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clux
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As a break in the unusually frequent gaming focused posts popping up, here's some photos of the small aesthetic things in my life. These primarily consist of exquisite food, and the Syrian hamster version of Lord Nibbler - with the same name. Fortunately, the feast of a thousand hams for the hamster counterpart generally consists of leafs and carrots, as opposed to whole zebras and giraffes.
I get all the good food.
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Continuing the small guide for how to fix your ancient config, or how to build a new one, with a twist. Here are some settings that I claim will help you play better. This is of course a controversial subject in the quake 3 community, and personally I do not believe there are a lot of config cvars that will actively help here, so I will only do the most logical ones that really could be of help. These are all along the lines of turning down information you do not want, and showcasing better the information you really want.
Things to tune up
It is of the utmost importance that you find an cg_enemymodel that is:
1. Visible, and has roughly the same size as the hitbox. TankJR annoys a lot of people with his size, and consequent rails that look like they hit. In general, I think it makes you less accurate to have a bigger target, but that's just me (note that the hitbox is the same for all models). Also, make him a really bright colour, like phosphorescent green.
2. Audible, and has distinguishable sounds relating to their health levels. This is where most models fail as a decent enemy model, as all models give of a different damage response sound depending on how low on health they are. The three levels are sup50, between 25 and 50, and sub25.
Sarge's sub25 health scream, his distinctive jump sounds, and his good shape is why he is probably the most popular enemymodel.
Now, your team model should be one that you can easily distinguish with the same two senses. However, you are also going to be hearing his jump sound constantly, so pick something light. Xaero, Mynx or Bones are good choices, but I found bones to be a bit too surprising as a team model in team games. Note that not forcing team mates to have the same model sucks if they are using sarge, so you should go for one of the above.
Now, you also want to know exactly when your enemy dies. By this I mean without having to hear .5 seconds of his death sound or recognize that his death sound animation has started; because he sometimes looks alive for a while depending on how fast and where he is heading. cg_deadBodyDarken takes care of this. Models will instantly turn black when dead. Very useful.
For similar reasons, having a response in addition to the hit sound to how much damage you've done could also be useful. I have com_blood on as it gives me another way to gauge how much damage my lightning gun does mid combat when there's a lot of noise.
Set cg_railtrailtime to at least 1 sec (1000), I use 1200. For while 400 might look better and be less distracting to you, the higher value can better help you better pinpoint the direction you are being railed from, you should be able to know most of the time from audio anyway. You could make the same argument for rocket and grende trails of course, but these are not weapons you just sneakily hit someone with without fully revealing your location, so these are disabled later.
This combined gives the following set of good settings:
model xaero/pm cg_enemymodel sarge/pm cg_forcecolors 1 cg_forcemodel 1 cg_enemyColors iiiiii //neon green color zzzzz //fully white cg_deadBodyDarken 1 com_blood 1 cg_railTrailTime 1200 //longer rail trail time cg_ammoWarning 1 //play a click sound when you are out of ammo on all weapons
Note these also force same rail colours for same teams, which is useful.
Things to tune down
I would claim cg_simpleitems is the most important thing to enable simply because your eyes likes to focus on things that move. It's just a physiological fact, when standing completely still, you will notice changes to your surroundings rather than things that do not change. For instance, if you camp an area with an item, then without simpleitems there are potential ammo boxes all bouncing around all potentially distracting you, while with simpleitems on, you would only notice them spawning, and have more brain power to focus on a potential threat.
For very similar reasons, s_ambient should be set to zero to turn off buzzing and gongs on tons of different maps.
Whether or not to use cg_drawgun isn't that relevant anymore as you can squish the size of the thing right down with cg_gunOffset and make it immovable to stop a bit of the distracting motion. There are equally valid arguments for and against having it on now: By having it on, you get an arguably better response to out of ammo by seeing the gun fail. By having it off, you don't take up any unnecessary space.
