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Question about Quake II view weapons

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  • Question about Quake II view weapons

    I've noticed this for ages, but I'm wondering about why this occurs:

    In Quake II, the view weapon/HUD weapon mesh surfaces seem to distort and not move quite in unison when an animation is played on them, almost as if they're made out of Jello. You can really see it when a fast animation is played on one, such as looking at the chaingun or the hyperblaster with the time acceleration tech powerup from CTF. What causes this?

  • #2
    its because they're actually made of jelly. yes, really!... mostly, anyway.

    both mdl(q1) and md2(q2) formats store the vertexes as 8bit x,y,z values. they're scaled and biased so they appear in the right place.
    the visible difference between the two is quite simple: md2 has per-frame scale+bias values, while mdl only has per-model.
    if a vertex at the extremeties of an md2 model moves, that frame's scale+bias values will typically come out differently. this forces ALL over verticies to move slightly - even if the 8bit values don't change the scale+bias will have.

    it is possible for an exporter to write md2 files with the same scale+bias for every single frame, which would provide consistency, but apparently most tools favour precision over consistency. which makes those md2s look truely terrible when they animate.

    for reference, quake3 moved to fixed signed 16-bit 1/64th global scale with no bias. This ensures there is no swimming from repeatedly importing+exporting, regardless of any edits made.
    Some Game Thing

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    • #3
      Ah thank you, now I understand. They must have been aware of this using the format in the game. Could this have been improved on during development or was it an issue of the performance constratints of the time? It seems MDL meshes weren't animated as well but didn't have this issue either.

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