Hello ? Anyone there ?

Site updates have been going pretty slow as you might have noticed by now. And there's a good reason for that also. Last month I've been working on some old projects and files I had buried somewhere far far away on some of the darkest sectors of my fileserver's raid array. Files so old, the dust came off when I first opened them after all those years. I even didn't believe it when I saw the files modification dates... 1998... Has it been that long already ?

What am I talking about ? Id Software's Quake II ofcourse. Quake, aka the decades defining first person shooter, is making a steady revival with Quake Live recently going from beta to public. But Quake is more than that. Quake and the idTech engine that has powered it through many generations of revolutionary graphics, John Carmack's brainchild, is also one of the only commercial 3D OpenGL renderer's of which the complete sourcecode has been released to the public. The Quake engine is also one of the best documented and most modded game engine's on the web. Add a well thought through server client model to the mix, and an engine that has a great modabilty, and there you have it:

The perfect base for an open source project. 

Back in the old days, I worked with a small team on a exiting Quake II modding project, called the Voodoo Mod for Quake II. A dark themed Q2 mod which featured some alternate fireing modes, custom textures and some maps and this all in a somewhat voodooish setting. Now with the recent release of Quake Live, I thought it would be a great opportunity to share this project and my custom Q2 maps with the community. 

After a few days off gathering all files related to this project, updating and improving some of the maps I made for it, I figured, hey, why not make it a complete Quake 2 Total Conversion project. Doing some research, I stumbled upon some pretty nice Quake 2 source code ports, like APRQ2, EGL, Berserker and many others. Each of which deserves a review on it's own, but I'm afraid I dont have the time for that ;)

Anyway, after some initial testing of all available source ports, EGL was the one that came out as the best candidate for my project. EGL featured an updated version of the Q2 engine, with some spectacular client side rendering effects and supporting high resolution textures, but still maintaining protocol compatibility. And best off all, EGL seemed to be completely compatible with my voodoo mod client dll. 

So to keep a very long story short, currently I'm working on a stable preview of my standalone Q2 Total Conversion project. I hope this was enough to keep your appetite going for now, I'll be adding some project info and screenshots soon.

Content Tags: 3D, Computer Graphics, Development, OpenGL

Content Type: Personal, Site information