R1Q2 troubles

[tripps]

sup everyone.  Haven't been on Q2 in forever and fired up an old pc to play.  Saw the TastySpleen Railz CTF server and was ready to go.  Went to download the client and got this message:

 Current Path is too long.  Please move your Quake II Installation to a shorter path. 


What gives???  I played CTF for years with this path C:\Quake2 and never had issues.  Now under that, I have huge amounts of mods....but can't even begin to load R1Q2.  I am bummin man cause I need a CTF fix bad!!! 

[X'tyfe]

if your playing from C:\Quake2, you should not be having that issue
maybe r1ch has an explanation

[QwazyWabbit]

Install Quake2 in \quake2 on any drive. Don't install it in a deep path like c:\program files\idsoftware\quake2

The message is caused by a safety check of the path to your Quake2 installation to prevent buffer overflows.



There are two problems:
1
Quake2 defines MAX_OSPATH as 128 characters.
R1ch subtracts MAX_QPATH (64 bytes) from it to obtain 64 characters that he will allow for a path to the current directory of the game. This is needed to establish the buffer size for Quake 2 to access the file system and I suppose the 50/50 split was deemed reasonable.

2
All old mods and many current ones use this same 128 character limit from "q_shared.h" so the buffer must be fixed at that size or it could potentially break (crash) most mods.

The fundamental error is that under Windows NT systems: NT, XP, Vista, the true MAX_PATH constant defined for the OS is 260 characters and that is the constant that Quake 2 code should have used in the first place.

I believe the MAX_PATH for Windows 95/98 was 256 as that was the standard in C90/99 at that time.

To top it all off, Linux can use values from 256 to 4096 depending on flavor and vintage and it's called PATH_MAX in <linux/limits.h> with the additional limit that NAME_MAX is 255 or thereabouts.



Anyway, move your Quake 2 installation and you will be fine.

[X'tyfe]

He shouldn't have to move it if its at C:\Quake2 right?

[QwazyWabbit]

No.

Try this:

Put -nopathcheck on the command line you use to launch r1q2. This will require changing it in the program you use to launch it or in the desktop shortcut.