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Nuclide
Software Development Kit for id Technology (BETA)
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Nuclide
Software Development Kit for id Technology (BETA)
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The engine binary attempts to initialize a virtual filesystem within a game directory. That is a directory in which your entire game lives in. In id Software their game Quake that directory was named id1/, in Valve their game Half-Life it was valve/.
You will be tasked with naming your own game directory, if you were to build your own game.
The example Nuclide game, called Test Game is stored in base/, and is thus often referred to as 'base'.
When a game is mounted, we're either looking for loose files (loaded last), or archives the engine supports.
game console command.
The Quake pak archive format, or zip archives with the pk3 and pk4 extensions are supported. Upon initializing the filesystem they are enumerated alphabetically and then loaded in order, thus the filename affects the load order of archives.
Directories with the .pk3dir extensions are emulated, acting as if they were .pk3 archives. We recommend you use them to organize your development files.
Protected archives always start have the prefix pak[...] and cannot be downloaded by connecting to a server game that has them. We suggest you use this for any copyrighted data.
When you spawn a map, you create a server (running progs.dat) which will distribute its own client-side game-logic (csprogs.dat).
But before this, when the client (not the server) has loaded a game directory, it'll load the persistent menu.dat into its own QuakeC virtual machine.
It's always running, unlike progs.dat and csprogs.dat code which gets reloaded between map changes. You can use this to your advantage by restarting levels in order to reload game logic, or to reload entity definitions.
In order to restart the menu, you manually issue menu_restart via the engine console (SHIFT+ESC).
You can initiate a refresh of the virtual filesystem by issuing fs_restart in the engine console.
You can reload image and/or model assets by issuing vid_reload in the engine console. While the map geometry may reload, for entity changes you will have to issue a full map_restart in the engine console to see them reload.