Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Updates for 9th June 2010

Not much today, but I have been working a little more on the surface refresh. The current plan is to go for the adjusted blending modes for external texture lumas after all, but to generalise it so that the new modes are used for everything. This involves removing fullbright texels from the standard texture image, then using a lightmap * texture + luma mode globally.

This will also massively simplify the 2 TMU path as well as make it easier to disable fullbrights properly.

I've also integrated a lot of the palettes that DirectQ uses, which are pretty much a GLQuake hangover. As well as video dimensions, palettes are something that GLQuake kept multiple copies of scattered all over the place. I didn't help matters by making some more of my own, so I'm consolidating them all into a single set of linked palettes (standard, no fullbrights and fullbrights only) that are just used everywhere.

Both of these are in a state of partial completion and work is ongoing.

Final job was doing a sanity check on my render to texture setup. It occurs to me that I'll likely be able to use a single rendertarget texture with different viewport sizes here, so that should give us something of a video RAM saving.

I've also been thinking a little about eye-candy features in DirectQ, and it looks as though the first one is going to be bloom. Between a combination of render to texture and the new luma blending (which preserves the full luma colour - a prerequisite) this should be very quickly do-able. It will be HLSL only so fair warning. Of course it will also be disabled by default.

5 comments:

Coranth said...

Having the new visual effects disabled by default is fine, but please give us some options in the menu to enable them; I don't like using the console at all, as it's too easy to cheat, and I couldn't be arsed using something that resembles a CLI.

mhquake said...

Menu options will be provided, yes. You can take that for granted. :)

Anonymous said...

What do yah say about customizing crosshairs? It would be pretty cool if possible.

mhquake said...

Customizing crosshairs was done for 1.8.4

BuzzKillington said...

This is such an awesome engine, runs so much faster on my laptop (integrated graphics) than opengl based ones. I like the idea of a bit bloom, but how much impact will it have on fps? on opengl engines, bloom destroys my fps! What happened to the advanced menu on 1.8.4? You removed lots of the options, I know they're still accesible from the console, but i liked having things like chasecam as an options menu (ok ok, I'm lazy too! lol). Anyway, keep up the good work, and I really like the way you post reguarly and keep us up-to-date with what's going on. Gives us a good insight into the programming side of things.