69 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
69 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
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This is the last major component of the quake utilities to be released. To
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be honest, I have been a little reticent to release this because most of the
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actual qc code is basically rather embarassing crap. The time never became
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available to even give it a good top to bottom going over. I never spent
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any quality engineering time on my parts, American wrote a lot of qc code,
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and even Romero has a bit of work in there. It is a mess. If you look
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through the code and occasionally think "This is stupid!", you are probably
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right...
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The compiler itself can be drastically sped up by just replacing the symbol
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searches with binary trees or hashing. We remotely compile on our alpha, so
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it hasn't been a big enough issue for me to do it, but as the code size
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grows and grows it will be done sooner or later.
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The resulting code is horribly nieve and space ineficient (twleve bytes /
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instruction). If common subexpression removal was added, the instruction
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count could probably be cut nearly in half. I would have liked to have done
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a better job at this, but this was my first compiler front end, and I had a
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ton of other things fighting for my time. The next one will turn out
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better. (wow, I'm making a lot of excuses here, aren't I?)
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Qcc also performs some other maintenence functions for us, like rebuildinng
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all the brush models and making pak files, but those functions are only
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usefull if you have created all new data for everything. models.qc and
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sprites.qc don't actually generate any code, they are just parsed by
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modelgen and spritegen and included for completeness.
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To modify the quake program code, set up a new game directory parallel with
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id1, and containing a "progs" subdirectory. Copy all the .qc files and
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progs.src into that, and just run qcc from that directory. That will
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compile all of the files listed in progs.src and (if there aren't any
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errors) generate a new progs.dat file in the parent directory.
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As a simple test, open the client.qc file, go to the ClientObituary function
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at the end, and change some of the messages.
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The directory structure will look something like:
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/quake/quake.exe
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/quake/id1/
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/quake/mygame/progs.dat
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/quake/mygame/progs/progs.src
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/quake/mygame/progs/world.qc
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/quake/mygame/progs/client.qc
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/quake/mygame/progs/... etc ...
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Run quake with "-game mygame", which will cause quake to look for data in
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the mygame directory before falling back to id1. In this example, it will
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find the new progs.dat from mygame, and take everything else from id1. You
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can type "path" at the quake console to verify the current search order of
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directories and pak files. THIS WILL ONLY WORK WITH A REGISTERED VERSION OF
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QUAKE.
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The header qcc.h has the language spec and some documentation, but I'm not
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positive if it is all current.
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The only documentation for the various builtin functions I can offer is the
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source code used by quake. See builtin.c. Some of them are required to do
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things outside the scope of the qc world, and some are just there for speed
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reasons.
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PLEASE don't ask me questions about all this!
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John Carmack
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