These points combined with a lot of single line explanation cvars, gives the following set of recommended downtuning settings that you are allowed to disagree with; I do, howeer, consider everything on this list to be useful.
cg_brasstime 0 //no shells ejected from mg cg_muzzleFlash 0 //no flash from mg on fire cg_noProjectileTrail 1 //no underwater ammo trail cg_damageDraw 0 //no blood across screen when damaged cg_noTaunt 1 //disable model taunts cg_fallKick 0 //disables smooth landing animation cg_gibs 0 //blood is enough cg_marks 0 //no marks on walls cg_shadows 0 //no player shadows cg_viewAdjustments 0 //no bobbing or rolling cg_autoswitch 0 //no automatic weapon switchings cg_simpleitems 1 cg_smoke_SG 0 //no smoke from sg on fire cg_smokeRadius_GL 0 //no smoke from grenades cg_smokeRadius_RL 0 //no smoke from rockets cg_drawgun 2 //static gun. 0 turns it off (probably better) cg_gunOffset 10,-4,-10 //low static gun model ch_selfonteamoverlay 0 //no need to view your own stats twice in TDM ch_recordMessage 0 //dont display massive demo recording message com_maxfps 125 //set this to monitor refresh rate s_ambient 0
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SuperHUD
The new way to control your hudstyle in CPMA: FULLY. In fact, your hud has a separate config. Since these are mostly preference, I will give a few points on what I think you should modify to get what an awesome hud. A hud with just the necessary elements, and one configured for better fonts and sizes for this new high res quake 3 decade that uses anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. For a detailed documentation of the superhud consult cpma/docs/hud.txt.
The most important things to do, is to make threewave the default font. It looks better on frag messages and a ton of other messages, but for high font sizes it might end up looking to blotchy and so you would have to manually define these to have the id. In particular, these turned out to be (working from hud2) the following: ScoreOWN, ScoreNMY, ScoreLimit, Team1-8 and the four PowerUpK_Time settings.
Also, remove the player character icon as it does not tell you anything (in fact it is hardcoded) and instead just put the armor icon in the middle (this gives you useful information in cpma). Additionally quote out itemPickup,itemPickupIcon,FPS and chat1-7 if not in TDM. The information these provides are simply not needed.
Move GameTime to the top right by setting its second coordinate to 0, and hence we replace (remove) the FPS counter.
!DEFAULT { color 1 1 1 1 fontsize 8 12 font threewave textstyle 1 } StatusBar_ArmorIcon { rect 310 448 24 24 } Score_OWN { rect 0 440 32 20; textalign C; fontsize 16 20; font id; bgcolor 1 1 1 0.5; fill; } Score_NME { rect 0 460 32 20; textalign C; fontsize 16 20; font id; bgcolor 0 1 0 0.5; fill; }
That is just a short snippet of some of the mentioned modifications. Look at the file, and you get the rest. If you just want to do this then download what I have done from here, or work with the closest approximation to a great OSP hud, namely hud2.
HardCore
There are a few more things to tune down that most quakers still do. This is by no means a necessity, and if you do not like how it looks, better stick with the above settings (and the ones from the r_ visual guide), as they actually look good and are useful. Anyway, continuing in the style of the downtuning section:
r_picmip blurs your textures. This is good by sort of the same argument as simple items, except in reverse. It is just easier to look for complex model skins and rockets (possibly without smoke trails) against a more constant background like a blurred out wall, but to be honest a lot of people play with 1, and you should be ok with that. There is certainly no need to go beyond 5 or probably even 3. Zero, on the other hand is just way too detailed.
Now to make picmip work in your favour, you need to define what you do not want to picmip out via cg_nomip. I prefer certain things mipped, and some not, and my value is 192 vs the default 1023 which says everthing but walls are nomipped (for more info on this check cpma/docs/client.txt). Additionally, I like a weird mix of picmip 3 and no bilinear or trilinear filtering (basically no opengl, so pixels) that I picked up from ic-BELTH on a LAN years and years back.
This pixel hell I found looks best with only cg_nomip on certain things, and with different r_mapover-/brightbits, r_gamma and r_vertexlight settings (192,7,1,1.4 respectively).
