plague SNG with reflect

[talisa]

i know i prolly posted this in some other thread long ago, but i have no clue anymore if i posted it where i did,
and i thought it deserved its own thread

here is plague's SNG with kingennio's maps and REFLECT added by me,
just like the weapon's in seans pack (which he posted long time ago, and then sadly removed)
have so it matches the weapons from his pack



short clip i made to show it, cuz a pic isnt good to show such an effect at all:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSVbt6cXtvY]SNG plague reflect - YouTube[/ame]

.

EDIT: made an update to the SNG to make it usable with Q3A quad-effect seven added to SMC!

DOWNLOAD V1.1 -WHICH IS COMPATIBLE WITH SMC Q3A QUAD-EFFECT

[gdiddy62]

Very nice to see reposted.

[talisa]

thanx, thought id make a thread about it cuz i didnt recall wether or not i posted this,
and if i did i have not the slightest clue where it would be i mightve posted it

[lucky88shp]

Link is not working for me...can you check please? Thanks!

[Mr.Burns]

DOWNLOAD IT!

Hi talisa,
I hope you had a nice break, "Welkom terug" (I hope that's right), and I wish I had your talent!
Sorry for such a newbie question, especially if you have been asked this before, but is this one of those "DP only" things? And there doesn't appear any instructions on how to retexturing newbie's like me would implement this and enjoy your work. So when you have a moment, would you mind letting me know what needs to go where as it would be fun to try some of this new stuff to freshen up Quake.

Many thanks
Monty

Link is not working for me...can you check please? Thanks!

It probably doesn't help much but it just worked fine for me

[talisa]

@lucky88shp
i just checked and the link works fine for me as well.
if you have problems its on your side, cuz the link works fine.

just noticed though i accidentially forgot to add the shader script to the pk3
fixed it and reuploaded new version which includes the shader-file too.


@burns
thanx, but im not that talented, most of my work is just copy&paste stuffs or playing around with some stuff i found online and with filters of paintshop to get the desired effect.

also yeah its for DP-only (i think), i dont think any other engines then DP allow for usage of these reflection shaders i added. not sure though since i dun use any other engines.

.

erm yeah sure ill explain, adding fake reflection (yeah its actually fake) is quite easy actually.

how to add reflections works the same just like a gloss-map pretty much. only thing different is that you need to add a shader to let the engine know to add reflections, and you need cubemap textures which'll tell the engine what to show in the fake reflection

open my pk3 and ill explain by explaining which files to use and how. (you can just open it with winrar or winzip)
go into the progs folder. you'll see there all the textures, gloss norm and reflect.
if you know how gloss maps work, reflection maps work pretty much the same.
the brightness of the reflect-map tells the engine how much reflection to add to the model. white is super-reflective, black not at all, just like with gloss that the brightness of the gloss textures makes for how glossy the model is.

so lets get to the additional files needed.
if you go to the textures folder, you'll see theres a folder in there called 'cubemaps' with some textures in it. these textures together make up a full 360view of what the engine should show in the reflections.
cubemaps are kinda like a skybox, you make 6 pics which together make up a cube, and each texture needs to have either lt rt ft bk up or dn added to the end of the name so the engine knows which part of the cubemap each texture is.
in this case what is reflected is a view of a part of the hipnotic start-map.

and this is where the shader-file comes in, the shader-file will tell the engine to add these reflections to the model.
however in the shader you assign the reflections to the texture, not to the model itself.
go to the 'scripts' folder, and open the shader-file in there. you can just open it with notepad or such, since its nothing more then a text-file with a renamed extension.
in the shader-file, you will see this:

progs/v_nail2.mdl_0
{ 

        {
             map progs/v_nail2.mdl_0.tga
             rgbGen identity
             depthFunc equal 
        } 
   
dpreflectcube textures/cubemaps/shot
{
             map $lightmap
             blendfunc add
             tcGen lightmap
}
	{
      	map $lightmap
      	rgbGen identity
     	depthFunc equal
	}

