Will Quake ever get PBR support?

[hardcore_gamer]

Just recently Doom's source port Qzdoom got support for PBR textures and it looks insane:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaYj6quuumE

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topi...pbr-materials/

Seeing as Doom is an even old technology than Quake's, do you think there is any chance of one of Quake's source ports getting similar features? PBR in Quake would look awesome.

[Mr.Burns]

Hi HG,
I wouldn't be suprised if Darkplaces and/or FTE could support this (or could be made to do so). MarkV and Qrack might be other candidates. I suppose the question is does a PBR set of Quake textures, or suitable ones that could be substituted, actually exist? A lot of the the newer players like their "eye candy" and would find it quite appealing.

As a learning exercise I would be interested in doing a comparison between PBR textures in Quake maps (in a different engine) versus those used in the map in "normal" engine, so if you find a PBR texture set for a particular map please let me know. I will post the results here just for ppl's info.

Kind regards
Monty

[hardcore_gamer]

Hi HG,

As a learning exercise I would be interested in doing a comparison between PBR textures in Quake maps (in a different engine) versus those used in the map in "normal" engine, so if you find a PBR texture set for a particular map please let me know. I will post the results here just for ppl's info.

Kind regards
Monty

Somebody already remade some Quake stuff for Unreal engine 4 so we don't have to imagine anything. Obviously it would not like this pretty in the Quake engine but this still does demonstrate what Quake textures could look like with PBR:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjJx7BqV6Yo

[Mr.Burns]

..If only they made the textures publicly available.

[Spike]

try vid_srgb 2
this will make both FTE and DP use blending that approximates real-world linear light, instead of between sRGB values (which are non-linear, and thus weird).
This is the only mandatory feature for PBR, the rest is basically just a mindset, rather than any specific technique - stuff like lightsources being limited to VISIBLE things like walltorches and light textures, instead of magically coming from thin air only in the centre of the room...
The rest is all just glsl (which can be changed without actual engine modification) and its input textures - both engines already support glsl that has per-texel roughness and specular and stuff, and there's already compatible textures.
That's the theory, anyway. Just don't expect it to look right - because of the magic lights(with its resulting lack of real light sources), and because everyone's too familiar with the old-skool lighting (along with any concessions that keep things vaugely compatible), and because of all the dodgy textures that have light directions baked into the diffuse map because someone wanted them to look okay even without any bumpmaps or fancy lighting (it still annoys me every time I see a button or whatever lit from above or below when the nearest light is a really bright one right next to it but to the side - stuff like that really is not PBR. Like I said, its a mindset rather than anything specific).

the UE stuff is more than just textures. doing displacement tessellation like that requires the geometry to be aware of the actual edges, otherwise you end up with cracks and all sorts of other hideousnesses. They've added geometry beyond that required to fix up displacement cracks, too. Going through every single map in order to rebuild all the geometry would be much work, especially with all the third-party maps that have no source available, as well as a bsp format (and tools) that support vertex normals etc too.