Release Discussion

[3rd_3ye]

Back to those pesky polyobjects, well, sort of. If true vertice hight slopes are your next goal, and polyobject slopes are nearly in the engine, what fate will befall the old decorative slopes? They're useless for surface areas where player can tumble on in game, but what about ceilings? It would be wasteful to use up a polyobject on some diagonal support beam, you only get 256 per map if I'm not mistaken.

[Corbachu]

New shader engine supports bump maps, normal maps, dynamic lighting and Doom3-style shadows, multiple lights and colors, specular highlights, environment maps, and more. Still working on even more advanced things, like decals, shader-based Sky system, reactive particles, per-pixel bounding boxes on 3d models (physics, basically) and more.

Screen is from Hypertension, testing a quick normal map just to show it off.

[Corbachu]

So, another update for today.

Damir and myself have decided to create two rendering paths for OpenGL - one based on 1.1 (which is the existing renderer), and the other based on OpenGL 2.0, which can render much more advanced effects if desired.

These effects will require use of a C_VAR (unnamed as of yet) that will control what level of OpenGL is used. This will be implemented into the edge2.cfg and into a DDF file (not sure which one yet, maybe DDFGAME) that will specify if the level/episode is to be strictly used with OpenGL 1 or 2.

Obviously, this will mean things like shader mirrors, shader reflections on floors, shader-based shadows, the works.

Unrelated to the rendering code, I've been integrating a new music device to replace the Default System player in Windows - OPL. The library itself comes heavily modified from GZDoom and Chocolate DOOM, which is based on the MAME OPL core. The library itself is integrated, I just need to write file handling for it. As usual, it will require the presence of a GENMIDI lump, which all IWADS have anyway. Timidity will still be an option, but the patchsets will not be packed in the executable once this is working - instead, a link will be given to download them. This will pretty much greatly reduce the file size. This device will be the default Win32 music playback device.

[3rd_3ye]

Ah, interesting read. Sorry to hear about the loss of integrated timidity, it was fun while it lasted.

Any news about the experiments with quake3 bsp? Would you care to speculate as to a possible preview of that feature, i.e. 3dge2.7?

[Corbachu]

Let me correct - it will exist if the user builds a Linux distro. Win32 will completely ignore it in favor of OPL. Of course, I suppose I could make an option for Win32, but at this point I just want the fucking MUS code in Win32 to work

Stay peeled for that Quake3 BSP stuff...which will require OpenGL 2.0.

[3rd_3ye]

Stay peeled for that Quake3 BSP stuff...which will require OpenGL 2.0.

Please excuse my nervousness, but I've been witness to the destruction of many mods at the hands of quakeC. Q3 uses quakeC as a map scripting language, I take it that this will never be the case with 3dge?
Gotta be careful out there...