Portal Cameras

[Syber Raith]

I just tried making some portal camera's for Q3 with GTKRadiant. Apparently that feature is broken in Radiant. I found some post from 2009 discussing the problem that talked about needing a particular shader was absent from Radiant and the shader that worked in 2009 fails to work with the latest version of Radiant.

So, my question is do portal camera work in Darkplaces and can Quark make them?

[Seven]

Hello Syber Raith,

How much does DarkPlaces support Q3 ?

Regarding portal cameras:
I am afraid you have to code them in and use custom func_´s in your mapping tools to be able to use them in your game.


Nahuel (one of the biggest qc coder talents) did all kinds of cameras for DarkPlaces. Doesnt matter if fixed player following cameras or interactive ones.
Yes, even portals through which you can see AND throw projectiles.
The latter feature was borrowed from divVerent´s xonotic but nonetheless still a pain to bring into regular Quake.

So, chatting with him is highly recommended.

Best of luck,
Seven

[Syber Raith]

Hey Seven,

It's quite frustrating because in the Radiant docs it makes it out to be easy. Put a mirror texture on the brush, create misc_portal_surface entity, misc_portal_camera and target_position, set them up pointing properly and it's just suppose to work in Q3.

The mirror texture and shader are are just suppose to work for this and nobody seems to know why it's broke. From what little I've been able to find there is a matter of having different camera shader and camera texture.

I found a copy of the shader although the texture I am unable to find because of broken links. Here's the shader:

textures/common/camera
{
qer_editorimage textures/camera/camera.tga
surfaceparm playerclip
surfaceparm nolightmap
portal
{
map textures/camera/camera.tga
blendFunc GL_ONE GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA
depthWrite
alphaGen portal 2048
}
}


I made a basic blank 32bit 128x128 white tga image with a alpha channel for the texture, although it fails to work and just shows up white.

The mirror textures just act like mirrors.

[Spike]

your shader is correct for q3.
your entities sound about right for q3.

dp is not q3, and its q3shader support is somewhat lacking.
your gamecode has no idea about those entities and will just give errors instead of anything useful.

getting it working in a qc-based mod is thus much harder, although there are two (original) mods that have achieved it, and two engines within which it can be achieved.
sometimes you just have to read the source.

[Syber Raith]

I got it. It really is a tangle of quite a few things.