I myself have modified my r_tele?.wav sounds. The ones you hear when you go thru tele or spawn. I picked the most noisy of those 5 sounds, deleted the other 4, created 4 copies of the chosen one, giving them names of the 4 deleted ones. Now all spawn/tele sounds are quite noisy. I use this for years so I don't remember if it really help anything. I've replaced some other sounds too, but after playing some games with them, I don't think they give any advantage to me.

But I'm still wondering about these 5 tele/spawn sounds. Do you guys without modified spawn/tele sounds think that it's possible that you don't hear (miss) some spawn sound during the game, because the random number generator has chosen to play the most silent one of the five sounds?

is that possible in ruleset smackdown?

I guess, sounds like a good idea too. Which one did you pick Johnny_cz?

empezar: yes it is. it's not checked by f_modified check.
peppe: the longest & loudest one.

Edit: That is sound/items/r_tele5.wav

tbh all sounds should be checked, at least when -rulset smackdown is used

should remake ruleset smackdown anyway :\

I'd consider this to be cheaty, f_modified should check this IMO.

Isn't this much like the custom mega pickup sound included in equake? I always thought that was a bit strange.

This seems quite weird. Is it possible to modify more sounds? Like picking up health sounds and what not.. :/

i've got an alternate sound effect for megahealth. i got it from the old forum and the sound is from megaman if i remember properly.

This is very wierd, see if you're allowed to modify sounds, you can have one loud sparky sound for spawns, and another high pitch noise sound for when someone passes through a teleport, OFCOURSE this should be treated as cheating.

No, you can't have, because the very same sound(s) is/are used for spawns AND teleports.

Btw, i think a better way would be to unrandomize the tele sounds, ie the same sound should be picked every time (and checked by f_modified). Luck shouldn't be a factor in this (if you can hear it or not), imo.

there are a lot of luck factors in qw

Yep, that's why i said what i said.

I can't agree with including all sounds in f_modified check. For example I have also modified gun sounds, I passed them thru some equalizer and reduced the bass level of them. Without this my head was going to blow after 40 minutes of QW (I wanted to listen to quality music when playing QW so I couldn't just lower bass level on my speakers/soundcard). I think that's the nice thing about Quake series that you can customize a lot of things. The f_modified check is about to determine the border between changes that give you unfair advantage over other players (so called cheats) and changes that just make your game more pleasant to you.
Iron: That's possible, but it's a change to the gameplay (kinda offtopic at the moment).

But does it really affect gameplay? Noone has answered my question yet! Is it possible that you sometimes miss the tele sound, because the most silent one was played??

And now, let's say I tune up the volume to some very high level, so I can hear even the most silent sound in QW. Ok, but after this, isn't this the same thing (my head is going to blow soon) as with the bass level of weapons I talked about in 1st paragraph?

a) you could probably just get bass and treble settings added to quake sound mixer


b) i don't think i've ever missed the sound but sometimes its harder to pinpoint which teleport it came from if the sound is quiet compared to other sounds (e.g. rockets) that are still sounding out


c) this isn't the same because there is an obvious drawback of the 'exploding head' that prevents people from just turning the volume to extreme levels. This is similar to the cl_rollangle / cl_rollalpha thing. You _could_ set really high rollangle but then that effects your own view so you lose something to gain something.

remove f_modified!

> a) you could probably just get bass and treble settings added to quake sound mixer
great idea btw
> For example I have also modified gun sounds, I passed them thru some equalizer and reduced the bass level of them.
Link to this sounds please =:-).

<IMHO> It give you little advantage. High noise mega and tele sounds make your like easy epsesially in duels </IMHO>

Another problem: FuhQuake dont have this checks. If we do it in ezQuake, then FuhQuake have advantage over ezQuake.

i actually vaguely remembered Goljat requesting this, and sure enough he did back in 2004 [link]

I too believe it's mostly a very slight advantage for those who modify/replace unchecked sounds to be more distinct and loud (mega can be heard much further away which could be considered a huge advantage on DM6). I don't believe there is the possibility of a "fix" for such a hack but seeing as it's been around for so long and is unlikely to be banned we probably have to live with it or even accept it (particularly due to FuhQuake being popular and likely won't get any updates and some competitions even still allow MQWCL to be used).