Behold, the horrible result:
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If you do find this intriguing, then you still might want to keep nice settings. Thus I will include a script from my new config that changes my play modes, and if accepting a second request, also changes to my hardcore settings (or back from) with 2 key presses.
set nogl "r_texturemode GL_NEAREST; r_picmip 3; r_vertexlight 1; r_mapoverbrightbits 7;r_overbrightbits 1; r_gamma 1.4;cg_railstyle 4;vstr unbindz; vid_restart" set startgl "r_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR; r_picmip 1; r_vertexlight 0; r_mapoverbrightbits 2; r_overbrightbits 4; r_gamma 1;cg_railstyle 2;vstr unbindz;vid_restart" set unbindz "echo ^7Do not want.;unbind k; unbind l" set tdm "cg_drawcrosshairnames 1;cg_noteamchatbeep 0;cg_nochatbeep 1; cg_drawgun 0;ch_file cluxTDM;wait 5; reloadHUD; echo ^7TDM settings (K to additionally exec nogl, L to ignore);bind k vstr nogl; wait 5; bind l vstr unbindz;set clientmode vstr 1v1" set 1v1 "cg_drawcrosshairnames 0;cg_noteamchatbeep 0;cg_nochatbeep 0; cg_drawgun 0;ch_file clux1v1;wait 5;reloadHUD; echo ^71v1 settings (K to additionally exec nogl, L to ignore);bind k vstr nogl; wait 5; bind l vstr unbindz;set clientmode vstr demo" set demo "cg_drawcrosshairnames 0;cg_noteamchatbeep 1;cg_nochatbeep 1; cg_drawgun 2;ch_file cluxNICE; wait 5;reloadHUD; echo ^7NICE settings (K to additionally exec startgl, L to ignore);bind k vstr startgl; wait 5;bind l vstr unbindz;set clientmode vstr tdm"
I will quickly walk you through it. Each block in there is supposed to be one line in your config unwrapped. unbindz is the token script for removing binds to K and L (which are my response buttons). nogl simply starts hardcore mode, whereas startgl fixes it back to normal again. Both these scripts can only be called (unless manually) by the K button when it is appropriate, and if you chose to execute them, then you will unbind both the response keys at the end.
Now 1v1, demo, and tdm are my scripts for which mode I want to play in. They all execute different superhuds (some slight differences in team chats and stuff to display for the nice mode), and do some slight mode specific changes. If you would also like to start the hardcore nogl or to revert from it (depending on which case you are in), press K, otherwise press L and both response keys will be unbound so you don't accidentally hit this key in a match.
Anyway, to avoid changing anything at all, you may work from my config found here.
clux.cfg goes in /baseq3 whereas clux1v1, cluxTDM and cluxNICE all go in /cpma/hud just to be absolutely clear.
This, combined with the other visual guide really should provide the fundamentals for a good quake config - covering most of the questions that I get asked most often. Hope this has been helpful to some.
As this writeup took me a lot longer than expected... Though still, feel free to correct any erroneous statements or grammar
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Having revamped my config in the advent of the new challenge quake 3 exe, I thought I'd share my discoveries on what actually controls the quake 3 visuals as well as what now is irrelevant.
Note, this guide only works for the latest challenge quake3 exe. Get it here (current v = 1.46, if I know you, you probably do not have it).
Here are the essentials
//monitor related cvars r_displayrefresh 0 r_swapInterval 0 //vsynch off r_fullscreen 1 r_mode -1 r_Width 1280 r_Height 960 //these 6 control contrasts and brightness r_ignorehwgamma 1 //use desktop gamma r_mapoverbrightbits 2 r_overBrightBits 4 r_intensity 1.7 //this needs a vid_restart on load as well r_gamma 1.0 r_fullbright 0 //worth noting. can dramatically change colors at 1. //rendering methods and lights r_vertexLight 0 //animated light effects on walls on when 0 r_dynamiclight 0 r_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR r_picmip 1 r_lodbias 0 //gun & model picmip r_fastsky 0 //turns off sky at 1 //filtering r_ext_max_anisotropy 16 //Anisotrophic filtering r_ext_multisample 16 //Anti-aliasing
Notes:
1. Displayrefresh can be set manually, but if it exceeds the maximum value for your monitor the game will revert to windowed.
2. Mode dictates what display resolution you run, leave at -1 and you are in custom mode and specify height and width instead.
3. Roughly speaking, the brightbits commands control contrasts, and gamma + intensity controls brightness.
4. IgnoreHWgamma 1 gives you your desktop gamma again. I recently converted this from 0 as then every time I alt-tabbed out (something you can do naturally and quickly with challenge q3 without having q3minimizer installed) the quake 3 gamma carried over burning out all my colors in windows. Now, this actually works.
