Saturday, August 22, 2009

More automap fun

Some more fine-tuning has been added to the automap - proper frustum culling (well it's not really a frustum but the end result is the same), removal of the "culled objects" count (which was just there for test purposes) and drawing of inline brush models that had previously been visible to the player. This latter will get rid of the large hole in the middle of the start map as seen on the previous screenshot. The implementation is slightly hacky but for now it stays as I think I've achieved pretty much what I set out to do with it. So I'm considering the automap code "done", unless I can think of anything else that it needs.

I know I said that I was doing a feature freeze, but I think I'm going to add shadows to this version. Not volume shadows, just classic Quake shadows. I have most of the code I need already in the Quake II engine, although the MDL architecture and scaffolding is quite different (even more so with this version of DirectQ) but it should be something that's quick and easy to implement all the same (famous last words). I'm not going to do it straight away, as I intend continuing with integrating the whole translucent brush model setup next (which proved to upset the whole engine quite a lot more that I would have liked), but I'm going to save it for when I get fed up of doing that and fancy something different (just like I used the automap for).

Of course, the fact that Direct3D actually does have both a stencil buffer and polygon offset (sssshhh - nobody tell this person) makes this easier.

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