Remake Quake Project

[FC Zvyozdochka]

Looks like it's from fairy tale. I myself like such "wooden" and "knighty" maps (e1m2-e1m4 and the whole second episode) much more than "runic" maps of third episode.

But your interpretation of runic maps (which is for me more Lovecraftian than original vulcanic maps) is pretty interesting too.

[Scotto]

Cleanup that insaller dude - localize it to its own directory with the text files etc...

[FC Zvyozdochka]

gb, I've just read "Props" post in your blog. All these little models are pretty cool, they bring life to the maps, which begin to look like a really remake, not just an enlarged id maps. The same is about decals, fog, the play of colored light and so on.
But will you add all these new features to already existing maps, or it is for newest maps only?

[golden_boy]

All RMQ maps will benefit from mapmodels, decals, and the improved knowledge of light and other things that we collected.

These are global things, they are for the project, or should I say the game, not just my current maps.

It just takes some time to catch on. After a demo there is usually a production low, but it will catch on and this stuff will then be assimilated and modified by the other team members.

I wasn't very involved with the last demo, which may be the reason why I'm pretty active now. I'd like to release two maps this year hopefully, both making use of mapmodels and everything else we can muster.

There simply weren't so many props available to us in the past, since we have no dedicated environment artist or however you want to call it. But semi recently, gnounc has donated a large amount of different props to us (untextured though) and I'm learning to really use Blender. So the mapmodels should soon be piling high.

It is really quite easy to make static models in Blender (I did like 35 models over an expanded weekend), I'd go so far as to say everyone can do it. There are tons of Blender tutorials on Youtube. It is very fun to use Blender, and these models can be used in Quake if they're exported to a Quake-friendly format. This means something like IQM or DPM or even OBJ and ASE, since these can all be converted if need be.

As you see these props don't really have a lot of polygons. The hard part is UV-unwrapping and texturing.

But I'm willing to UV unwrap and texture pretty much any models someone donates to the cause, like I'm doing with gnounc's models.

I'm also open to ideas; what kind of stuff would you expect to see in a dungeon, in a castle, or in a tomb? Suggest something and I might just do it.

[FC Zvyozdochka]

I'm also open to ideas; what kind of stuff would you expect to see in a dungeon, in a castle, or in a tomb? Suggest something and I might just do it.

Well, you have an excellent sense of taste and your own decisions are very good by itself.
The thing that really matters is interactivity - it would strange if little barrel - and even more so if those would be just a book - will stay motionlessly after explosion. So it needs to bring some physics ingame.
But as I remember, big wooden boxes was movable in previous demos. So interactivity already exists, amirite?

PS white books looks weird on rusty metal floor. Try to make them a bit dirtier, darker a bit, so books will belong to the main color gamma. Just look - pages became brownish because of ages and dirt, why cover shouldn't be the same? Grey and purple books look much better in this regard, barrels and chains look just excellent.

[bluntz]

Great suff GB ,as usual
Glad to see your going to blender.

[golden_boy]

Yeah, the book skins need some darkening - no problem, there can even be different types or colours depending on the environment.

Lighting on models could need some work, so at least they aren't lit evenly but have the polygons closest to the light source appear brightest. I think this is doable without real time lighting, even.

I noticed the physics thing as well, it would indeed be good if the barrels were breakable and the books were gyro objects.

It is however limited by hardware requirements, IIRC breakables cost some CPU and especially Gyro is said to be a horrible performance ****** - both MH and Spike have said this, so it is probably true.

Looks like gyro would need some improvements to counteract that.

Stick physics would be nice as well, I don't know how many darkplaces extensions are required to make that work though.

Another alternative is ODE, which is a free physics engine, but it seems to be geared towards joints and stuff more than towards forces and bouncing objects/explosions like Gyro is.

The three can probably be combined but it remains to be seen how big the performance impact is.

Then again, every monster in RMQ is a Gyro object and we have no problems with 400 knights in the same scene, so maybe it's not that bad.

Time will tell.

The next demo will have some nice things, such as sounds moving with certain monsters, special footstep sounds, new zombie variants (done by ijed) and so on. The various zombies are actually very fun to fight now, especially if a few Vomituses are around to recycle the fallen It can get quite crazy.

[Seven]

Hello gb,

having a little bit experience with gyro, I can say that it is very sensitive to the way you design the forces.
On top of that gyro is also very sensitive to the bbox of the object.
If the force dont "hit" the center the behaviour is quickly not what it should be.
But it is very doable when finetuning both.
And it is a hell lot of fun !
Matthew Lawrence did a masterpiece with it !


Regarding performance:
If every monster in RMQ is a gyro object, then the map models can be objects too without much loss I guess.
I even tried to make the map models in the other WIP threat gyro objects and it worked.
But as mentioned above, the different bboxes made their behaviour too different, so I dropped that idea.


Making them breakable is another interesting thing.
I had this idea with the chain, that holds the skeleton.
The implementation should be quite simple, by giving health to this object and then define via "self.th_die" what to do. Adding some particles effects that represents the "dust" when you break something and then remove the object and spawn the shivers with a little velocity (like gibs but much less). Rounding it up with a nice sound.
People always love to "destroy" things in games (as you know)
So this is what you should really implement. It is pure fun.

Best wishes for RMQ project !

Regards,
Seven

[MH]

The problem isn't really the gyro code, it's pointcontents and traceline. gyro uses a lot of pointcontents, and pointcontents can be slow, especially on bigger maps (traceline is even slower). Put 400 knights in a map consisting of nothing but a box room and pointcontents is going to return fast. Put them in e2m1rq and it has so much extra BSP tracing to do.

As a test I modded pointcontents to always return CONTENTS_EMPTY immediately and got a 4x performance increase in e2m1rq. That more or less proves it. Commenting out the gyro setup code can give an over 2x increase.

I tried adding a simple 8-entry cache to pointcontents and it does nothing; the tested points are just different every time. Increasing the cache size can get results, but then cache checking adds it's own overhead which cancels things out.

Unfortunately moving gyro to C isn't going to resolve any of this as the QC itself isn't as big a bottleneck; it's all the pointcontents calls that it uses.

[golden_boy]

So it seems like making heavy use of Gyro is just going to be expensive no matter what.

Seven: I'll probably implement breakable barrels etc. via RMQ's func_breakaway and func_emitter code. I'd like to blow up stuff as much as the next guy

[Spike]

just optimise gyro. an object that just moves only sideways isn't going to be changing its contents. there's no reason that all those monsters should need pointcontents every single frame (func_water complicates things, but is not seen by pointcontents anyway, so this is a non-issue). Remember that for many entitites, the engine tracks .waterlevel/.watertype too.

[RangerXT]

can someone post the newest version on?

[golden_boy]

Downloads The Realm of Blog Magic

The latest release was SP demo 3.

The project is ended, or rather it forked into Scout's Journey and Schism.

[Syluxguy28O3]

i wonder how those projects are going....and where is that resident evil mod gone too?

[golden_boy]

Scout's Journey is going well, Schism is relatively silent but active.

Schism S C H I S M - Index

SJ spawnhost