Monday, March 14, 2011

DirectQ Update - 14th March 2011

The "cd" command now works with replacement audio; I've also added TAB autocompletion for all of the options.

Loaded pointfiles should be a lot easier to see.

I've removed the multithreaded surface sort code and reworked some things deep in the renderer backend; this should give a 5% to 10% speedup (depending on hardware and other system config, of course).

I'm going to add TAB autocompletion to the "bind" command sometime, but it requires a slight reworking of how some of it ("it" being autocompletion, not the "bind" command) works so it may not happen soon. But it'll be another strike in favour of player-friendliness.

I had a version of DirectQ running that did AVI capture some time back, but I junked the code owing to weird bugs in places. I may restore some of it but don't hold your breaths for this one.

That's about it for now. Release in the second half of this week, depending on how testing goes.

Update

You can now turn fullbright colours on and off using the gl_fullbrights cvar. The default is on, of course, because this was how software Quake did it. However, being able to turn them off is desirable in cases when the texture artist targetted GLQuake and either didn't bother/didn't care to test in software Quake or was unaware that the original intended look of Quake was slightly different.

An interesting glitch with fullbrights is that they can actually appear darker than the non-fullbright version under certain circumstances. You want an example? Here we go.



The obvious solution is to sample the textures with fullbrights both on and off and take the maximum, but it will come with a performance penalty. How much? Don't know yet, but I suspect that it will be acceptable enough.

Now, this is definitely not how software Quake did it, and it will lead to some slight over-saturation in places, I know, but it comes back to what I mentioned before about doing something a little different "when the original is crap".

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