Absolute Beginners guide to using shaders

[OneManClan]

[gnounc]

Pretty good guide, I think that appears to cover it pretty well.
I know you linked some articles, but could you walk us through building a simple shader script?
You said you can link input textures, that would be useful in an example post too.
thx.

[Spike]

[Spike]

[ajay]

Hi
trying to get a Quake 3 grass shader working in Darkplaces, did a quick forum search and came up with this thread.

Anyway, the grass isn't working, before I do more digging and tweaking, a couple of basic questions:

1) Can darkplaces use .obj models (the shader uses one as the q3map_surfaceModel)
2) Do I have to compile the map with q3map2 to get this sort of thing working?

Many thanks

[KillPixel]

Nice post with nice links. Thanks, this will be handy.

[Spike]

ajay:
1)q3map2 handles the surfacemodel stuff and inserts it into the map as trisoup or some such, the engine doesn't need to support anything but the q3bsp format. this means that everything has the correct lighting instead of looking goofy.
2) the engine doesn't have anything to do with q3map_* settings. so yes, you need to use q3map2 in order to utilise those shader settings.
q1bsp does not support trisoup, so q1 tools won't do it. the engine can't/won't randomly do it as it expects the compiler to have done any of that stuff already (and yeah, screwy lighting or really long load times...).

[ajay]

Cheers Spike; so it won't work like the shader for water, which is a shame. Is there a grass shader that does work with quake tools, rather than q3?

[Spike]

no. make a static entity instead.

[ajay]

I see, thanks. Therefore... can q1 maps be compiled with q3map2 "as is" or is there much work required? I guess some entities or brush functionality would be lost. Also, static entities; do you mean sprites? Sorry for questions, ajay.

[Spike]

q1bsp cannot sanely embed arbitrary geometry.
I believe quark can convert .map formats. LIghting algorithms will be significantly different (nicer, but less quakey). I imagine you'll need to faff around with water shaders, I'm not sure of any other differences.
By static entities, I mean the makestatic builtin, where the entity is thrown at the client and doesn't stay on the server etc. any model format.

[Nahuel]

[ajay]

Nahuel, that's really helpful. If you could post an english version of that tut, it would be great. I'm terrible (it's an age thing ) in learning new stuff, once I get it, I'm fine, but anything outside of my current knowledge needs a lot of guidance Thanks again.

[Nahuel]

Well, this is off topic here so i will write a quick guide to use q1 maps to compile q3bsp´s with quark in this forum!

[ajay]

That's excellent, thank you very much