Give multiplayer a compact join card in Quake 4's own style, over a softened map

[themuffinator]

Connecting to a multiplayer server opened the entire in-game menu on its Join tab — ten navigation buttons, a full server dump, a chat log and a text field, all to answer one question. This replaces that with a compact join card drawn in Quake 4's own menu style, over a map that is pushed out of focus behind it.

What changed

A dedicated join card. It carries only what a player needs before picking a side: gametype and map, whether the match is in warmup, the scoring limit that gametype actually enforces, how full the server is, the server name, and just the choices that mode allows — join, pick a side, or spectate. Settings and Leave Match sit in the header as symbols. A refused team switch reports in place on the card instead of on the Join tab nobody is looking at.

The button set comes from the gametype descriptor via two GUI state flags, so the GUI no longer carries its own copy of the gametype table, and the scoring-limit lookup moved into one helper so the card and the Join tab cannot drift apart. The frame comes in two heights, so a Duel offering one choice does not get a panel sized for four.

Quake 4's visual idiom, from shipped art. No new interface images were authored; everything is already in the retail PK4s.

• tooltip_edge / tooltip_mid for the frame, which carries the olive inner rail and cuts a 45° chamfer off every corner. The bottom cap is the top cap mirrored with matscalex -1 matscaley -1, which is how the stock tooltip does it.
• Real Q4 button plates (b6_light, b4_light): 45° cut at the bottom left, highlight down the left and along the bottom, fading to nothing at the right. Marine-font label, corner marker, plates tinted olive rather than white.
• The menu's own hover contract: snap to orange on enter, ease back over 300 ms on exit, label growing by exactly 0.01, main_menu_mouseover / main_menu_selection on both ends.
• gfx/guis/common/gear1_still and gfx/guis/mainmenu/icon_arrow for the header symbols.

The panel is authored inside the plain 640x480 canvas and never reads gui::virtual_screen_x_expand, so it keeps its 4:3 shape and stays centred on a widescreen display instead of stretching across it. It deliberately does not dim the rest of the screen — Quake 4 doesn't, and the softened backdrop does that job.

A renderer parity fix for the soft focus. The OpenGL half of the Raven special-effect blur read parm 6 as a tint amount and blurred by a fixed 0.6 regardless, while the native Vulkan pass reads it as the effect strength; parm 4 was inverted between them too. So a request for no tint became a request for no blur on Vulkan, a gentle blur came out heavy on OpenGL, and the OpenGL renderer module produced a half-blurred quadrant with a hard seam. rvspecial_medlabs.fs now mirrors the Vulkan contract — parm 6 is strength, parm 4 converts to the same normalized falloff, the tint is driven by the approach colour's own alpha — and a zero-strength request correctly draws nothing. The Arena Campaign's depth of field had the same split and is fixed by the same change.

ui_autoJoin was never the gate. It has always defaulted to 0; what suppressed the join screen was all 98 VS Code MP launch configurations passing +set ui_autoJoin 1, and because the CVar is archived one such launch made it stick permanently. Those now pass 0. Automated profiles (renderer_gameplay_benchmark.py, stock_asset_baseline.py, the dedicated smokes) still set 1 in their own code, and AGENTS.md now says which is which instead of implying one blanket rule.

docs/dev/ui-visual-design.md records the rules so the next panel does not have to be reverse-engineered from this one: the art vocabulary with a material table, palette and type scale, button and frame anatomy with the exact hover script, the 4:3 authoring rule, how to soften a scene behind a partial-screen panel, a pre-flight checklist, and the traps. AGENTS.md cites it as a project rule.

Companion game-module change

This needs openQ4-game at bc60187 or later, on main:

• cdcde5e — the join screen's model (UpdateJoinScreenGui, SetJoinScreenSoftFocus) and a sticky joinScreenPending flag.
• bc60187 — the blur controller parameters that go with the shader change here.

Notes for a reviewer

• The MP menu is Activate()d twice per open — idMultiplayerGame::StartMenu activates it, then idAsyncNetwork::ExecuteSessionCommand hands the result to session->SetGUI, which activates it again; a listen-server host is also offered the screen again after its own player entity respawns. The old one-shot initial_join GUI state bit was consumed by the first of those, so every later activation fell back to the full menu. That is why the offer is now tracked in code and cleared only when the player answers.
• onActivate restores the chrome and its intro animation on the non-join path. anim_in sets p_main::visible 1 a frame after the join event hid it, which is the trap that made the first version of this look like it had not been applied at all.
• A GUI parse error is only a warning. The engine logs mpmain.gui, line N: expected ... and silently drops the rest of that windowDef. Related: windowDef properties do not resolve $desktop:: names — only scripts do — so a matcolor property has to be literal numbers. Both are written up in the new design doc.

Validation

• Built clean (engine, both renderer modules, both game modules) and staged to .install/.
• Entered gameplay on mp/q4dm1, mp/q4dm2 and mp/q4dm3 across Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Tourney, on r_renderApi gl, gl-module and vulkan, at 1600x900. Screenshots captured for each; all three backends now produce the same softened backdrop.
• Zero GUI parse warnings in openq4.log on every run.
• 13 validation scripts pass: match_control_ui_contract, competitive_match_layer, lang_table_encoding, competitive_match_localization, match_control_localization_bridge, arena_campaign, mp_bot_navigation, renderer_budget_contract, stock_asset_baseline, settings_menu_coverage, mp_bot_server_menu, docs_link_integrity, release_tooling_safety.
• Seven new #str_ entries added to all six language tables.
• Release-note material updated in docs/dev/release-completion.md and docs/dev/releases/v0.12.0.md.

Not covered: clicking the buttons was verified by reading the emitted commands rather than by driving the mouse, so the join/spectate/team actions themselves are unchanged stock commands but have not been clicked end to end in an automated run.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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