How to change weapon damage/rate-of-fire in Quake 2 console/config?

[Arclite]

Title serves my main question. I'm quite a newbie to Quake forums, and moreso the commands of the Quake 2 console, so forgive me if something like this is going over my head. I've been able to mess around with player movement speed, RFX effects and some server settings in console/config but through all my research haven't found anything that specifically explains how to alter attributes on weapons (like damage, etc).

I'm trying to "buff" the Blaster and Shotgun in Quake 2 for me and my bros' competitive Quake 2 deathmatch sessions, so any instructions or advice that don't involve going into the .cpp file and recompiling would be appreciated! Thanks in advance!

[QwazyWabbit]

The weapon classes and their fire rates are controlled by the game code, so yes, you'd have to mod the source and recompile.

[rikwad]

The N.I.Q. mod will let you adjust weapon damage, among other things, if you want a quick and easy way to do it.

https://www.angelfire.com/mt2/quakebots/NIQ.zip

You can also download the mod in its unaltered state  from the downloads section of Tastyspleen site.

[Arclite]

The weapon classes and their fire rates are controlled by the game code, so yes, you'd have to mod the source and recompile.

Unfortunate, that will have to wait a year or two then as I have not ventured near far enough into C/C++ to comfortably mod other games' source. I've been struggling to build any of these old source codes as Visual Studios seems to throw errors for everything as well.

The N.I.Q. mod will let you adjust weapon damage, among other things, if you want a quick and easy way to do it.

https://www.angelfire.com/mt2/quakebots/NIQ.zip

You can also download the mod in its unaltered state from the downloads section of Tastyspleen site.

Okay I'll look into that, any advice to quickly get it up and running? I tried simply extracting the baseq2 and niq to the main directory but nothing changes, and no options become available, I'm probably missing a step. I'm new to the Quake 2 mod world, so anything outside of extract & execute is still a task for me.

Thanks for the info guys, will check back later!

[QwazyWabbit]

The number of errors you get in Visual Studio builds depends on the age of the mod and whether you are getting the old sources or something more recent. The original idSoftware code was written for an older version of C and upgrading that code in VS2019 isn't trivial. It also doesn't help when VS wants to bitch about "unsafe" functions and does so by throwing an error instead of just a warning. Look around on GitHub if you're interested in pursuing mod source code as there is lots of good work being done there that might save you some time.

Extracting from older source zips and expecting to build in VS is not going to work very often.

[rikwad]

 You right-click quake2.exe and select create shortcut. Then you right click the shortcut and select properties. Then you add +set game MY_MOD_NAME to the end of the target string that's already there, so it should read -quake2.exe +set game niq +exec niqeb.cfg- as an example for starting the NIQ mod. NIQ stands for "No Items Quake" and it may be more than you're looking for here, but there are some .cfg files within the NIQ folder that you can alter to whatever you want. Weapon damage being among them, and bots if you're alone and just want to practice up a bit.

 You can also change  the game while already playing by bringing down the console and typing game my_mod_name then loading a map. There are many ways to adjust Quake2 and you don't necessarily need programming creds, but that would definitely be helpful. OSP Tourney may also have an option for weapon damage, I'm not sure right now, and you could use it for straight up Deathmatch as well.

So many mods...

[Arclite]

The number of errors you get in Visual Studio builds depends on the age of the mod and whether you are getting the old sources or something more recent. The original idSoftware code was written for an older version of C and upgrading that code in VS2019 isn't trivial. It also doesn't help when VS wants to bitch about "unsafe" functions and does so by throwing an error instead of just a warning. Look around on GitHub if you're interested in pursuing mod source code as there is lots of good work being done there that might save you some time.

Extracting from older source zips and expecting to build in VS is not going to work very often.

Yes Visual Studios likely isn't ideal for older source code come to think of it, I was hoping for some shortcuts but something as specific as "changing weapon attributes in Quake 2 (24 year old game) with C/C++"  isn't going to yield much with a search engine. Oh well. I'll swing around GitHub at some point to see if some of the work's been done.

You right-click quake2.exe and select create shortcut. Then you right click the shortcut and select properties. Then you add +set game MY_MOD_NAME to the end of the target string that's already there, so it should read -quake2.exe +set game niq +exec niqeb.cfg- as an example for starting the NIQ mod. NIQ stands for "No Items Quake" and it may be more than you're looking for here, but there are some .cfg files within the NIQ folder that you can alter to whatever you want. Weapon damage being among them, and bots if you're alone and just want to practice up a bit.

You can also change  the game while already playing by bringing down the console and typing game my_mod_name then loading a map. There are many ways to adjust Quake2 and you don't necessarily need programming creds, but that would definitely be helpful. OSP Tourney may also have an option for weapon damage, I'm not sure right now, and you could use it for straight up Deathmatch as well.

So many mods...

Thank you that worked, had to put it outside quotation marks in target string. It likely is an overkill mod for what I'm pursuing, but playing around the configs might get me closer. Either through programming or mod exploration I'll get what I need, and will report back here (might be a while lol) with what I did/found so anyone else with similar pursuits has more to go with.
In the meantime thanks for the info and help y'all, appreciate it!

[QwazyWabbit]

The number of errors you get in Visual Studio builds depends on the age of the mod and whether you are getting the old sources or something more recent. The original idSoftware code was written for an older version of C and upgrading that code in VS2019 isn't trivial. It also doesn't help when VS wants to bitch about "unsafe" functions and does so by throwing an error instead of just a warning. Look around on GitHub if you're interested in pursuing mod source code as there is lots of good work being done there that might save you some time.

Extracting from older source zips and expecting to build in VS is not going to work very often.

Yes Visual Studios likely isn't ideal for older source code come to think of it, I was hoping for some shortcuts but something as specific as "changing weapon attributes in Quake 2 (24 year old game) with C/C++"  isn't going to yield much with a search engine. Oh well. I'll swing around GitHub at some point to see if some of the work's been done.

Visual Studio 2019 is perfectly capable of converting the VC++ 6.0 projects to Visual Studio 2019 format. In fact, it's better at upgrading them than VS2008 or 2010 ever was. It's just that the libraries have evolved and you'll initially get a lot of warnings and errors until you tailor the projects to suit the new environment. Most of the settings are trivial but there are a few things that prior experience can help with, especially the whining in the compiler about "unsafe" functions but it does explain itself.