Friday, March 4, 2011

DirectQ Update - 4th March 2011

Been reworking my MDL lighting again. I was starting to get quite annoyed by it earlier on, so I decided to refocus my objective a little, and am now well pleased with the result.

Way I see it there are a number of possible goals with MDL lighting. One obvious one is to be faithful to GLQuake, and another is to be faithful to software Quake. Up to now I had been aiming for the latter, but ran into trouble with various scaling and clamping factors, in particular with attempting to work overbrights vs no overbrights into it.

Thinking back, the solution should have been quite obvious. Instead of aiming for either of those two goals, let's define a third one instead: be consistent with the world model lighting. This automatically solves a lot of problems: MDLs now slot perfectly into place with no weird brightnesses (or darknesses) jumping out at you, dynamic lighting matches, and the whole scene just looks a lot better now.

Being faithful to the original is a worthwhile goal, but sometimes when the original is crap you've got to rethink things a little.

Update

A screenshot of the revamped MDL lighting was required so here we go. There's not really much to see here, it's when models and lights start moving that things get interesting.



And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you pesky kids!

11 comments:

meTch said...

and then was screenshot?

=peg= said...

Looks like Quake to me though, so good job! :D

mhquake said...

I think I found the reason why you disconnected by the way.

David A. said...

Will this make that MDL lighting slider more useful? From playing with it, one notch down/up makes the models either way too bright or way too dark.

Also, is there any way to make the particles blockier? I have everything else set to be as close to software Quake as possible, but the round particles kind of stick out. Do the current ones use an image?

mhquake said...

"Will this make that MDL lighting slider more useful? From playing with it, one notch down/up makes the models either way too bright or way too dark."

Yeah, it actually works properly now. It does go in 0.25 increments though so I might be able to reduce that a little. The underlying cvar is called r_aliaslightscale by the way.

"Also, is there any way to make the particles blockier? I have everything else set to be as close to software Quake as possible, but the round particles kind of stick out. Do the current ones use an image?"

Not at present but really easy to add. You might then want to play with the value of r_particlesize to suit your own tastes.

David A. said...

Awesome. I was wondering what cvar that slider corresponded to.

I don't think I've thanked you yet for the work you've put into DirectQ. It really is everything I could want in a Quake engine - the menus are laid out sanely, it's not trying to turn Quake into something it's not (IE, a modern-looking game), and It Just Works(tm), which is unfortunately more than I can say about other ports due to the poor state of OpenGL drivers. Thanks!!

mhquake said...

Cheers! It's great to see people getting use from it.

Anyway, I've added the option for square particles (r_particlestyle 1) and have added both this and size to the menu.

These will be in the next release. Can I say "early next week?"

Nick said...

is it possible to set the strength for shadows?

i like the shadows but don't like them complete dark. so i don't use them. but have them at 20% or something would probably be cool.

big thanks from me too for keeping things how they used to be and keep all the gimmick as an option.

mhquake said...

"is it possible to set the strength for shadows?

i like the shadows but don't like them complete dark. so i don't use them. but have them at 20% or something would probably be cool.
"

r_shadows 0.2

:)

mhquake said...

You can do the same with r_dynamic to vary the intensity of dynamic lights by the way. And with r_drawviewmodel to have a translucent gun.

David A. said...

You know, the documentation for DirectQ is a bit on the scarce side... For instance, I had no idea it supported ripped music until I stumbled across your post on quakeone.com explaining that. Have you thought about making a wiki?