Saturday, December 20, 2008

Adventures with alias models

Lost a lot more time messing around with alias models, but it was interesting and I did learn a few things from it, so it's not a total loss.

First I decided to implement Direct3D lighting on them, which was great fun as the SDK and online examples were completely impractical for this. There's also misleading information; light colours go from 0 to 255, not 0 to 1. That threw me off for a long time, trying to figure why my models were rendering all black.

Anyway, I got a good result in terms of accuracy to the original, and it was much faster than Quake's software emulation, but it ended up looking very tacky and plasticky so I rolled back.

Secondly I started messing with the in-memory format; I've been badly unsatisfied with this for a long time, so I wanted to make a change that would enable cleaner passes through it. I ended up spending too much time on it though, so in the end I decided to put it off and rolled back again.

Right now I'm getting down to what I should have done a long time ago; sky and water surfs on brush models. I think I'm going to have a pop at doing them on ammo boxes too.

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