine

Create a functional copy of a compile-ready stock id1 Quake.

I use e:\engine\locked-quakereal

Right click the folder and do Properties -> "read-only".

When you want to do experiments, copy the folder and right click it and remove the read only status.

Then do the tutorials you can or play with WinMerge against different fairly faithful (and hence, not completely rewritten) engines like:

1. (easiest to work with, no graphics changes).
2. (2nd easiest to work with, few non-graphics changes except console and cvar callback)
3. (3rd easiest to work with)
4. (has some interesting fixes in it)
5. (in most ways, the cleanest codebase for a baseline Quake)
6. , like DarkPlaces (*)

Get TextPad 5 or another more sophisticated text editor -- I like TextPad 5 because it does more while still using the "keep it simple" philosophy, and use Search -> Find in Files against your source codes a lot (be sure to set the filter to *.c; *.h; *.cpp; *.m).

Learning to modify the engine is hard because there are a lot of different sections. But the more you do, the more you understand. After a while, some things will start to become very obvious.

(*) That was some invaluable advice from MH I once got.