Few changes to mvdsv (and to a lesser extent, ezquake & ktx) recently to support optional authentication, a way of giving some measure of proof that you are who you say you are. Not imagining that this will be extensively used at the moment, but it might be more useful in the future (tournament reporting, lgc/race/bloodfest records... potentially saving & sharing race routes across servers via your account, etc).

Short version:

• Once they've upgraded, you can connect to a servers linked to badplace and 'login' to your quakeworld.nu account, or if you wish, a badplace.eu account
• This is done by getting a generated password via private messages on quakeworld.nu, the 'challenges' dropdown on badplace.eu, or by the client retrieving the challenge for you (there is a limited time to complete this step)
• No landrush for nicks, you're forced to use your quakeworld.nu username
• Login and country flag is sent to clients via *login & *flag userinfo
• Latest ezQuake can load country flags and show them next to logged-in players on the scoreboard

Longer explanation here.

Still need to do some kind of authentication for old servers.

If it's useful then will develop it further & possibly replace with public/private keys but spent last 2 weekends on that and hit a brick wall with gpl libraries etc so have parked it for now. If it's not used then no harm done, we can remove.

Available for testing on london.badplace.eu, nl.badplace.eu

This is interesting on many levels.

For one, it can make streams more enjoyable to watch if players have their country flags next to their name. Secondly, could this potentially be developed into an auth-system that could be required for the server to allow you to enter the server? That should, unless I'm misunderstanding, prevent fake-nicking altogether, right?

On the flip side it would cause some issues for new players and nquake.com would have to have an elaborate explanation how to go about playing on servers, so maybe it's a bad thing, but I know the North American scene in particular dislike fake-nickers very much. In Europe it's so common, most of us don't even care, but this whole idea feels like it has tremendous potential.

As always, amazing work Meag. I assume I'd need the latest alpha to get the country flags to show up on my scoreboard from QTV? You might actually finally make me update my Stream-quake from 2.2.

Nice going meag!

Hopefully this will keep fakenickers away

rip grc

Have updated so that you can have simple variations of your username as your nick (redtext & upper/lower case letters)
This also makes checking usernames a bit stricter, so MEAG and meag are now considered duplicates

Fixed the broken link to the longer explanation link in Meag's first post. (still had the "in-test" part in the url)

Put the .apikey in quake/ezquake/configs or \quake\ezquake\configs

Nice little flag