Describing the Quake Command System

[frag.machine]

[mh]

Threading would work OK in the menus where it would show up as some latency in the info becoming visible rather than causing a hitch, but I suspect that it would be equally as annoying in the console. Press TAB and nothing happens for a short while. Unfortunately the console is the place where autocompletion is really needed, and equally as unfortunately I think that filtering out ammo box/etc models from the maps list is sufficiently important that maps do need to be opened and validated (the fact that the "map" command is the one where autocompletion is of most benefit just makes this suck even more).

So much for on-demand parsing; threading the scan at game change time may be of benefit but disk IO does remain the major bottleneck.

[Baker]

[mh]

Won't work with multiplayer though, where there may be a different progs on a different machine.

Not really bothered about it being a perfect solution; sensible with some imperfections is OK.

[Baker]

The .bsp model problem sucks.

[Spike]

if it has a leading b_ then ignore it?

scanning the progs won't work. most list the maps/foo.bsp files within the 'main' function. and those that don't still have the map names hardcoded in the intermission/finale code.

[taniwha]

A bit of a tangent, but on looking at QF's command and cvar code (with a mind to do some more work on completion), it turns out QF still maintains the alpha-sorted linked lists (however, hash tables most definitely are used for lookup by name).

[Baker]

[Baker]

[Spike]

they should have put sounds in the progs directory too, it makes about as much sense. and yes, separate complaint.

[mh]

Lotsa things only come through with hindsight. That's part of what makes Q2 and Q3A better platforms than Q1.

[Baker]

[Baker]

Holy hell ...

The amount of fun you can start having playing around with building a "command line interpreter" is almost beyond description, after you get a few pain in the arse functions written.

I used to wonder what could possibly motivate someone to, say, work on QuakeC compilers. Or scripting. Which seems boring as hell. I get that now. The possibilities are endless ...

/ My initial interest in this really was some "robust" 3D menus and doing it in a flexible way, so I can't do that within the Quake entity system. Using parsing, not only can I largely define this stuff in a text file, but defining 2D interfaces with hotspots on the fly seems within range.

[Spike]

much of the joy of writing a compiler is writing code that writes code. good luck testing every single possible combination though.

[Baker]