Here is my QC style custom hud I made in superhud editor. my goal is to have it working in spearmint.
I cannot reply to my previous comments about editing the hud in this thread: Flexible HUD Mod for ioq3 - #17 by zturtleman, so I had to make a new post.
from what i gather, i will have to edit the engine by inserting the code that allows it to run scripted huds, however i am wholly inexperienced with this. the extent of my experience lies in creation of the hud.
it would be nice to get my hud working in a nice clean spearmint install instead of cpma and really would appreciate the help.
If you play Quake 3: Team Arena (on vanilla Quake 3, ioquake3, or Spearmint), there is built in custom HUD support (the achieved rfactory.org tutorials I linked just talks about code changes for ideas for improving it). I don’t know of a GUI editor for Team Arena HUDs though.
CPMA uses a different format for custom HUDs than Quake 3: Team Arena. I found some documentation here. CGame mod code changes would be needed to support CPMA HUDs. It has control for many elements that Team Arena HUDs cannot change. rfactory.org is no help for CPMA HUD support. Adding support for this would be difficult if one is not familiar with C programming and Quake 3 modding.
that makes sense.
I’ve just settled with the vanilla hud, i’m running 1.01 and i must say so far i really like it. the weapon z axis is a little sucked in and i cannot change that with the available weapon fov adjustments, so where in ioq3 the weapon length is more visible in spearmint they’re too far back, or, they simply aren’t adjustable within that axis. setting fps to 144 results in 166 but i’ve seen that before in other engines.
everything feels great though, i really like it. here it is in action: Quake III Arena - Alien Temple - YouTube
so now i’m having another weird problem with spearmint. i was able to change fonts by simply dropping a new font into the font folder. i was running liberation sans, but then droped in kairos from quake champions which worked. however now, out of nowhere, it doesn’t work. i drop a font into the folder, boot q3, and the oem font remains. this is maddening since i just had it working and i didn’t change anything. i cannot find find any cvars to seta a specific font. what the hell is going on? i just want it to run whatever font i drop in the folder. out of frustration i literally just copied every single font from my fonts folder in win to the font folder in spearmint and still the oem font remains.
EDIT: never mind i found it, it’s ui_menuFont, which needs to be set to whatever font you’re using.
i started renaming whatever i dropped in to liberationSans which for some reason became glued into the ui variables although i definitely do not remember setting it. but anyway it works now.
i need to find the person who wrote spearmint so i can ask them why they weren’t able to add custom hud support, like what’s the difference between spearmint and q3 plus or excessive that enables custom hud support and why it won’t work with spearmint. i really hope it was just a technical limitation and not intentional, or something they just didn’t think of. would be strange to write such a good engine, but intentionally gimp hud support. if i could get them to recompile it with hud support i wouldn’t have to use a different engine, although i have noticed bots are particularly sticky in some maps with spearmint where they aren’t in other builds. however i like spearmint and would liike to keep using it but i won’t be able to as long as i’m unable to run the quake champions hud i made that works in q3+ and cpma.
i really hope they’re able to fix the hud support and recompile it. i can’t understand why anyone would actually intentionally not want hud support, so it must be some kind of limitation. i had to squeeze the numbers by using paint 3d to stretch the canvas without stretching the graphic so that the characters became squished down. i had to use the same technique to fix the squishing of the weapons icons.
this is the qc mod so far. as you can see missing the hud really sucks lol.
are you the one who made spearmint? i just looked for that person and apparently it’s you?
either way i don’t mean to insult your compile i’m just frustrated by the lack of custom hud support on vanilla-like engines. i tried using q3 plus, but now it’s having issues such as it isn’t displaying custom models until you get close to them, and something seems to be missing visually compared to spearmint, where the graphics are altogether very clean and stunning. maybe it’s just placebo, idk.
Yes, I made Spearmint; primarily for creating new games/mods using the C programming language and not for playing Quake 3. I agree custom HUD support would be nice.
Background
I previously mentioned Spearmint supports Team Arena and when running it you can use Team Arena’s HUD text definition system without programming or compiling anything. I don’t love this system; it’s not possible to perfectly remake the standard Q3 HUD, many things on the HUD cannot be changed, and it’s hard to make a HUD without based on it on Team Arena’s HUD (which cannot be used for new standalone games). Quake Live’s HUD system is based on Team Arena and there are a lot of custom HUDs; they’re not compatible with Team Arena / Spearmint but the HUD system itself is viable.
I never got around to making a new HUD definition system (for baseq3 and Team Arena). I suspended development on Spearmint to make a new engine from scratch (that doesn’t run Quake 3). It’s unlikely I will add a new HUD definition system to Spearmint in the future. If I add one to baseq3, it would likely be the Team Arena HUD system.
CPMA
CPMA HUD system (which I didn’t know existed until this thread) is not as simple to add as “recompiling” (e.g., running the command make clean release). The CPMA code is not available under a compatible license. It would have to be re-written from scratching using documentation and testing CPMA behavior.
