HEXEN II community work and discussion

[Seven]

Hello Korax,

I played around with your engine recently.
Well, my XP could only run v1.14 (v1.16 was missing some runtimes), and I noticed that the complete view/world is blurred.
I could not find the option to turn it off, as I accidently pushed the button right beside "p" on my german layout. That turned it off.
I suggest to disable this "blurring" on default setting, as it changes the visual too much.

Regarding bloom:
Please do not rip it out of your engine code. I (as well as others) always enable a slight bloom (not too much). That makes Hexen more mystical.
You should of course disable these things by defaut, but do not get rid of them completely.
Small things like these sometimes make the difference, when a player chooses his favorite engine...




Hello Mathuzzz,

I was able to contact Jeank
He is still the same helpful and kind person that he always was.
He is renovating (overhaul) his house at the moment, so time is precious and rare at the moment.
We talked about this issue (as I know you are planning to implement some of these into your mod):

FTE:


UQE:


DP:


jshexen2 (bug):


When he has a free time, he will look into it.
The only thing I could find out until now is, that it is not the verts limit in glquake. Also much smaller/simplier models behave same this.

Well, it is not a critical bug at all, as we do not have many external replacement models yet...
But it is good, to know that Jeank is still "available" (somehow).

Best wishes,
Seven

[Mathuzzz]

Thanks for your effort Seven, good to hear jeank is willing to look into this problem.

[webangel]

Thanks for your effort Seven, good to hear jeank is willing to look into this problem.

jeank back in business?

[szo]

I posted newest uHexen2 (Hammer of Thyrion) source code, as well as
Windows (Win32 and Win64) and Mac OSX test builds from the SVN at:
http://uhexen2.sourceforge.net/devel/
There is still time before I do an official 1.5.7 release, however
testing to see if there is any regression against the former release
would be welcome.

ChangeLog (as of today, may change later on) :
- Music: Support for FLAC codec. (edit the makefiles to enable it when
compiling, if necessary.)
- All platforms, gameplay, mission pack: fixed an hcode bug which would
make the spiders seemingly invincible for a difficulty-depending time.
- SDL mouse/kbd input: Fix for a rare freezing issue.
- OpenGL: minor gamma updates.
- Utils, hcc: Added a command line option "-os" to compact the strings
heap by eliminating duplicates. some minor revisions.
- Minor fixes, tidy-ups, safeguards elsewhere in the sources.

[Korax]

Seven,

I think the bug regarding jsHexen is it loads the cached GL mesh models.
Look under the /data/ and /portals/ folders for one called "glquake" or "glhexen" and delete it, then restart the engine.

The model format between the original and the mission pack is slightly different or it writes and loads these MS2 files differently. Something towards that extent.
In UQE I solved this by just generating & loading up these meshes in-memory, thus completely skipping the HDD steps.

I'm obviously guessing what the problem is, but according to me it seems related to the meshing code.
I'll bet the loading the mission pack the bug will go away in this case, but it'll depend which game you load first when generating the MS files from scratch the second load will be buggy.

[Seven]

Hello Korax,

Yes, you are absolutely right.
The .ms2 files have been causing this issue.

Razumen has mentioned the same thing in the Raven forums, but I only searched in the /data1 folder. Not in the /portals folder.
In the /data1 folder are no subfolders with .ms2 files. But still, when playing Hexen2 the files from /portals seem to make problems....

Now it works:




Jeank & Mathuzzz,

Now that Korax found the bug and even mentioned a fix, please consider it and continue your engine developmet / mod development.


Thank you again.
Seven

[Korax]

Here's the fix:

gl_vidnt.c
In the funtion close to the bottom: void VID_Init (unsigned char *palette)

Find the line that reads:
GL_Init ();

Comment out the few lines following it:

//sprintf (gldir, "%s/glhexen", com_gamedir);
//Sys_mkdir (gldir);
//sprintf (gldir, "%s/glhexen/boss", com_gamedir);
//Sys_mkdir (gldir);
//sprintf (gldir, "%s/glhexen/puzzle", com_gamedir);
//Sys_mkdir (gldir);

gl_mesh.c
In the funtion: void GL_MakeAliasModelDisplayLists (model_t *m, aliashdr_t *hdr)

Find the line that reads:
// look for a cached version

Comment out the following:

	//strcpy (cache, "glhexen/");
	//COM_StripExtension (m->name+strlen("models/"), cache+strlen("glhexen/"));
	//strcat (cache, ".ms2");

	/*COM_FOpenFile (cache, &f, true);	
	if (f)
	{
		fread (&numcommands, 4, 1, f);
		fread (&numorder, 4, 1, f);
		fread (&commands, numcommands * sizeof(commands[0]), 1, f);
		fread (&vertexorder, numorder * sizeof(vertexorder[0]), 1, f);
		fclose (f);
	}
	else
	{
		//
		// build it from scratch
		//
		Con_Printf ("meshing %s...\n",m->name);

		BuildTris ();		// trifans or lists

		//
		// save out the cached version
		//
		sprintf (fullpath, "%s/%s", com_gamedir, cache);
		f = fopen (fullpath, "wb");
		if (f)
		{
			fwrite (&numcommands, 4, 1, f);
			fwrite (&numorder, 4, 1, f);
			fwrite (&commands, numcommands * sizeof(commands[0]), 1, f);
			fwrite (&vertexorder, numorder * sizeof(vertexorder[0]), 1, f);
			fclose (f);
		}
	}*/

Right after this commented-out block of code, make sure theres a function call:
BuildTris ();

...and thats it.