5. Texturemode is now set at the best (trilinear filtering) but I personally like to play with this setting on GL_NEAREST (pixellated)
6. Picmip = texture blurring. 0 = off, 1 looks best imo. 3 good for competitive playing.
7. Dynamiclight can give you special lights on quad carriers reflecting off walls, useful in team games, but it is off here. Read the client.txt under cpma/docs for more info.
8. Antialiasing and anisotrophic filtering can be set pretty much as high (though up to 16 max I think) as your gfx card can take, and q3 is old, so 16 is usually good. I run the above settings with 333 fps without a drop.
Conclusion
That is really all you need to make quake 3 look good. To experiment, all most people really change is the brightbits/intensity/vertex lights/picmip settings. The right combination of these will define your unique quake look.
Put these in your nick.cfg in baseq3 (or whatever it is called) and start cnq3.exe with +exec nick.cfg as a parameter. A good idea would be to put vid_restart on the very last line in your config, I found this helped with getting r_intensity to load correctly (but it will take an extra second to load quake).
Migrating Configs?
If you are migrating configs, I would chuck out all other r_ commands from your file try with your settings for the above first. If you do want some other settings, here are some more obscure r_ commands that are in my config for the next 5 minutes only. They are all set at current cpma defaults (and thus also unnecessary) and with the rate of development on the cnq3.exe some of these are likely to change or be removed in newer versions. Regardless, here are some of these commands with a short explanation (based on the sparse information I could find on each) for each command.
r_subdivisions 4 //higher values subdivides curvy walls into sets of linear segments r_finish 0 //sync every frame r_ignoreGLErrors 1 //supresses errors r_flares 0 //apparently certain dynamic lights have flares, never found these, left at default value r_roundImagesDown 0 //how textures are resized 0,1,2. 0 best. r_smp 0 //dual processor thing for win2k or NT, fucks up opacity on w7 r_customaspect 1 //for wide, this determines whether or not to stretch a 4:3 generated frame or to actually get the right one (i think) r_stencilbits 0 //supposed to control shadows r_stereo 0 //stereoscopic visuals off r_detailtextures 1 //best quality textures //these 3 are often set to 32,24 or 16, but 0 gives optimum afaie r_colorbits 0 r_depthbits 0 r_texturebits 0
Finally, the following cmnds should just be removed from your config altogether. All but that the specified one below are actually dead settings. They will show up in your console as invalid command (unless you set them as your own variables with 'set' in front).
r_ext_texture_env_add r_ext_compiled_vertex_array r_ext_multitexture r_ext_gamma_control r_ext_compress_textures r_rail* //other cmds for rail styles in docs now r_lastValidRenderer r_dlightBacks r_glDriver r_ignoreFastPath r_drawSun r_facePlaneCull r_primitives r_lodCurveError //actually just cheat protected r_allowExtensions r_simpleMipMaps r_offsetFactor r_offsetUnits r_logfile r_showcluster
Also, if anyone sees any mistakes (grammatical or something relating to the cvars) please let me know.
NB: If you copied my quake 3 this christmas then make sure you delete zz-rman-flu1d03.pk3 from baseq3. This is what makes the guns look shit. Don't know how that got in there.
Now done: Part two of this visual guide - competitive visuals, is now done.
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Is done, unless I can find some more places to improve. Fortunately, I think there's such a small gap for improvement so if I don't get it in the next few days or so, I will finish this haphazard gaming project. I'll try to stitch the original captures together in one high quality avi and find some hosting soon. In the mean time here are the time table. Note, this is done on easy difficulty with all items. Speed was the only focus.
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1'39''667 - Astral Acadedemy
2'10''967 - Academy Hallways
1'24''967 - Wolvercote Catacombs
1'07''133 - Dragon Graveyard
1'31''367 - Crystal Caverns
1'29''800 - Crypt of the Damned
1'43''100 - Forsaken Dungeons
1'14''367 - Throne of the Lost King
1'39''167 - Fangle Forest
1'04''767 - Shadowthorn Thicket
2'14''200 - Ruins of the Perished
1'08''967 - Heartland Mines
1'57''767 - Bramblestoke Village
2'20''100 - Iron Forge
1'00''033 - Tower of Sarek
23'46''369 - Trine
The game is great fun. Ninja rope in a 2D platformer, I shouldn't need to say more. It is like playing a more sophisticated part of worms 2. If you haven't played it, and plan on playing it, maybe you shouldn't watch these. Otherwise, embrace the hypnotism of the eternal swinging ninja rope and triangle flying.
