Game changing - queries

[Baker]

[mh]

[Spike]

[mh]

[Baker]

This is an oldy, actually surprisingly old.

The "right" way to do this --- barring some better "right way" is ...

game whatever -hipnotic // FitzQuake uses "game" as the command in-engine.
gamedir whatever -hipnotic // Every other gamedir switching engine (id Software's Quakeworld, DarkPlaces, JoeQuake, etc.)

Extra params like "-hipnotic" or "-rogue" or with user made mods like "-quoth" or "-nehahra", the change can only successfully go into effect during a gamedir change since the HUD images have to be reloaded.

[p.s. It looks like DirectQ and other MH engines might already support this precise method, which isn't surprising since this is the "right" way to do it. I finally got sick of having to restart Quake to indicate the special gamedir extra of -rogue, -hipnotic or -quoth ... or -nehahra).]

Yeah, this thread is older than dirt but I didn't want to start a new one.

[mh]

[Spike]

imho better to detect the hud elements to display based upon the images stored within the wad, then just add multiple arguments to the game/gamedir command to load multiple gamedirs as needed. its just less specific.
this is basically what I was saying back in 2009.

[mh]

A mod could require -hipnotic but provide it's own gfx.wad - Quoth does this. So you'd need to open and parse each gfx.wad in each gamedir as you load it in order to get that working (it doesn't seem enough to just parse the mod's gfx.wad as they may omit some icons for weapons or powerups they don't use but still require the same HUD layout). Alternatively another mod could rip some images from hipnotic's gfx.wad and put them in it's own - I don't know of anything that does this, but I've long since learned that there is little limit to what Those Wacky Modders will get up to. When in doubt I tend to err on the side of doing what id Quake did - at least if it breaks you can always point at it and say "well it breaks with id Quake too".

[Spike]

quake only ever loaded one gfx.wad. it doesn't make sense to scan each one in turn as missing replacements in there would be broken even in vanilla. just go by the names of the lumps in there.

[mh]

The bit that I'm not quite understanding is this:

The engine knows what games to load based on the contents of gfx.wad, OK?
But the engine can't know which gfx.wad is the correct one to use until after the games are loaded.

Take a hypothetical -hipnotic case. Game loading goes through Com_AddGameDirectory for ID1 by default, which I'm assuming is always done anyway, even in this setup.
Then, the way I'm reading it, you have a snoop in gfx.wad to figure out what other games to load.
But the gfx.wad you'll be snooping in is the ID1 version, as hipnotic hasn't been loaded yet, so hipnotic won't be loaded at all.

There's obviously some other info here that I'm missing, or my understanding is slightly arseways.

[Spike]

you'd still need to specify both, just as 'gamedir quoth hipnotic' instead of any special case -hipnotic stuff. then you can make all sorts of derivative mods using the same mechanism.
as baker said, but without the special cases.