Friday, April 24, 2009

Rendering Framework1 first video, Streaming Quake3

Aside from working on Animation and AI related things at AIGamedev.com, which by the way just went live with a brand new website :), I am slowly working on an XNA rendering Framework.

I figured it would be a good and time efficient idea to write a Quake3 map loader this time, since much content is directly available, All the nice geometry can then be used as a basis for graphics experiments.

This is the first version that successfully loads Quake3 levels, it took approximately 24 hours, it uses only colored vertices, but it already does something cool, leafs and their faces are streamed as needed and not pre-loaded, and the streaming usese Generics and Reflection and is Vertex format agnostic, of course streaming maps of this size (~100k vertices) does not really make sense since they could all fit nicely in one very small vertex/index buffer, but still, one of the goals of the framework is to focus on streaming and parallelization (think submission engine), so the code is being designed around that, with the Quake3 levels providing the data.

More technical details and source code will come as appropriate, for now, have fun with the (not very exciting colored vertices) video, at least it shows how only the pre-baked radiosity in vertex colors is already enough to create a sense of nice lighting.




References I used for the bsp format and loading:
The nice test maps are from:

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