}

at the top of this block, there is this: progs/v_nail2.mdl_0
this tells the engine which texture to add the reflections too.
slightly lower there is this: map progs/v_nail2.mdl_0.tga
this line allows you to set a different texture to replace the normal one or add a set of textures which make up an animation.
however in this case we dont want to do that, so we just set it to use the same texture as normal.

then a little bit lower you'll see this line:
dpreflectcube textures/cubemaps/shot
this tells the engine which cubemap to use and where to find them. so in this case the cubemap used is the one called 'shot' which is the one found in the pk3. you can use any cubemap by just changing this.

and basically thats it. once you added the texture-name to both of those lines at top and added the name of the cubemap you want to be used for the texture, just use the 'save as' option of your text-editor, set type to 'all types' and save it with the extension .shader instead of txt

.

if you wanna add reflections to other models yourself, feel free to just copy and paste the blocks from my shader-file and re-use the cubemaps from my mp3.
thats what i did too myself, i copied and pasted what i needed from sean's shader-file and the cubemap textures are ones he made and i took them from his weapons-pack.

[Spike]

why does your shader use two separate lightmap passes on a surface that doesn't even support lightmaps? :s
also, 'rgbGen identity' means you'll get fullbright model lighting with no bsp-based lighting at all.
'depthFunc equal' is also dodgy as hell.

:s

but yeah, dpreflectcube is also dp-specific. other engines would expect such a feature to actually be a proper pass rather than a random keyword, or if they use glsl perhaps as an additional texture within a glsl pass.
I could add support for dpreflectcube to fte some time, but the other breakages are a dealbreaker.

using this should at least prevent other engines from breaking if they happen to load your shader:

progs/v_nail2.mdl_0
{
    {
        map progs/v_nail2.mdl_0.tga
        rgbgen lightingDiffuse
    }
    dpreflectcube textures/cubemaps/shot
}

note that I've not tested it in dp, or indeed in any engine, so take this idealistic response with a pinch of salt.
The *only* difference from a regular q3 model shader is the addition of the dpreflectcube line (lightingDiffuse instead of identity allows diffuse lighting from the bsp to be used).

[talisa]

@spike
i have no clue why, i just copied and pasted the block right out of a shader seanstar made.

i honestly dont know what all those lines do at all,
all i know is that modifying those 'progs' and 'cubemap' lines are used to define
which texture to use and which cubemap the engine will use


ill try if your code works and if it produces the same effect (or an even better effect)

[_Smith_]

Why ? Because we are ignorants and have copied shaders from someone before us
It seems that

{
map / animap texture path
rgbgen lightingDiffuse
}

is enough for bboxes as well...

[golden_boy]

Anyone who wants to write Q3A shaders would do well to read the Shader manual:

Q3Map2 Shader Manual

... and to listen when Spike says something.

[Spike]

dp only 'properly' supports single-pass shaders. lightmap passes are partially supported, but simply serve to alter the single pass that it does support.
which means there's a lot of dp-specific shaders that just make no sense to any other engine with more complete support for q3 shaders.
dp's shaders are more 'materials' than they are 'shaders'. The difference is that materials support a specific set of properties (ie: diffusemap X, cubemap Y, etc), while shaders are a lower-level 'add this texturemap with this colour' type thing. Note that materials are simpler (just add some property and the engine takes care of the rest, like rendering it with glsl instead), while shaders are much more explicit, wordy, and annoying, so its hard to really fault dp for it - the rest is just a terminology thing.
long story short: dp ignores most of what you tell it to do.


rgbgen says what rgb colours to use for the model. identity is '1 1 1', or in other words: fullbright. lightingDiffuse means that it uses the vertex normals and combines that with the entity position+direction to figure out some sort of lighting that responds to local bsp light sources. there are other rgbgen terms available, like sine waves to make things flash.
depthfunc says what depth-value comparison to use when rendering the surface. equal basically means that it draws *only* if a previous pass was drawn (ie: the pixel passed the alpha test in a previous pass). if there was no previous pass, then the depth value already on screen is probably too far off the required value.