I've researched many gameplay and skill peak implications with various setups (hacks like replaced sounds as well as allowed modifications) and have come to the conclusion that not much actually makes a huge difference (besides the mega hearing distance advantage) but still there are many annoyances remaining in QW which restrict ones ability to achieve a perfectly optimised setup.

Regarding modifications I'd like to suggest an improvement for QW. To be blunt the lighting in QW is absolutely dire, it's pointless having dark and light areas in a multiplayer game like QW especially when it's seemingly there (these days anyway) only for visual effect while also negatively affecting visibility of non-world items such as rockets, trails, health, weapons, crosshair, etc especially when using darkish gamma settings to keep the world geometry lighting from being too extreme.

So regarding the lighting, I already "fixed it legally?" by making my own lit files with a global blue light, doing so effectively normalised the lighting making it effectively the same regardless of being in a dark or bright area. In otherwords, it's like having a fullbright map, except it isn't fullbright, it's more of a subdued fullblue map. It's still possible to see the blue quad glow in TP too although slightly less visible compared to using white lighting. Using these lit files allows me to use high gamma settings to ensure rockets, health, weapons, trails, and of course the crosshair is highly visible (as they all should be) and also means the visuals aren't "washed out". An extreme example of the benefits of such a setup would be on the ultrav map with it's bright blinding textures, not that I play that map, it's just an example of extreme bad lighting/texturing, ultrav is/was a UK played map, which is why I even know it exists, but some of you might not know of it.

Subdued blue world geometry also goes well with contrasting colors. For example a green crosshair, fullbright white blank enemy skin and a subdued white shaft beam works very well. Like I said though it's an optimised setup consideration, meaning it doesn't really give much of an advantage, it's more eliminating an annoyance in the game.

Also, something to consider that already exists in QW is using a low gl_shaftlight setting. The ability to subdue the brightness of the beam is a good example of how lighting changes can help players reach and easily maintain their shafting skill peak and to me it does so because it eliminates a visibility annoyance. I wonder how many players consider a subdued beam to to be an advantage or a disadvantage?

Anyone have thoughts on improving or even completely redoing the lighting to completely eliminate negative visibility?

huge first post!

oldman: I can't agree with such comparision. I don't think that people who have ears and head that can handle high volume gameplay for hours should be in an advantage.
But people who can still aim well with high rollangle have the 'skill' advantage in my opinion. I just don't want to destroy my ears because trying to win on all costs. Other thing is that you might also become 'dizzy' when playing with high rollangle for long time. (Again the 'safe your health' effect).
But still there is the 'skill' factor in aiming with rollangle while in hearing all sounds on high volume there's no 'skill' at all, that's why your comparision doesn't work.

disconnect: ezQuake would just report r_tele??wav modified and you would have problems defending yourself to newbie players that don't know the situation. Leagues would have to include list of allowed modified things in QW. (Something that wasn't necessary until now). After all accepted clients get updated, leagues can update the rules with those sounds. This is something that would take at least a year and there would be a lot of 'omg those ezQuake cheating users' whining.

strider: dm2, nailgun area, can you post a screenshot? (I'm not sure that I got it right from your words). I'm interested in this situation - you cannot see the corner of the pillar there unless there is a light from the rocket. Fighting an enemy who is standing up there is something that happens often to me.

Maybe it's worth a new topic. (Or I just don't see the connection with what I'm trying to discuss here.) Can you post it as a new topic? (I'm a moderator here but there's no possibility to move posts to new topics.)

Johnny: Even with a global light lit file, the black areas in the the map still exist. I would create a screenshot showing the fullblue map but atm my Linux PC isn't in operation as it waits to be upgraded. The point of it is to make the lighting uniform throughout the map rather than eliminate the black areas from the map although I believe it would be worthwhile eliminating black because it's utterly pointless due to the use of full bright skins. For me there really is no reason to make the world geometry black so why bother doing it is the question on my mind.

As for high volume vs low volume or replacing sounds. I completely agree, low volume sound recognition in QW is dire, making it other annoyance in QW. The QW sounds are low quality which just makes matters worse and to me it's partly why high volume is required to hear well positionally especially in duels.

Also the tele/spawn single sound hack is a very minor change with little benefit simply because all 5 sounds are practically useless. None of them are perfectly hearable especially at distance particularly due to the low quality and the positional recognition problem is especially noticable when a player quickly goes through a tele multiple times for example the GA tele on DM4. A perfect solution might be to replace all of the tele sounds just like with the mega sound (I use the one in def's QW setup) or edit them to be higher quality while also removing the silence in some of them but more importantly making sure the same tele/spawn sound isn't played twice in succession and that change could be added to either the server mod or the client.

