HEXEN II community work and discussion

[inkub0]

WEBSITE UPDATED, WITH v0.78 & WITH NEW SCREENSHOTS!

PS: Regarding your pack-size:
What does my wife always tell me: Its not the size that matters

[Korax]

I've been working on UQE adding colored lighting and trying out your texture pack.

I've noticed for some odd reason I'm getting a crash on one of the demo# levels when loading. I'm not sure yet if its a corrupt texture or a bug in the in-dev version of 1.14 or if its something that would also crash v1.13

It'll be cool if someone could run a test on 1.13 and see if its only me getting the crash on the newer code.

The texture code still needs more adjustment and the colored lighting implementation is about 50% done, but heres some results sofar:

1. Colored lighting with original textures.


2. Colored lighting with new textures.


3. Something Id like to confirm... the light bordering texture on the roof and below the angel... it feels incorrect with regards to texture mapping... is this how it renders in other engines too?

[inkub0]

NIIIICE WORK KORAX

I've noticed for some odd reason I'm getting a crash on one of the demo# levels when loading. I'm not sure yet if its a corrupt texture or a bug in the in-dev version of 1.14 or if its something that would also crash v1.13

strange! i used FTEqw and JShexen with my texpack: both crashes rarely, maybe not for texture reasons...

It'll be cool if someone could run a test on 1.13 and see if its only me getting the crash on the newer code.

i'll do it tomorrow

The texture code still needs more adjustment and the colored lighting implementation is about 50% done, but heres some results...

3. Something Id like to confirm... the light bordering texture on the roof and below the angel... it feels incorrect with regards to texture mapping... is this how it renders in other engines too?

In other engines the texture is different... a square decoration....

[Korax]

Thanks

Regarding the weird texture... I'm not yet doing texture overriding /level/ stuff... I'm not sure if that bit of info helps

[inkub0]

Thanks
Regarding the weird texture... I'm not yet doing texture overriding /level/ stuff... I'm not sure if that bit of info helps

dont worry, but if you got overriding problems, use Jeank texture pack, because he prepared all the files in the right folder order... but pay attention, because his foldertree is different from mine...

(i added Jeank skies in my texpack, but fte doesnt load the, it will be great if all engines can read the skies )

@ world

I want to extract all the lightmaps from game maps and i want to try to increase 8X their resolution...
HOW CAN I DO IT ?

[dfsp_spirit]

I have no clue about Hexen 2, just inferring from my Quake knowledge here:

I think you would have to recompile the lighting for the maps using a light compiler. For Quake you could use one of these to get the job done. Since the lightmap is most likely stored in the bsp this would change the bsps and may cause trouble in multiplayer/on servers though...

[inkub0]

My mind is to create external lightmaps files with an higher resolution... our good Engines developers will put support in their projects for external lightmaps (.LIT are also supported huh? )

(maybe i'm too idiot to manage such programs... i obtained an highres lightmap for demo1... but .lit file is very strange O_O )

[Korax]

I think my colored lighting implementation is complete. I'll do some more testing to see if I've captured everything regarding colored lighting.

Here's another stange thing I found that I'd like confirmation on if this is an engine bug or texture data issues:


I got some experimental texture overriding code working... I just need to now implement it everywhere, where its needed.

Some Colored Lighting & Hi-Rez texture goodness:


...some more goodness:

[Seven]

Hello Korax,

i can confirm that the strange behaviour in your first screenshot from above post
is also in FTEQW (with inkub0´s textures) and jshexen2 (with jeank´s textures).
In jshexen2 it is not so obvious, because jeank´s textures look almost like the original,
so you must look very near to see the failure.

[inkub0]

I found that creating nicer shadowmaps is simple and it can take almost 2 hours... but coloring them is impossible... the automatic programs that do it (like MHtool) creates a great confusion of colored lights where color is unuseful ...
definitively, i can only patch .BSP files with the new no-colored shadowmaps...

[jeank]

Korax: good work! And we waiting exe of new UQE build

[Mathuzzz]

(i added Jeank skies in my texpack, but fte doesnt load the, it will be great if all engines can read the skies )

Hm? I think FTE support those skies, but they need to be put together, as jeank´s are split into alpha and solid.

[inkub0]

ok but it's better if every engine loads the same way all the textures..

[Korax]

I've added external texture support for Hexen2's classic skies.
I say "classic" since UQE has skybox support too, just so theres no confusion that I'm not talking about the skybox.

Loading skies work simmilarly just like textures work. Including overriding capabilities. The updated engine scans within a folder called "/skies/" ( [base]/skies/ ) for sky textures, firstly it tries to find the textures like so: [base]/skies/[map]/ then if not found it tries [base]/skies/.

It will look for two seperate textures namely [skyname]_solid.[ext] and [skyname]_alpha.[ext] then it scans for file extensions in the order .tga, .jpg, .pcx and only if both "_solid" and "_alpha" is present and if the same dimensional size, it loads it as valid sky textures.

If nothing valid is found it loads the original internal textures.

I've found a few odd things I'd like to confirm and have encircled them on the screenshots:

Firstly: In egypt1 I see this messageboard that seems to have the wrong texture... is it only my engine? I've been using v0.75


Secondly: In egypt1 I see that when colored lighting is active I find here and there bugs in how the lighting looks like. Is this bugs in the .lit data or something with my engine?



Then some goodness... heres a test shot of external sky textures:


The only problem is I dont have decent test data when it comes to skies... I there a link where I can ONLY download the sky textures?

The ones I used was ripped out of the Q3A game, and these textures doesn't have alpha, so only the lower layer is visible in the shot above.

Am I right by assuming that these sky textures will always have alpha?
Meaning I can only leave the engine as-is with alpha blending and not having to worry about color blending.

Also, is everyone happy with the external sky texture naming convention or is there other suggestions?

[jeank]

Korax: screenshot 1 - your engine work proper, it`s H2 texture overlay problem, inkub0 must add proper texture in egypt1 folder.

screenshot 2 -your engine work proper, this problem of lit file.

For skyes i hope you be use that format -
sky(number)_alpha
sky(number)_solid

sky000_alpha.tga
sky000_solid.tga
sky001_alpha.tga
sky001_solid.tga
And as always, that textures must be overrided in level folders.

inkub0: i hope you just take my texture structure and replace textures with your hi-dimensional textures, because my structure correct and full override textures in all levels of Hexen2 and Portal of Praevus, and recreate that structure is not so easy task, so why do it again?