quake 3 engine going open sources

I never said q3a can render uncompelled maps; what I said was that q3a is capable of rendering all poly gons on the fly. Just like SL. To do that, every thing is set to a mineral type like 'door' or animate. Witch tells the q3a to render the those poly gons every frame. Those poly gons can be moved around, streached, and be manipulated.

FYI The reason q3a can't render uncompelled maps, is that it isn't programed to read the raw data files. It's programed to read pk3.

Ahhh, the "uncompiled map" terminology is confusing people.

Yeah, I don't know the lingo, which is always a problem with this.

How would you pose the question?

You could also ask him a more direct question. Like do you think any of the q3a source would be use full for other developers, who are development a massively multi player online game, Such as SecondLife. If so, what areas would do you think would be useful?

When rendering with poly gons, the process of rendering is kind of universal. For instance an apple. The apple is made out of poly gons. q3a may store those poly gons as some sort of poly gon base object. If I had to guess how SL works. I would guess. SL store the apple as an object. Made up of several primitives. Each primtive have a set of settings. The sl client can then interpit those setting to generate a poly gon object.
Ones the object is poly gons, from q3a or SL, I think rendering process becomes quite similar. They have to store those poly gons some how, then pass those poly gons to the rendering functions, and then to the video card.

The SecondLife rendering engine is an amazing peace of technology. It's very mature. Sense they started from scratch, they were able to do all kind of innovative ideas. And unlike some companies, they seem to take their rendering quite seriously.

Just to speculate. If some one was to make a 3d card, specifically for sl, and games like it, they might be able to increase efficiently, by making a specific spot on the card to convert parameters into poly gons.

Not sure they know what SecondLife is. I can add that though.

Well, I strongly disagree with this statement.

CPUs are are maxing out. Future performance enhancements will come from video cards.

Therefore, I think everything will be depend on the direction that video card manufacturers go in. Maybe they'll see SL as a godsend and add streaming capability to their cards.

The future computer is most likely going to be one where you have CPUs for handling different tasks and the main one will just tell them what to do.

Also confused. Sounds like what you're talking about ('door') is just rendering within the camera's frustrum. Is that what you're talking about? Or are you talking about "portals"?

And the part about polygons being moved around and such, sounds like id's shader technology which allows - within limits - simulated vertex displacement. Is that what you're referring to?

And as for what Q3 reads, it's not really accurate imo to say it reads "pk3" files. That's just a version of a .zip file (in fact you create pk3's with a program like WinZip; just change the suffix from something like "mymap.zip" to "mymap.pk3". Q3 renders the level from a .bsp file iirc, and grabs entities (weapons, characters, mapobjects, etc) from their own folders and places them in that pre-lit, pre-compiled environment. Those entities are usually .md3 files (with .tga or .jpg skins). And map objects imported into the level are merged into the .bsp iirc during the compile. All those different files reside within the compressed pk3.

if the zip file contains the bsp. Then how can q3a read the bsp, with out first reading the zip. ^>^ Especially because the zip file compresses data. The only reason q3a read the bsp in the zip file is because a text file in the zip files tell it to read a bsp. But you ovusly know that, because your farmilure with how q3a interpits and renders.

Sounds like quake only renders door objects (or animate) objects in limited ways.

Is that really going to extrapolate very well to an entire metaverse?

DO you have any pics of this rendering? Have you done this yourself?

{from the 174 - 179 changes found here }

If I remember q3a terminology correctly. Doors are entities. Witch like player models, can interact with players and the level. But unlike players, entities are not directly controlled by a user. Nor can entities be controlled by npcs. Entities can be controlled by code.

When some people realized that some aim bots did not discern if a door was open or closed. They began to experimenting with entities type that were ether doors or like doors. By having hole levels of these types, they believed they could make aim bots useless. I believe the idea was abandoned, because they figured that the aim bot hackers would eventually program their aim bots to determine the difference. And then player would be left facing aim bots that were harder to detect and levels that would required more cpu and gpu power to render.

He didn't respond to my question re: shaders, but this is something I'd like to see. However, given that prims aren't meshes and don't contain vertex information like regular game models, as much as I'd like to do some of the things I've done in Q3, I'm not holding my breath.

I did make a nice little weapon for Q3 (a "squidgun" with undulating tentacles), but can't find my in-game shots of it (although for other reasons I started looking for it and other things last week).

If I rember right, you can disable the pre-lighting, and shading through console commands. And no I was not talking about shaders.

Well, it sounds very intriguing.

You really don't have any links about this eh? Any forums it was discussed on? Anything we can google on?

sure quake3arena.com

Ok, where on quake3arena.com does it discuss having levels entirely comprised of entities?

I'm beginning to feel like I'm on a wild goose chase, here.

woops I should have typed http://www.quake3world.com

You're not big on direct links, are you?

quake3world has been around sense almost the biggening of quake 3 areana. There has been so many articals and disucstions. Finding a specific discustion or atrical is like finding a needle in a hay stack.

It's kind of silly to search for an old discustion, when some ones said they would be asking Ydnar.

Spellcheck. Please?

Basically, from my knowledge of BSP trees and whatnot... Q3A, even Quake1 can read "unoptimized" maps -- ie one where the geometry is compiled, but views aren't.

But I wouldn't recommend it.

LF

Could also ask Paul Jaquay. He's a regular and should need no introduction. TTimo posts as well i think and would know. In fact most of the good people at quake3world hang or used to hang at MC (though it's been pretty quiet since the last site meltdown couple years ago). Most of the good amateurs that went pro also hang out there (like Raven). Others like Kat either know or have the connections to find out. And Jezebel's boyfriend would know as he's a programmer over at Fountainhead (Carmack's wife's machinima company). So plenty of people to ask that probably don't go to q3w anymore.

I'd ask, but tbh, I've no clue what Kurt is saying.

More fascinating detail.

An old video card for q3a is a rage 128 pro.

My conclusion here is that I think Kurt was originally right, but we can't take his ideas tooo far as exciting as they might be.

I suspect Quake3 should have a lot of great optimisation tricks (they do use entities which are dynamic polygons and can be rendered dynamically), especially since Carmack has had hand in a lot of it.

Let's hope that LL studies it carefully.

My other conclusion, is that LL is a different kind of fish.

It has outdoors and LOD issues on far away dynamic content. It also has massive amounts of dynamic content (or prims).

Quake simply was not built for lots of entities. In fact, each level has a maximum of 1000 entities.

Also, trying to hook multiple sims up with Quake3 most likely would not work as it simply was not built for that situation.

Maybe one castle style SIM could be made, where you're in rooms all the time, but wide open spaces are unlikely to be possible except with heavy modifications... modifications much like what LL is doing themselves.

Having said that, I think this was a great thread and I learned quite a bit. I also think releasing the sources is very important for LL to make sure they're not missing any tricks. That being said, we do have to accept that they are different animals and not everything will cross over.

I still believe, though, that turning the client into an asset server is the number one thing they need to do.

Capabilities and possibilities aside, the source has now been released. Even better, a version of Radiant (before going "GtK" has been GPL'd as well. An unexpected bonus. Blue's News has links in their post .

And as i had an older pc up and running yesterday, I managed to snag a couple old shots of one of the models I made. So for fun, here's a few shots of it:


Awesome little game when it was released.