[Seven]

Hello,

Spike is of course completely correct.
But let us look at this "shaders" topic from a different viewpoint for a second:
We are playing/speaking about Quake 1, right ?

There are many different Quake 1 engines available. Every engine has its own advantages and focuses on different audience (that is important to not forget).

Now, when we want to play Quake 1 and want to use some advanced "materials" or "shaders" to get some visuals into the game, which engine supports this ?
- FTEQW
- Darkplaces
(I am not aware of others, but I may be wrong)

So, our portfolio of engines is quite limited, right ?


What I want to say is:
We should be thankful and happy, even though the available "shaders" are not fully Q3A shaders in a Quake 1 engine.
We can do a LOT with the available/restricted "materials" and "shaders" in Darkplaces. There are many examples available in this forum or at inside3d what is possible with it.

Yes sure, they are not Q3A shaders in all their beauty, but at least we can use several shader keywords. Dont forget, we are talking about Quake 1 here.

I think it is also good, to have these DP-custom shader-keywords, which can do also a lot of nice visuals.

We should not complain about:
"Look, what a Quake 1 engine like DP cannot do"
We should be thankful that it at least gives us the possibility to use some restricted shaders. They already can do a lot of great things, which should be sufficient for many situations.
They are still far away from real Q3A shaders, but hey that is OK, because we play Quake 1 here, right ?


I sometimes have the feeling, that we play Quake 1 but want to have the graphical power-engines like Doom 3 or Unreal 3 or whatever...

FTE and DP brings us already more possiblities than we can swallow.
And they are actively developed continuously, which is great !
Let us not forget that, instead of complaining, why they dont have the features of Crysis 3 !

Just my 2 cents to this.

And a big Thank you to Spike and LordHavoc.

[golden_boy]

Yeah, well, if there are things that can be improved, one is allowed to point them out, though.

[Spike]

when an engine partially supports a spec, there's typically an expectation on it to later support the full spec (a keyword at a time). if that happens with dp you're basically screwed unless the shader is well-formed in the first place.
while nailguns etc won't cross over between quake and quake3-like games, maps will, thus there is reason for greater compatibility over time.
I only mentioned the 'materials' vs 'shaders' thing as a way to explain the difference, I'm not trying to critisize DP, merely to explain the differences resulting in the gotchas that will likely turn up.
if you, seven, don't care about fucked up shaders, that's your choice - on your head be it.

plaque's pak, which the md3 model was originally from, explicitly targetted FTE (needing texture renames if you wanted support for DP). So if you do want to improve the content, I'd really rather any existing expectations don't result in people complaining at me that *I* broke something.

[Seven]

Hello Spike,

I think I understand your viewpoint better now.
If Darkplaces wants to support Q3 shaders, it should have been complete support or better no support at all.
That sounds logical and the half-baked shader support only brings up questions and irritations for users.

What I only wanted to say in my post was, that DP-users, who know about the lack of full shader-keyword support, are already happy to be able to use the dp-custom ones and the ones that are supported from Q3A portfolio.
Mainly aniMap is heavily used in texture mods, as it opens such great possibilities.
I did not think about mappers shader usage, as I am no mapper and therefore dont know what they need.
Nahuel is much deeper in this category and he seems/sounds quite positive when he talks about it.


Regarding plaque's pak and the renaming of files:
That is more related towards replacement content in general. And it affects many engines (with replacement support). We talked about this point with MH and Baker several months ago:
If a modder wants to release content that is usable "out of the box" for as many engines as possible, he is limited/lost.
Reason is for example the naming convention of model textures (the .mdl_0 topic), which we have no standard for. MH and Baker explained, why the naming standard does not exist.
Fortunately, world textures are handled identicaly in all replacement content supporting engines I know of.

The more engines there are, the more variations we will have.
But that does not need to be a bad thing. It makes it more complex, but challenging for modders...

Kind regards,
Seven