I'm having difficulty getting a mod to work properly

Quake
1

Hello my fellow Quake lovers!

I am very happy to have found this website! I am hoping to learn from everyone’s wisdom.
I apologize in advance for the length of this.

Here is my situation,
I am trying to get Block Quake to work properly as a separate shortcut.

The following paths are the two directories I have for my 2 Quake shortcuts:

The default Quake executable that comes installed through Steam in the .…\Quake\rerelease folder
uses the following path:
C:.…\Steam\steamapps\common\Quake\rerelease\id1

I made a shortcut of the Quake executable (named Block_Quake.exe) that comes installed through Steam in the .…\Quake\rerelease folder with the shortcut parameter -game Block, and it uses the following path:
C:.…\Steam\steamapps\common\Quake\rerelease\Block

When I launch Quake normally through Steam(or using the Quake executable in the rerelease folder), it launches the Remaster and it works fine.

When I launch my Block_Quake.exe, the standard Quake demo of E1M3 starts up fine and shows all the “Lego” models and weapons. However, when I go into the menu and start a new singleplayer game, I arrive at START and my weapon is back to the standard shotgun.
This also happens if I start new multiplayer games (coop, horde, deathmatch). It seems that the “Lego” models aren’t persisting.

Initially, I followed the instructions from this site: https://github.com/Kebby-Quake/block-quake

  1. Rename the Block-Quake pak3 to be called pak1
  2. Put both the pak1, pak2 into your Quake / rerelease / Id1 folder.
  3. Turn off the enhanced models in the Remaster’s display settings.

When I just follow these instructions, then Remastered launches from either Steam (or using the executable in the rerelease folder) just fine and is immediately in Block mode. And it persists through all the different game changes that I do.

If I then:
-Take this modded Id1 folder, rename it to Block
-Put an Id1 folder that has the original “Rerelease” guts in it back in the Rerelease directory
-Then point a Quake shortcut at the Block folder (-game Block), I run into the same Block “non-persistence” issue.

I’m aiming to have a Remaster shortcut and a Block shortcut.

I hope I’ve posted this in the correct place. I will happily repost somewhere else if I need to.

To any and all who read this, thank you for your time, patience and knowledge.

Covered in gibs,
Xeryn

2

I think that is because when you press New Game - Quake, the rerelease will load ID1 folder anyway. Same goes for choosing New Game - Scourge of Armagon loading stuff from HIPNOTIC folder, etc. And level select as well. Because of this, the BLOCK game/folder is discarded or “forgotten”.

I suspect that’s why Kebby wrote instructions to put these .pak files in rerelease\id1 folder, so they will be always loaded because id1 is the “base” folder for anything that is not found in hipnotic, rogue, dopa or mg1. (It’s the same instruction for sourceports, because not all of them can ‘combine’ multiple game/mod directories).

Maybe the workaround for this would be to create different .bat files and make shortcuts for them instead. Keep Block Quake mod’s files in the rerelease\id1 folder but rename them to something else, for example pak1.blk and pak2.blk. Then to launch Block Quake, have one .bat file to rename these *.blk to *.pak files and launch Quake. While have other batch file to launch “Normal” Quake to rename these *.pak files (but not pak0.pak of course) to *.blk files and launch Quake.

3

Here’s a quick rough hack job of what I meant. I tried this and it works. First, I followed Kebby’s instructions to put pak2.pak and pak3.pak into rerelease\id1 folder and rename pak3.pak to pak1.pak. Then, in the rerelease folder (the one with Quake_x64_steam.exe) I created these two .bat files:

Normal_Quake.bat

if exist id1\pak1.pak ren id1\pak1.pak pak1.blk if exist id1\pak2.pak ren id1\pak1.pak pak2.blk start Quake_x64_steam.exe

Block_Quake.bat

if exist id1\pak1.blk ren id1\pak1.blk pak1.pak if exist id1\pak2.blk ren id1\pak1.blk pak2.pak start Quake_x64_steam.exe

Then created shortcuts to these .bat files instead.

4

Thank you very much, GIla!

I made the batch files and they work beautifully. I appreciate your help!