Here is a downside to vispatching and transparent water.

In the first level of Abyss of Pandemonium (not the difficulty select hub) I got stuck. Kept wandering around wondering where I had to go. Doors were locked, no levers or keys to be found. There was what appeared to be a small pool or well, but on looking into it I could see spikes so I stayed away from it as I was expecting that jumping into the pool would kill me by impaling me on the spikes.

Anyway, I eventually got tired and seeing as the pool was the only place I hadn't looked, and not caring if I died at that point, I jumped in, only to find that it wasn't really a pool but a portal, and there were no spikes. Yay!

So, if I'd been playing it with opaque water surfaces I'd have just seen a pool of water and jumped in. But because I was using transparent water surfaces I saw the spikes and stayed away from it initially.

I've attached a screenshot of said fake spike filled pool.
Do you mean this?

"If you start a new game and use r_novis 1 but don't vispatch your maps, you'll get the same effect as connecting to a server that doesn't run vispatched maps. The water will look transparent, but you won't see anything under the surface."

If so, then that supports my statement that my pak files must have vispatched maps as I can see objects and enemies through the water surface. In which case, r_novis = 1 is not a true solution, you still need to vispatch the maps to see the items and enemies. My original question then remains, how do you do that with modern machines when the vispatch utility doesn't work on them and doesn't work in DOSBox? Though for me that doesn't seem to be an issue as my old pak files are already vispatched.

Yes. Your files are obviously vispatched.


Yes, as etb and I have said, r_novis = 1 is not a solution.


I don't understand the problem. It does work on modern computers without any problems. I've used it about one hour ago, because I've started with unpatched pak files on this computer (I didn't want to search for my patched copy).

This page has all necessary downloads. The main archive includes the sourcecode and binaries for some operation systems (including DOS, Windows and Linux). It does compile and I assume it will do so for some time, as the maintainer is Ozkan Sezer, one of the QuakeSpasm authors.

No problem, it was just that on checking a few different places I kept finding people saying vispatch was old and didn't work on modern Windows and couldn't be made to work via DOSBox, so I thought I'd ask here.

However, as it turns out, the pak files I'm using have already been vispatched (the last time I played Quake was many years ago now and I have vague memories of running something to patch them for transparent water). I bought the game here on GOG (along with all the other Bethesda games) but haven't tried using GOG's version of Q1+MPs.

Anyway, good to know that there is a working vispatch version for modern Windows. It may come in useful for someone if they read this thread and want true water transparency. Though enemies don't see you in the water until you've attacked them, which is a little bit of a cheat. Yep, I just confirmed that too. Awesome, I have a fully vispatched collection. :)

This vispatch program also works on non-id maps?

Only if you have the necessary data. Vispatch only replaces the vis data of the maps with precalculated data. Cou can update the maps automatically with hmap2 (you should check if there is a newer version). It has an option to recalculate the vis data. There should be a bat file called revis_all.bat that runs the program with the correct options.