Late summer update

All hail the Goat-Mother, Shub-Niggurath.

Here’s the scoop:

The RMQengine is going all-shaders. This was remarkably painless so far, I thought it would lead to more complications but it seems to work fine.

Mapping continues. As far as the BSP format holdup goes, that will hopefully be resolved soon.

A new group of “former human” enemies resulted from a collective design brainstorm on IRC.  This should close the gap between “base monsters” and the rest. The dimensions will become a more dangerous place.

Our current dev cycle lasts until the end of September. I heard talk of multi-map releases. Let’s hope the BSP limit falls in time for that.

New team members: digs (level design) and =peg= (playtesting).

As a reminder, our IRC channel is #rmq at irc.anynet.org.

gb

Videos

Video page updated with the QExpo clips.

2 vids of Monster and Bloodshot playing Demo 2 forthcoming.

Summer Update

1. Ijed and RickyT23 released two RMQ speedmaps. You can run those either with the SP Demo 2 (create a new folder “maps” next to the pak file, and copy the .bsp files there) or with a newer progs etc. (170 MB download).

Here’s the thread at func_.

2. SP Demo 3 is on a hiatus induced by technical obstacles and RL requirements. There is no release date atm.

3. There is continuing work on new enemies, weapons, a really nice new monster roaming system, textures, maps, and a few technical issues.

IQM; grass

mh on Inter-Quake model (IQM) support in RMQ:

“more complete support than both Darkplaces and Alien Arena.”

mh’s IQM notes, part 1

mh’s IQM notes, part 2

gb on grass:

 

Schedule, even more updated

We’re on the track towards a triple-map single player demo release during QExpo 2011. That’s around the 20th of June.

Hi-res textures are being phased in at the moment, even though it is a Pandora’s box of unfinished work, and as is usual by now, no one can agree on a common set. But who else should open Pandora’s boxes in Quake if not us?

gb intends to do a full set of new normal maps for the QRP, since the existing ones are often really over the top. This’ll not kick in until after the demo though.

Beta brawl

Very early beta version of the SP Demo 2 map, e1m6rq. I showed this to a couple external testers during development to get feedback.

Notice the m0ar brutal crusher section (nail shooters), bad (and non-coloured) lighting, the completely different (and very sketchy) end (mini-thon!), the absence of the boiler room, the missing lavatrain area and the  still-original lower crusher (no power crystals yet).

The gold key section, the entire pipe stuff and the grapple points are completely missing. This version used a route that was more similar to the original e1m6. Different SK position as well. The new route (and the requirements that came with it) only existed in the TRAC and in the heads of the team.

It was recorded in March 2010, nine months before the extensively changed, polished and greatly expanded version was released in SP Demo 2. Used Darkplaces to record this, since we didn’t even have our own engine yet.

It’s quite funny to see it like that now.

Be sure to watch in 480p.

Doom3: The Remake of the Remake

I learned how to make these textures with see-through parts, they’re actually sprites with some parts painted over with the “transparent” color (index 255).  I’m simply loading them into the map with RMQ’s misc_model entity – seems sprites are handled much like models. Guess this would work in standard Quake as well, you just have to make sure you set the sprite’s orientation to “oriented” (in Fimg2, for example, which is a pretty good software written by FrikaC). If you don’t use “oriented sprites”, the sprite will rotate to follow the player just like DOOM’s trees do. I set the rotation by way of a “mangle” key in misc_model, as usual.

Got the idea from Quoth2, so credit where credit is due, and Spike explained to me what an oriented sprite is.

I’m pretty sure you can make stuff like chainlink fences and spiderwebs with this, probably also grass, vines, hanging cables and so forth. Pineapple had a pretty good idea how to get a higher effective resolution with these, which I’ll keep to myself for now. Note: Sprites are usually fullbright in Quake, unless the engine supports an extension to light them properly – DP_LITSPRITES or something similar. And guess what, this is broken in DP. Haha. maybe we can unbreak it, so these actually get properly lit ingame.

The full 3-D “see through” effect of course only occurs when you’re moving while looking at these. So a screenshot doesn’t really do them justice.

As for the title, I love Doom 3, which is more a remake of DOOM than a sequel, and I’m kinda… umm… letting myself get inspired by it. To put it carefully. What I mean is, you might recognize some things in a certain map once you can all actually play this stuff. Oh frabgious day! Will we release by 2016? Bets, anyone?

We’ve Got Incoming

Ass is being kicked liberally, as in this e1m2rq shot of a colored dynamic lights – enhanced shambler letting loose at a god-moded, motion blurred mapper, er I mean player, with reckless abandon. Or something.

We’re working on episodes 1, 2 and 3, pineapple came up with a pretty good story and protagonist for episode 4, Supa worked some on cameras, Baker is making the multiplayer stuff more accessible (I heard something about downloading content from the server, and universal servers), and mh took a long look at Spike’s CSQC-winquake and needed very strong coffee afterwards. If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you…

Spike joined as a watcher (which gives him access to code and discussions); he showered us with his CSQC wisdom and is going to and fro over the CSQC stuff with mh. We’re trying to find out what we really need, and how to make it relatively easy to pick up for others.

One question was that of the VM – is the existing qc VM going to be hacksawed to run both ssqc and csqc, or are they kept separate? It looks like for the sake of adaptability by others, for pragmatic reasons and so forth, it is going to be the latter. This would mean a less ideal and elegant solution, but leave the existing VM largely intact and allow to gradually add CSQC support to an engine. This is what mh said:

So the idealist in me says “4a” but the pragmatist says “4c” with either qclib or a copy of the current RMQ VM rewired for CSQC. I think we have a decision here. “

4a being “one VM to rule them all”, 4c keeping them separate and using qclib or something else for CSQC.

Spike’s a cool guy; we got RMQ working properly in FTE – no more unkillable grunts – and even the bots are visible, yay!

Engine support for RMQ is looking pretty good, I think Proquake, QRack, FTE and DirectQ will probably run it, in addition to RMQ’s own FitzquakeSDL-derived engine. I can’t imagine that Darkplaces doesn’t run every Quake mod under the sun, so I hope the two will get along as well.  We will probably try and keep our csprogs.dat DP-compatible as well.

The semi-project/idea of QSB (Quake Standard Base) has twitched a little recently, so it might not be quite dead yet. How a new standard comes about, and in how many steps (I’d assume two steps, the first one consisting of stuff that is already existing and/or easy to implement, the second one consisting of a lot of extensions and more esoteric stuff, including a standard protocol), remains to be seen. It could be a sort of document, or it could be simply RMQ kicking down the door and putting down its heavy foot matter-of-factly, declaring “this be the standard”. With a Yorkshire accent.

We are thinking of others, though. Protocol 666 is apparently relatively clearly written and easy to work with, all credit for this of course goes to metlslime, and RMQ’s stuff is basically only flansched on top of it. We’ll see how CSQC support impacts the whole thing, but mh has already said that it needs to be as clean and portable as possible, practically acting as a reference implementation that others can follow.

Some of it is, in mh’s words, “a full hostile takeover” though. Well. He is mh, though, and this is RMQ. So a certain amount of “make it so” is part of the whole thing’s DNA.

The center bridge has changed…

… among other things.

More on the screenshots page under “episode 2”.

…

“weird, daunting atmosphere”

— Screenshot too dark? I intentionally didn’t brighten it by an insane amount like the other screenshots here – this is Quake we’re talking about. It is supposed to be dark. Watch at night.