When playing some older maps on Chocolate Quake I’ve noticed some maps have draw distance/clipping issues where the void is visible. You can see this in the screenshot attached below which was taken from lbase.zip.
My guess is this distance is set prior to compiling the map but when I checked another map with the same issue (pagan3.zip) I couldn’t see where this was set. I would have guessed it was set on the worldspawn entity but I really have no idea. lbase also has an issue where some entities like health pickups would disappear if you get a short distance away from them.
Doing some searching I saw on the Quake Wiki that ‘Far clip distance’ is an engine variable but I couldn’t find anything else about it. I’m curious to know how all this works / why it happens.
Thanks for the info but gl_farclip isn’t a cvar in vanilla DOS Quake. I’m confused as to why different maps seem to have different values for far clip.
Not exactly. Predefined values for far clip has sourceport engine, not map. Increasing gl_farclip is only necessary for really huge maps.
Lets look at your maps.
The Lost Base
Small, leaked linear Base map.
The main word here is “leaked“ - it means that map is poorly built and this is the reason why You encountered visual issues. It seems to be the second map has something like this.
You also may try this great but sadly broken map that has the same issue:
This is not far clip but old time "greyflash" rather. Unfortunately web search is broken nowadays so I cannot find the good old canonical tutorials on it. Maybe r_maxsurfs and/or r_maxedges and check out r_speeds.
Thank you, Spirit! One can only guess how the rabbit hole dip is! I never playing Quake betveen 1997 and 2017 and absolutely missed such a problem, thanks to developers of modern sourceports already prudently prevented the emergence of various problems and continue to do so, carefully adapting engines to modern maps. This 20 – years jump was the insane hard work of developing! But for the one who playing now on vintage hardware and vanilla soft some extra efforts and additional knowledge is required (in case You are not old enough
Ahhhh, that makes a lot of sense now! So since the map has a leak the game is trying to render too many surfaces at once and hitting the r_maxurfs/maxedges limits. I’ll check it out with r_speeds and see what it looks like. Thanks heaps Spirit and Calluna for answering my question.