It’s also likely that CPMA HUD system can’t do everything and people will ask for more features. It doesn’t look like it supports Team Arena or aspect correct at any aspect (in a way that works with Spearmint’s splitscreen). It also appears to be less customizable than Team Arena’s HUD system in some ways.
I don’t have any interest in adding CPMA HUD system to Spearmint. It’s time consuming work to remake and the end result is still too limited in my opinion. The CPMA HUD system would need to be extended and I don’t know if the general design is even worth using.
Spearmint HUD modding
Ways to change the HUD on Spearmint: learn C programming to change the source code for mint-arena’s baseq3 HUD (code/cgame/cg_draw.c) or use the Team Arena HUD definition system (cg_hudFiles “ui/hud.txt” cvar, missionpack/pak0.pk3/ui/hud.txt, missionpack/pak0.pk3/ui/hud.menu).
If you want to make a total conversion, it would work best to learn C programming and modify the source code which allows changing the HUD and applying any other changes you want. Of course you could implement CPMA HUD system if you feel strongly about wanting to allow players to customize the HUD using that system.
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yeah, i ended up moving away from cpma since it’s locked down. so far your engine has been hands down the absolute best vanilla engine yet.
i have been pulling my hair out recently trying to figure out how to make font1_prop and font1_pro_glo.tga just stay white, instead of turning that ugly yellow color. i did manage to figure out how to make the hud numbers stay white by simply deleting the rgbvertex entry for each number in the script, and also figured out how to shrink them by using paint3d to stretch the canvas size without stretching the image. since the object dimensions in the hud aren’t editable, that’s the only way around it i could find, but you can’t change the space between the letters. only can shrink the height.
here’s the work i’ve done so far for a complete drop in vanilla conversion. that’s keeping everything vanilla so that old schoolers like me who want that pure q3 experience with just an audio visual mod can enjoy a modernized q3 with qc aspects. i absolutely loooove hunting down obscure old school gothic maps that were well textured with good gameplay like the eternal prisoner, or castle leir… but with a modern qc touch.
however, there does seem to be an interest in basically writing a full blown quake champions in idtech 3, but keeping the graphics within the limitations of the engine. there’s actually pretty high quality models available, but mapping can only be pushed so far. considering the work that was done with blood covenant, it seems evident that many more maps can be replicated in q3.
a new menu system, and a revised character selection system where you click on the main vanilla character, and a sub menu opens containing a list of selectable skins, and the same for the bot selection. this gets rid of the main window inconvenience and cleans it up a bit. a custom bot icon when clicked would drop the same submenu, full of the custom bots and their respective sub skins.
the logic of using a tree instead of putting everything in one big window would be so much better. similar to the qc system but ofc not as complicated with less options since the q3 version would be missing all the extra fluff like lootboxes and such. runes would be possible though, a rune collection system that rewards the player with rank, which really is just asthetic. but from the grave and the other rewards could exist.
i’ve been asking around and it seems there’s a demand for this, and I’d love to be part of it, but I’d also like to hear from the devs, considering we’re about 4 years into the assets being all over the internet and youtube, qcde growing into a sizeable community, and qc being relegated mostly to esports competitions. it seems people are still going back to quake live for quick matches, as playing qc usually involves a ritual where the user needs to dedicate a lot of time waiting for it to load and waiting for a match, and for people who want to just play against bots, they must go through a gatekeeper. i can’t play qc without connecting to their serves which makes my fps dependent on how good my crappy network is going to perform at whatever given time i attempt to play.
another issue that’s killing qc is the lack of mapping support. if they would have went with a hybrid financial model, allowing mappers to utilize texture assets and submit competitions where their maps earn royalties it would have led to an explosion of mapping support and quite possibly a q3 renaissance so it would be nice to have a q3 version we can bang around in that isn’t a complete replacement for qc so the franchise can live on.
i would love to tackle this project but learning how to code would be a bit much right now with the tests i have coming up so i’ll have to wait till mid summer or so to start on it.
but yeah i figured there must have been some kind of technical limitation otherwise you’d have obviously given it hud support. i’m not sure if you’ve done something to increase the visual goodness here and it could be all in my head, but it seems other ioq3 versions and older engines aren’t as smooth and visually dopamine inducing. but again it could be all in my head.
one thing i really wanna figure out is how to get realtime lighting in idtech3 but also have the models glow so that for example an armor isn’t darkened by the shadow, but glowing. iirc realtime lighting also affects simple items so you couldn’t just use sprites to get around it.
this is the font i’m trying to change. not bigchars, but font1_prop and font1_prop_glo, and font2_prop.
this is the original font
this is the custom font
as you can see they look spot on, but when using the one i made all you get is hieroglyphics.
this is the og old school bigchars file, also the only one that the online font gen makes:
i have tried using this q3font program to no avail, it just spits out font files that don’t even work, and definitely doesn’t create literally the only file i want, the font1 and font2 files. this has gotten quite silly indeed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090105193618/http://rfactory.org/q3font.html
so i really don’t get it. how the hell are people making this damn file? obviously people are making them for their mods, even acid arena has custom font1_prop files, yet i have searched and searched and it’s like it never existed. this should be as simple as finding whatever app they’re using. what are they using?