[Quake-devel] Re: [Quake-devel]

[Seth G. <sga...@li...>]

On Sun, 24 Sep 2000, bf galbraith wrote:

> I just saw "Nahara" It took all afternoon, but wow! Reminds me of my
> same old same old wish list of tweening, bolt ons and model scaling :)

The singular most annoying thing in the Seal of Nehahra movie is the
limited precision models.  Other than that, it's the best real-time 3D
movie around :-) (You can especially tell when a model has been taken
from Quake, modified in any way that affects it's bounding box size, and
exported to Quake .mdl format again.)

Quake's low precision alias model format is the biggest flaw in it's
design.  I see a lot of focus on special effects and shaders and colored
lighting in various incarnations of the Quake engine.  Folks call this
"eye candy" I call it "sugar frosted crap"  I mean the superficial
texture-related effects are great, but they don't solve the more
fundamental problems like low-detail and/or jiggling characters.

Folks can make cool high-detail levels and use them in Quake, but they
can't make cool, high-detail characters and use them.  The average
Quake user has something like eight times as much memory and four times as
much power for processing characters now than in 1996, but if you add any
more detail to a Quake .mdl, you start having polygons disappear,
flattened by the low precision.

A character with a beautifully sculpted face suddenly has a melting mass
of goo with eyes that appear and disappear, a nose that jumps out, jumps
up, swings left and right, drops, down and disappears many times per
second.  Moving mouths?  Forget about it!

Somebody said they had half life model support working in Quake, but there
were licensing problems with the Half Life SDK.  Well, it happens.  All
the more reason to go and find other documentation which doesn't have such
limitations.

Our models are primarily in two source formats similar to Half Life:

 * MilkShape 3D - a half-life oriented program but we used it
   to make an Open Quartz player and a couple of other models.
   It has a free SDK with no "shrink wrap" license agreement.
   http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/ms3d/index.html   
   http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/ms3d/download.html
   http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/files/ms3dsdk12.zip
   http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/files/MsViewer.zip
   (the last file is a viewer for ms3d's ascii export format.)

 * qME - no source code or format docs are available for this program
   I asked the creator of the program about it and he hasn't gotten
   back to me about it yet (He seems to come and go a lot.)

> We've been putting the Open Quartz material to good use in our latest
> hack and slash release (Y2K appocalypse edition.)

Check out the new Hack and Slash Y2K Apocalypse Edition:
http://www.planetquake.com/gg/fmp/hack.html

One interesting feature of this TC is that standing and running animation
is played at 20 fps for most characters, but only at 10 fps for the
skeleton character because I didn't find the .qME version of the .mdl with
the skeletal animation data in it.  (So the skeleton is the only character
without a skeleton :-)

But it doesn't matter that the one character has a different number of
animation frames because I used frame groups.  This also makes the
animation run client side, and as far as the server is concerned it's just
one frame.

This would be a problem for other model formats which don't support frame
groups.  The way to work around that problem is by including a text file
listing which scenes are frame groups.  The same file could also be used
to customize animation interpolation.
  __    __    _                                    _    __    __
_/  \__/  \__/  Seth Galbraith  "The Serpent Lord"  \__/  \__/  \_
 \__/  \__/  \_ sga...@kr...  #2244199 on ICQ  _/  \__/  \__/
_/  \__/  \__/    http://www.planetquake.com/gg     \__/  \__/  \_