Long ago, I used Windows for QW and I had my SB Live software dynamically modify the sounds with extra reverb or something like that, to help make the low quality sounds more acceptable. Back then I didn't realise just how much of an advantage that tweak gave me but, I was well known for hearing and making use of every sound in the game especially on my favourite duel map (DM4). I believed for a long time it was just because I was used to the sound cues in the game rather than I had improved the sounds but yeah it was the hack giving me the advantage. I do miss that option in Linux (not that I play much recently though) so yeah the best option might be, as mentioned by others above, to add sound manipulation options to QW and also it might be worthwhile to edit the sounds or use the higher quality sounds from the QW sound project (some editing of them would probably also be necessary to make some of the sounds less annoying and more distinquishable/hearable at distance) and give them to the players as an option. I suspect everyone would use them seeing as they would be a good thing.

Also, Johnny, it's probably about time to propose ezQuake be the defacto standard in QW to reduce the time it takes to accept refinements like enhanced sound. Fuhquake is dead development wise just like MQWCL was long ago. There's no tangible reason for players to use either of the old clients instead of the now fully accepted ezQuake so it's more a matter of what is done to take QW beyond these clients to help eliminate the use of anything but ezQuake. Jogi's coloured text for TP is a prime example of taking QW beyond other clients.

As for those that will come up with reasons for continuing to use Fuhquake or MQWCL, just consider them to be drama queens and call them drama queens repeatedly to make them go away instead of trying to reason with them. Also tell them strider said there isn't anything in any of the previously accepted clients that isn't already in ezQuake, be it features or "feel" differences, ezQuake has it all, and when I'm around I'll counter anything they might have to say with my infinite knowledge of the supposed differences in QW clients.

Forgot something else I meant to say. I understand there are good ties between the ezQuake and MVDSV developement people so that just leaves the KT Pro mod outside the same circle of developers (AFAIK anyway). So how about taking on KT Pro or that new thing that I read about KTX? making the defacto standard for QW (client/server/mod) under the same roof and all being open source too. It would stand you in good stead for making improvements to QW as a whole rather than client only or client + server changes.

Yeah, we need single client, single server and one or few mods which supports this client+server, so we can change/improve things widelly.

strider: I'm not the one who could somewhere 'propose' ezQuake as 'the one' and I'm also strongly against such idea. Look how bad it has gone when someone decided some other client is 'the one', how it slowed other things down. Also the idea of one server/client going hand to hand together can be interpreted in many awful ways. Maybe you should give an example what could such partnership bring us.
It's also good to make clear when you are about to change gameplay and when you are about to change something that just makes the game experience more comfortable. When does your change affect only new client? Will your change work on QWCL 2.33 client?
I'm kinda confused about your posts, I don't see where you are pointing, it seems to me like you are mixing 10 different ideas together, implying 20 different conclusions from them. But even such brainstorm can be good sometimes, thanks.

Now back to the topic.
From strider's post it's now clear to me that there are at least two modifications that give you real gameplay advantage over other players:
A) modified megahealth sound
B) modified tele/spawn sound (not in the way I described in my first post but as Strider described - higher quality sound, more loud)

What to do about those?
A) support the changed gameplay by spreading new sounds as much as we can (e.g. f/eQuake already contains modified megahealth sound)
B) catch the midification of such sounds in f_modified

I'm implicitly implying here that f_modified is some QW-wide standard here. Ofcourse we can check all sounds and list all modified ones, let anyone consider what is allowed and what is not. But I think most people 'feel' f_modified as some standard and what doesn't pass it is not accepted in any circumstances.

well you simply have to extend f_modified to give a more useful response

i.e.:
> f_modified
> all original id 100%
> 80% original id + qrsp
> 40% original id + qrsp + plague's pak
> 50% original id + non-verified player.mdl shaft.mdl quaddama.wav playerjmp1.wav backpack.mdl

etc.

we just need more checksums so we can differentiate between allowed custom models and ones that cannot be verified (i.e. self made hacked models)

Maybe you could add dynamics setting for sound.

To answer the question in topic; yes, it's an advantage. Everyone should use same sounds in competition.

Kalma: And same screen resolution. Come on...
oldman: sounds good