Tangled Mess: Disconnect / Demo Stop / Loading Plaque

[Baker]

[Baker]

Finally sorted this out, sheesh. The loading plaque (plague?) code is terrible, but once you figure it out it makes a great deal of sense and is easy to deal with.

What I mean is that the console showing/hiding and the loading plaque in Quake is terribly, terribly wrong in the actual code. But once you figure out the design, it is simple. I think Carmack might have just said to hell with it.

Every engine I've seen tries to deal with the console by opening and closing it instantly to avoid what the real problem is. There isn't anything wrong with the console transition between open and close if that is what the user is intending, but instead the code tries to do that but is broke in about 8-9 different places.

What it wants to do is sometimes show "loading", sometimes not even update and sometimes close the console normally.

Now is this a boring topic? Probably, except it bothered me to no end that there isn't an engine that can have the console transition as Quake was designed to do, but correctly deal with the cases where the original code messed up and put console in your face when you didn't want it.

These solutions always result in hideous things, like at least once upon a time, the console would pop-up in DarkPlaces between levels and then maybe start flooding the keyboard with "WWWWWWWWWWWW" if that is your forward key. Or in most other engines, the solution would leave the console on the screen if the map crashed.

The unglamourous problems never get fixed usually. I would have normally even tried to tackle this except Quakespasm has so hordes of unglamorous fixes and combined with the fixes MH and others dredged up here, I realized that this is all in striking distance.

(i..e. Quakespasm flat out conquered 3/4 of the ugliness in the original source code, places I can't imagine anyone wanting to deal with the tediousness would go. Yet, that is Quakespasm. Seeing that blueprint, I've probably offed maybe 40 little nuisances (little as in that their annoyance level is somewhat small, but it doesn't mean the solution is easy --- usually the problem still exists because the solution is not fun at all). And --- at the moment. My grand total list of nuisances is unbelievably 0.0000 )

[leileilol]

It's messy because it's all a big workaround for a stack overflow when quickloading (where it'll annoyingly show a console scrolling up instead). I never had that happen though, so it must've been an isolated incident with older versions of DJGPP...

[Baker]