Thursday, October 29, 2009

W_LoadWadFile: couldn't load gfx.wad

Some people seem to have trouble with installing Quake properly. Granted, it's an old program from the DOS days when people were reasonably expected to be familiar with arcane crap like command-lines and directory structures, so this is perfectly understandable.

To resolve this, I've just given DirectQ the ability to be able to run the executable from anywhere on your PC (or network). You can even download the latest exe (when it becomes available - hyuk hyuk) to your desktop, open it and run it directly from the Zip file (thanks to the magic of Windows Compressed Folders) and it will find where you have Quake installed and just run away happily.

Those of you who have been paying attention will remember that I had something similar in my WinMHColour program, but this is the all-singing, all-dancing version. First it checks the current directory, then a few "well-known locations" (like C:\Quake) to see if it can find it fast. If it can't, it does a full traversal of your HD (which is actually quite fast) and all other drives (including network drives) to try find it (notifying you that it's searching so that you won't think the program has hung).

Finding Quake is just a matter of looking for some stuff in ID1: pak files, maps, models, cfg files and so on: basically the same code that I had previously used for detecting a game dir.

The real reason I wrote this was purely selfish. I move between PCs semi-regularly, and I find that VC++ will always lose the "Working directory" setting from the Debug properties. So it's a convenience for me that just happens to be a bonus for everyone else.

4 comments:

=peg= said...

heh, nice!

seems like 1.7.4 is gonna be a rather substantial upgrade ;)

mhquake said...

You noticed!

I'm actually thinking of bumping it to 1.8.0 on account of the amount of new stuff going in.

=peg= said...

1.8.0 makes sense to me ;)

Andy said...

I want to know how you bypassed the 1.6.66? Quite silly when id did, no doubt, but I still give them a +1 for having fun with patches.