Episode 3: Advanced settings menu

The third episode of Nexuiz In-Depth will continue in the spirit of it's predecessor, covering other means of tweaking your beloved game to your liking.
Once again guiding the Nexuiz newcomer through the vast configuration possibilities this podcast will explain the newly introduced “advanced settings” menu in great detail.

After this episode you will

• recognize variables which are saved automaticly on shutdown
• know the difference between engine and game variables
• be able to use the search filter the right way

Tune in!

Open the advanced sttings menu: settings → misc → advanced settings menu

• white: variable has default value
• yellow: value differs from default
• pale: is NOT saved into config file on shutdown
• saturated: is saved into config file on shutdown

The filter has support for wildcards and is exact about them. So entering damage to find all variables containing the word damage will not work.

To search for variables that

• contain the word damage enter: *damgage*
• start with the word damage enter: damage
• end with the word damage enter: *damage

Hello and welcome to the third episode of the Nexuiz In-Depth video podcast. My name is Marius Shekow aka GreEn`mArine and this time I will demonstrate you the new advanced settings menu that was introduced in nexuiz 2.5

The level of difficulty of this episode is beginner.

Alright, let's go into the menu. We will find the settings → misc → advanced settings menu.
The menu that opens shows the name of the variable on the left side and it's value on the right side. Please notice the scrollbar on the right side which you can click and drag, or, alternatively, you can also use your mouse wheel to navigate inside the list. The initial view, the view that we see atm, contains ALL variables of nexuiz.

The first thing you'll notice is that some variables are sort of white, and some are sort of yellow, some look a bit pale, while others appear to have a very saturated color. I'll explain what each of these colors means:

• Variables written in white, regardless whether they are pale or not, are variables whose value matches to their default value. In this case the value here matches to the default value written here in red color. Btw, this red thing is actually button, so when you click on it, you can restore the default value of a variable.
• Variables written in yellow are just the opposite, they have a value that is different than the default value. However, once I click on the red default-value-button, the variable that was previously yellow will become instantly white, because I restored the default value.
• Apart from the white or yellow difference there's also the pale or not pale difference. The key is that variables that appear pale are NOT saved into your config when closing nexuiz, as opposed to the completely saturated variables, which will be saved.

This is what you can also see here at the type information. There's another useful information that this type-line shows, however, it is more of a technical kind and probably not interesting for you: for some variables, this line includes the wording engine setting, and for some other variables it doesn't. The reason is that all the variables you see here had to be created at some point. This could either have happened in the darkplaces engine, the engine that handles your mouse & keyboard input and displays the map and models on your screen, or it could have been defined by one of the config files of nexuiz, and it is likely to be a variable that controls an aspect of the game. For this reason variables that cover the domain of the engine, such as the vid_ r_ variables, are always engine variables, while variables that start with g_ for example are normal variables coming from a config file.

Let's now go over to the most powerful feature of this menu, the filter input field up here. When I enter the beginning of a variable, it will show me all variables that begin with what I've written, just like the auto-completion. Of course, here I have a much better overview than in the console, and I also have the scrollbar on the right side in case of a long list of variables. Also, when I want to change the value of a variable, I can do that right away by entering the new value in the input field down here. Notice that I don't have to hit ENTER or anything, as it will be automatically be saved.

The great thing about this filter is that it doesn't only work for looking up variables that start with your input, but it can also look for the ones that contain or end with your input. For example I'd like to find all variables that deal with the waypoint configuraton. When entering waypoint into the filter, it won't show me anything, because there aren't any variables starting with waypoint. So now I just say: ok, I don't care about the exact name of the variable, so there can be anything before or after the word waypoint, as long as it contains the word waypoint. So what I do is to place a so-called wildcard before and after waypoint, which is the asterisk key (*) on your keyboard. And voilà, it found all variables that contain waypoint.

Keep in mind that this is an incredibly powerful tool, as you you can lookup very quickly whether there is a variable you are looking for just by thinking about what you actually want. For example I want to know how to setup the damage of the hagar: I just enter *hagar*damage*, and I'll automatically get all variables that contain the words hagar and damage.

One last hint: if you are looking for variables that end with your input, you simply enter the wildcard symbol and then the name you want your variable to end with. For example I enter *damage, and it presents a list of all damage variables for all the weapons in nexuiz.

So next time, before you waste time to ask on the alientrap forums where you can configure the setting XYZ or whether it is actually possible to configure, you should try to look for the variable in this menu first.

Soo, we've reached the end of the episode again. In the next issue I will talk a lot about the config files that save, or in some cases don't save, your nexuiz settings, so that you get a better idea of what happens under the hood when you open and close your Nexuiz client. This was GreEn`mArine for the AT dev team, have a good time and cu next week!