What this does is not bothering writing the ms2 files neither bothering to read them. So the meshing becomes an in-memory activity, basically meshing everytime the engine starts without writing to disk or reporting this on the console.

[jeank]

Hi to all.

Korax, thank you for your help with model issue!
I put your parts in code and compile build with your fix for Seven
(source code and jsHexen2.exe in H2MP\code\release_gl Folder)

I hope someone make new advances for Hexen 2 engines, while i made some overhaul, because overhaul be continued until November, as i mean

[Mathuzzz]

Good to see you back on the boards, jeank.

I like to see the model problem addressed, however I see other obstacles with jsHexen. I have very low FPS with jsHexen in my map. With UQE I had none performance hit, however with jsHexen, it is pretty drastic. Maybe with full build, it will be OK, how big is the difference between full and quick build of the map? (Quark editor)

Seven, I saw in another thread your tutorials:
http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-hel...arkplaces.html

There are also those sitters models we talked about. I was not able to get proper transparency on my models in Hexen. The only way in Hexen was to make them translucent, what cause entire model to be partly invisible. Does Quake has some other way to handle transparency or it is some Darkplaces addition?

[RL Clown]

My reply is not directly relevant to this thread. I apologize, however, I must say that Hexen II has turned me into a courageous person. No, I kid you not! When I first played Hexen II, the monsters scared the jeepers out of me. But throughout the course of time, I became less and less afraid of the monsters. I became courageous. This transformation has affected my real-life character as well. I am not afraid. I have to thank Hexen II.

[Seven]

Hi to all.

Korax, thank you for your help with model issue!
I put your parts in code and compile build with your fix for Seven
(source code and jsHexen2.exe in H2MP\code\release_gl Folder)

I hope someone make new advances for Hexen 2 engines, while i made some overhaul, because overhaul be continued until November, as i mean

Hello Jeank and Korax,

Thank you very much for your fix and efforts !
Now I only need someone who can compile Jeanks source to a new .exe, as I do not have the software to do it.

reckless from inside3d said, that your project file is made for msvc6 and some of the typedefs are incompatible with msvc2010. Well, I do not have nor do I know both software, I just repeat what he says.
If someone, who has msvc6 could be so kind and compile it for us ?
That would be great.

Good luck with overhaul of your home.
I also made some renovations lately.... In the middle of the summer.

All the Best.

Seven, I saw in another thread your tutorials:
http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-hel...arkplaces.html

There are also those sitters models we talked about. I was not able to get proper transparency on my models in Hexen. The only way in Hexen was to make them translucent, what cause entire model to be partly invisible. Does Quake has some other way to handle transparency or it is some Darkplaces addition?

Hello Mathuzzz,

Spike posted on previous page and here about this topic, when using FTE.

I can only speak for Darkplaces here. It is possible, if you use a .tga or .png replacement texture for a model to create semitransparent or partial full transparent areas on this replacement texture.
I quickly made a headless grunt, by using a rubber tool in Paint.Net program and removing the head from the original .mdl texture, and saved it as 32 bit .tga.
No shader or something is used. It is a fresh unmodified Quake installation.
Darkplaces seem to have no problems with transparent areas in replacement textures out of the box.



I tried it in Hexen2 (jshexen2 and FTE) and this method does not work here.
It seems to be engine or game dependent.

Sorry that I cannot help you in this topic.

[Spike]

fte aims for compatibility with q3 for some reason. models only use blending/masking/etc if they are explicitly flagged for it (either by a model flag or by a shader).
not doing so would result in weird differences between mdl, md3, replacement textures, etc.
note that an .alpha of 0.99 or so will also force blending.
alternatively to shaders+.alpha, you can use either the hexen2 alpha blend flag or alpha mask flag combined with a replacement texture, and this should be true regardless of the engine you use (so long as it has both support for hexen2's extra model flags and replacement textures).

[jeank]

Hello Jeank and Korax,

Thank you very much for your fix and efforts !

Thanks for Korax, not for me

Now I only need someone who can compile Jeanks source to a new .exe, as I do not have the software to do it.

Compiled jshexen2.exe file you will find in this folder: H2MP\code\release_gl

[Seven]

Thank you Jeank,

You hided it very well

[webangel]

Seven, I want to give you the link to this but I was too late.
Thanks to every developer here who is helping to improve this barely recognised game....