Monday, October 26, 2009

New 1.7.4 features

I've about 80% of the software I need on now, so I fired up Visual C++ and added some more new features to the engine. Some of the menu options in the Video Options menu have now been restored to simple mode, there is an r_infiniteperspective cvar for switching off the infinite projection matrix in case it gives you trouble (I have yet to tune sky for it) and I've also added compatibility for DarkPlaces-style alias model skin replacement textures.

With regard to the last item, I'm of the opinion that DarkPlaces does one thing wrong and one thing right. The wrong thing is the directory location; it's just so much cleaner all round if you store all replacement textures under "/textures". That way, you can easily locate them, move them out of your Quake folder if you want, and so on. However done is done, and while we might now have an enforced de-facto standard that is essentially "wrong", and unintuitive, it must be supported.

The right thing is retaining the ".mdl" in the texture name; primarily because "/progs" is used for two different types of content - alias models and sprites. In ID1 there is already a case where there is an "s_light.mdl" and an "s_light.spr"; without something to differentiate them there is a risk that a texture for one type could be loaded for the other.

DirectQ used to not add the extension (dunno why, as my previous MHQuakes did), but now it does. The upshot of this however is that skin textures without ".mdl" in them are now unsupported in DirectQ. A general rule is that if it works in DarkPlaces it should also work in DirectQ (with obvious exceptions such as gloss/specular/normal/etc maps), but if it doesn't work in DarkPlaces, while it might work in DirectQ, I make no guarantees.

2 comments:

xaGe said...

..nICE. Thank you.

Stefan said...

Awesome! Can't wait to play with DQ 1.7.4... :D