I've just spent quite some time chasing down a visual weirdness and performance bug, only to discover that the cause of it was that a mod had stuffcmd'ed a change to gl_texturemode behind my back. The mode was invalid for the currently available selections in DirectQ (subtle differences between the way OpenGL and D3D handle texture filtering modes), which caused it to revert to some bizarre combination of I don't know what kind of filtering.
Global message to mod authors everywhere: don't do this kind of thing. You may prefer a certain setting for gl_texturemode, but chances are that the player prefers a different one. Even worse, the setting you prefer might not work on the player's hardware. It might just cause things to run slowly, or it might even crash.
In other words, settings like gl_texturemode belong to the PLAYER, not to the mod. Behaving as if it was othewise is just showing disrespect to the person who took the time (and possibly expense) to download and run your mod.
As a rule of thumb, if whether or not a setting works depends on an unknown factor that you have no control over, it's probably a damn good sign that you should keep well away from it.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that checking your current settings is always a good idea if weird things currently start happening for no apparent reason. Arising from this I'm probably going to expose gl_texturemode via the video options menu. It seems to me that as well as being a player-friendly way to expose settings, a menu is also a heck of a good way for everybody to check the current values of several settings all in one place.
For the record, no, I don't know which mod it was. I frequently test with a very wide range of mods, downloading virtually everything as it becomes available, and switching between 4 or 5 and back again in the course of a single testing session. It could have been anything.
Next time we'll have an update on a much more positive note (as soon as I stop chewing bullets over this).
Monday, June 21, 2010
The evil that mods do (part 666)
Posted by
mhquake
at
8:38 PM
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3 comments:
Okay, I've been running directQ with Transfusion 1.01 since 1.8.3a. The tfn bot game has loaded fine with each version until 1.8.4.
1.8.4 runs the demos fine. It's when I select a bot game I get a crash-to-desktop. I know I need to send an error report, I just need to find where directq keeps them.
-Z
Here's good enough. I have Transfusion 1.01 and you've given me enough info to reproduce it, so I'll see what I can do to fix that. :)
It's a shame you don't know, really, as that's something that you should be naming and shaming for...
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