Table of Contents
If you're an advanced user, or are thinking of setting up a server, you'll not be a stranger to editing text files and may find doing so to be more productive than using the menu as described in the previous chapter.
As part of the start-up procedure, the game looks for user settings in a number of files. autoexec.cfg is one of these files. By convention, it is the place where all AudioQuake-specific settings are kept. As the game starts, it reads this file and acts on the commands found in it.
There is another file, called config.cfg that is also read. This contains general Quake settings. The curious may want to read this file too, but it is beyond the scope of this book.
You can customise the way AudioQuake behaves by editing the file autoexec.cfg. This file can be found in your ~/.zquake/AudioQuake/ directory on Linux, or the AudioQuake folder where you installed AudioQuake if you're using Windows (if you used the default, that would make it C:\Program Files\AudioQuake\autoexec.cfg).
The file has a number of sections and has many comments in it to explain what each individual setting actually does. This part of the book will not repeat what is written in the file, but gives a general overview of what each section of the file is for.
To edit the file, you need to use a plain-text editor. Vim, Emacs, Nano or Notepad will do the job.
This section controls which objects and which features of these objects, are to be activated when the game starts.
If you use the toggle keys to turn things on/off and then complete a map, the settings you had at the end of the last one will be carried on to the new map.
This part of the file allows you to configure things like the detection distance, ESR and D5k field of view and if they are to make sounds when an item or enemy is outside of your field of view. You can specify the default player turning angle here, too (this is the angle the player turns when you press the left or right arrow key).
Here you can control how loud various sounds AudioQuake makes actually are. They act as “throttles” that AudioQuake will apply before it makes sounds. You can control the volume of all of the AudioQuake objects.
Key bindings just tell the game what you want to happen when you press a certain key on the keyboard. This section allows you to redefine which keys cause which things to happen in the game (such as toggling devices on/off or using the compass).
Bindings work by specifying a key and then the command that key is meant to activate. In Quake, these commands can be quite cryptic so we have added “aliases” for them. These aliases are much more readable names for the in-game commands and should make configuring AudioQuake much easier for you.