Thursday, April 29, 2010

Quake Standards Group


Quakesrc.org redirects to and is apparently parked by an Israeli ISP of some kind or another:

I figured I would post links to the archived versions and duplicated content as I come across them.
For the old tutorials: http://www.quake-1.com/docs/quakesrc.org/
For the site itself, the last useful copy on the web archives is: http://web.archive.org/web/20071027092929rn_1/www.quakesrc.org/news/
After that date the archive doesn't have much except for a splash page about the site going down and/or SQL errors.
Given that the quakesrc forums were where most of the useful information actually was (far beyond the few things that actually got made into tutorials), here is a direct link to them from that date: http://web.archive.org/web/20071010020551/www.quakesrc.org/forums/
The links within the forum don't work, but they should give you an idea what to search for within web.archive.org.
While searching for the quakesrc.org information, I discovered that Pat Aftermoon (frequent quakesrc contributor) already has something like this up on his site: http://www.aftermoon.net/quakesrc-index.html.
Additionally, this inside3d thread provides a bunch of useful information: http://forums.inside3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=9633&sid=1fa0162e83342ddf810f9e45b89fb49f
I hope that somebody finds this useful. When I get some time, I might try to extricate my Bleeding Eye Studios forum and see what I (NeVo) had in there (I still have the vast majority of the code for my Quake2 project, but I do not recall where I left off). L

Visual Studio 2010

The install process took about 90 minutes, not counting the help files that are downloading now. The Help Library Manager is actually a nice tool, but its functionality should really be integrated into the VS installer instead of adding an extra step. It is not necessary to download the help files, as they are simply local versions of what is online, but I personally feel that they will be useful in the event of an internet outage or if I am not in a location with net access… essentially any scenario where I would not have access to the internet. Given that the NYC subway system lacks cellular and internet access for some reason (it is only the capital of the world and we are only in the 21st century) this scenario might be common enough for me. Following the installation of VS2010, yet another reboot is required, which is not really a big deal considering that Windows 7 boots fast enough, but still annoying. In my case, the option to 'Reboot Later' is grayed out inexplicably. The help installer seems to take forever, with the caption on the progress bar (which is not moving) vaguely stating that it is 'merging indexes' (shouldn't it be indices?). The next step is the DirectX SDK (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/directx/default.aspx). I am currently installing the February 2010 edition, but the next one is slated for June (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/directx/ff632024.aspx) which will add official VS2010 support, a few random but useful Direct3D enhancements, and a bunch of housekeeping. Although I don't foresee doing anything so crazy with DirectX that it won't work in VS2010, there are no guarantees that anything I do will work so I may have to use VS2008 to compile in the interim (messy and inconvenient).

Setup of Visual Studio 2010

So today, I am installing Visual Studio 2010 Professional. The installer runs smoothly, but requires a reboot as it installs updates to the .NET Framework and so on. I have already installed the most recent version of the Windows SDK (although it crapped out with an unidentified 'Fatal Error', everything seems to be in place), and I will be installing the DirectX February 2010 SDK shortly. I've got my SVN repository setup already, and I'm planning on getting to work as soon as I get everything else installed… the VS2010 installer is definitely not fast (perhaps they should use an install images similar to what they use for Windows now – I'm pretty sure that Windows 7 installs faster (minus the updates, of course)).

Who Am I

I am a computer-programming hobbyist. I have some formal training in Computer Science; however, the stuff they teach you in school seems to have little to no application in real-world programming. Once upon a time I deconstructed the Quake 2 GPL engine and ran an ill-fated 3.22 update project on QuakeSrc.org (the Quake Standards Group) – unfortunately, nobody else wanted to contribute to the project and the icculus.org version of Quake 2 superseded my project in spirit. Reading through the Quake 2 source page by page, function by function, and tracing the execution path from WinMain onward taught me orders of magnitude more about coding than any university ever could (especially because my university at the time switched from Java to Scheme… can you get any more useless?). Real life, by which I mean the war, interrupted my Quake 2 project and all of my other programming endeavors; however, I am now in a situation where I can dabble in it again at my leisure. A description of the systems I will be using to code is in order I suppose:

2x Windows 7 x64 4 GB RAM systems with dual core processors (1x AMD and 1x Intel) and DirectX 10.1 video cards (1x ATI and 1x Nvidia).

Subversion Server hosted on my Windows Home Server by VisualSVN, running TortoiseSVN and AnkhSVN for clients for Windows Explorer and Visual Studio respectively.

My IDE on both systems is Visual Studio 2010.

For concurrency, I will primarily be using Intel Threading Building Blocks, although I am open to alternatives.

The project I am currently putting together will be closed source, although I may release code snippets to the public domain as I see fit.

Time for me to get to the setup of my systems…