Retroquad

[mankrip]

That would be very useful for the brand new Map Jam 8! As of now, you can't use replacement textures with it (well you CAN, but they're rendered in color instead of B&W) because 24-bit textures exceed the palette.

Hmm, good point; I remember some talks about they using a desaturated palette for it, and hardware-accelerated renderers does indeed ignore the palette when rendering 24-bit textures. I'll try it.

[edit] Retroquad can't run Jam8 because it uses the Arcane Dimensions mod, which requires extended engine limits.

[mankrip]

according to some information I just read, 8bits means 8bits per channel.

No. 8-bit color means using an 8-bit index to access the colors of a 256-color palette.

Also, Quake's software renderer (and Retroquad) uses a single global 256-color palette for everything.

"8-bit color" is actually short for "8-bit indexed color video mode". There are no multiple channels in it.

[edit]Here's the source 8-bit color PCX of the first image in this thread. Check the color depth and the palette.

And another, from this screenshot:

[mankrip]

I'm editing some HD textures to make all ammo boxes identifiable in the dark, as well as tweaking some details to fit my taste. I'll release these textures once they're done.

They're mostly based on ezepov's textures.

[Mugwump]

Retroquad can't run Jam8 because it uses the Arcane Dimensions mod, which requires extended engine limits.

Aww, crap! Well at least you tried. Thanks for the heads-up. Welp, instead I think I may try making a HD pack by desaturating the high-res versions of the textures.

ezepov's

Never heard of those, but judging by the pics they seem to look just like Ruohi's.

[Seven]

I'm editing some HD textures to make all ammo boxes identifiable in the dark, as well as tweaking some details to fit my taste. I'll release these textures once they're done.

Hello mankrip,

I follow the progress of your engine with great interest.
First i thought it will be like Super8 or Makaqu but you are implementing features that I only knew from GLQuake engines.
That is a great mix and you are going a unique path. It will surely have lots of fans due to combining different wolds.

Please keep on your great work mankrip !

Never heard of those, but judging by the pics they seem to look just like Ruohi's.

Never heard of ?
There are lots of different (model-) texture packs available.
Some bring their own models + textures, some only bring their own textures and use original id1 models.
mankrip needs the latter. It seems he didnt implement replacement model support yet. He will surely work on this later

Offtopic:
bfg666, if you want to know about high res textures for original id1 bmodels, you can choose between Neogenesis, Ezepov, QRP and some mixtures that flow around the internet.
Ezepov�s textures look more *dirty* and *worn* compared to QRP�s. They are also 512x512 in size and look very faithful. Neogenesis� textures are less faithful and very much *colored*.
Find ezepov�s textures here, and do not trust the preview screenshot. They look much better in-game. It is a .rar archive, not a .zip if you download them from there. Be aware of it.
/Offtopic:

[Mugwump]

Thanks Seven. Not only do you do great work, but on top of that you're a well of knowledge and info. What would we do without you?

[mankrip]

mankrip needs the latter. It seems he didnt implement replacement model support yet. He will surely work on this later

Replacement models can be used, as long as they're in regular BSP or MDL format, and stored in a path that follows the vanilla Quake hierarchy.

I've got some replacement BSP ammo boxes somewhere, but I've stopped using them when implementing support for the QRP HD textures, because it's easier to figure out texturing glitches when using the vanilla models. I'll try the replacement item BSPs again later.

So far, support for MD3 isn't in my plans.

By the way, liquid surfaces and skies still doesn't support HD textures, but I'll work on it. But they won't support additive luma textures, only alphamasked luma textures.

And a semi-important note: For Retroquad, external textures must either have power-of-two dimensions, or exactly the same dimensions as the internal textures in the BSP file. This is because non-power-of-two textures must be rendered through surface caches. I'm resizing the non-power-of-two textures through GIMP, and the results looks fine in the game.

Support for external textures in MDL models, SPR sprites and 2D images (menus, HUD, text, etc.) won't be implemented yet, because my current focus is on the BSP renderer.

[MadGypsy]

If you would like all the answers to md3 parsing, to where you can "almost" copy/paste my code in yours, I can strip my parser and give you the meat and potatoes of it. Of course there will be some porting on your part but, I have ported numerous C(whatever) scripts to AS3, I don't see where it would be all that complicated to go the other way. Mostly it would be converting constants to enums, "." to "->", Vector.<Object>[n] to struct + n, while(true)...continue to :label...goto label and moving types from the end to beginning as an equivalent (ie num:Number is float num, etc). Other than that the syntax is pretty much identical. Of course you'll have to allocate some memory cause AS3 doesn't do that but, that's small beans.

[mankrip]

Thanks, but it's not just about parsing. The whole MDL renderer needs refactoring, all the way down to the lower-level triangle rasterization routines.

There's a lot of improvements to be made before support for other model formats can be considered.

[mankrip]

Still need to do some more editing on the textures for the big shell boxes, the rockets, and the thunderbolt cells.


Improved the mipmap system, with up to 16 mipmap levels. The highest level used by QRP HD textures is 12.

[MadGypsy]

It looks really good.

[mankrip]

A comparison:

Darkplaces

Retroquad, mipscale 1

Retroquad, mipscale 0.5

0.5 is the new default in Retroquad. I've decided upon it after testing through several different maps with a wide range of texture styles.

[MadGypsy]

I went over all of your images and stared at them very hard... why is it so grainy? I ask this cause, I just made an "any-image-to-palette-miptex" thing and there is no grain in my images. Often times they look identical to the original.

example - where the top is the original HD texture and the bottom is the redraw-from-palette mipped versions


edit: here is a side by side to illustrate what I'm saying. The image in my app window is my 8bit version of the HD texture. I'm only asking this in order to understand why your textures are so much different than mine.

[mankrip]

MadGypsy: Mipmaps are static 2D images. The needs of color conversion for static 2D images are extremely different from the needs of color conversion for realtime 3D scenes.

More specifically, the texture filtering in Retroquad isn't a bilinear color filter, but a texel coordinate dithering filter. The basic concept is inspired by the dithering filter in the Unreal 1 software renderer, but improved and expanded to several different kinds of data. Fabien Sanglard's Quake 2 source code has a simple and easy implementation.

And also, your method only worked well because the colors of the QRP textures are very close to the colors of the Quake palette. But here are some examples of why dithering is also needed in general-purpose color quantization.

[mankrip]

A very important note: If you look at Retroquad using a TV, in most cases it will look significantly more grainy than it should.

By default, most TVs nowadays are preconfigured for enhancing the visuals of low-res poorly-encoded movies. This means that they apply a lot of image filtering, which almost always looks bad for Retroquad.