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Having programmed a few ridiculous (I thought) examples of linear algebra gone wild in my C optimization course I thought I would share some insight into what your computer does.
I will not go into the maths much, but matrices and vectors are the foundations of linear algebra. It’s used constantly for rendering graphics, and to find solutions of equations (also happens a lot in virtually every area in your life, but you don’t really think much about it). What you do in linear algebra, are based upon these primary operations in an n-dimensional space.
1.Vector products (two sets of n-coordinates multiplying one by one and summing them up) requires n additions and multiplications.
2.Matrix-vector multiplication (generates a new vector via a dot product operation on each vector element) requires n^2 multiplications and additions, which is tedious on paper even for n>5.
3.Matrix-Matrix multiplication (generates a new matrix via a dot product for each of the n^2 elements) requires n^3 multiplications and additions. This gets tedious on paper for n>3.
We are doing the latter in our project, the heaviest operations, in a space of n=3200 dimensions. That means we are doing 3200^3 multiplications; roughly 33 million operations. Now, we are using these multiplications to somehow calculate some properties of this 3200*3200 matrix (namely the eigenvalues) so we do this (and a bunch of other necessary stuff, but comparatively negligible) and wrap it in a for loop for it to run for 100 iterations.
Get that. Just that matrix, which has 3200*3200 elements, each using 8 bytes of storage, demands a total of around 80MB for itself (not mentioning its factors) and 33 million multiplications to calculate. We do this 100 times; over 3 billion multiplications. This corresponds to 3 gigaflops (3*10^9 floating point operations). A 2008 quadcore CPUs could do 80gigaflops per second! So assuming you do not run out of memory and have one of these new great CPUs; what the fuck does your computer actually do when it lags? It must do something more than 30 times more demanding than that! Your video game must require more than 90 billion multiplications per second to render.
Take a step back and think about the utter insanity that machine you use for your porn is capable of.
for it owns you
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This might end up spamming my blog to bits, so I will just leave this here for now.
Fangle Forest, Dragon Graveyard and Iron Forge [now 36 secs faster than 4 days ago] all down with very little possible improvement left on each. This is usually my goal. Last run done today after having my presentation over and done with, i.e. this is me de-stressing.
Edit: Now also with bramblestoke and academy hallways.
Trine Speedrun Playlist.
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There really should be a proper run for this; I mean a relatively short 2D platform with ninja rope should be synonymous with speed.
There was apparently an effort to do this back in July, but after patching an exploit that allowed endless flying was nerfed via a patch I think it just stopped. The flying wasn't even that fast. Ninja rope is faster, but more difficult. A good run should still be possible and fun to do. I made this yesterday on Tower of Sarek. Took me a while, but at 1:00 it's 12 seconds better than the previous best.
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Hello and welcome to clux.org.
This is indeed my blog, the name and my name attached to all the posts should be a dead giveaway. It was recently redone for friend support (to have accounts) but it's still mainly my site for link archiving and testing out web design and scripts. Hope you like what you see, there are quite a few easter eggs : )
If you have any feedback, bug reports, questions or comments, goto the clux.org V2 post and comment. I would greatly appreciate it!
Due to the self coded hobby nature of my website: IE (any version) => you're gonna have a bad time. It's been tested for full support on newest webkit browsers + firefox. But really, anything but IE should work.
"No doubt these texts will prove to be an embarrassing legacy, but I must order my thoughts herein, lest they spill from my accursed mind."
- Gender Male
- Country England
- Website $this
- Games Quake 3, TrackMania
- Spoken Languages English, Norwegian, 1337
- Programming Languages PHP, JS, SQL, CSS, HTML
- CPU Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
- RAM 4GB 800MHz DDR2
- GFX Card 8800 GT 1GB PCI-E
- Mouse & MouseMat G3 / Allsop
- Headphones Sennheiser HD595
- Soundcard Xonar Essence STX
- Operating System TinyXP
- Connection 10Mbit ADSL