was the sound of my jaw dropping on the floor.

Stellar work! 

you bastard, you killed quake mapping! 

Stunning work, MFX 

Doom4 called, they want their map back!! 

Kids love the Teletarbbies 

never ceases to amaze 

Looks nice! Hopefully gameplay is also stunning and not just the brushwork* Would you make the whole spaceship explode at the end.. cinematic ending. Killtarget everything.. then turn on copy of everything and kaboom. Epic ending for Arcane Dimensions. Then people keep writing 10/10 reviews "the best Quake map ever made". Sock gets mad and punches you in the face, and every other top mapper joins to the battle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFkAAvDkj9k

But no seriously, looking very nice mfx! 

<KinnyCrumbles> squelching around bouyantly in my jizz-soaked office chair, kept afloat by aching, swollen testicles, bobbing on the surface like space hoppers bouncing in a vat of molasses.
<otpffs> KinnyCrumbles
<otpffs> http://www.quaketastic.com/files/screen_shots/spasm0003.png
<Shambler> u just seen mfx's screenshot too then
<KinnyCrumbles> yes
 

Someday I'll release a screenshot that gets this kind of feverish response. Someday... 

I'll just join in with the crowd and say: holy fuck. 

Earlier still:

<onetruepurple> jesus fucking christ on a vintage yamaha 

hust wow 

1. mfx what are you doing

2. when are we having beers again (stopped smoking though)

3. he never said he used TB for this 

I need a purple one and itll get thrown into every map i map in response to the "does everyone hate tarbabies?" Thread on quakeone.

Maybe i can take a poke at it myself to throw in my first offering... 

finally found a way of hand painting textures that works for me.

http://i.imgur.com/j8Q35FN.png 

Screenshot.

I've found that compatibility with standard _luma textures will be a pain. It seems that standard _luma textures have lower dimensions, plus no alpha channel, and are rendered by overdrawing the opaque textures with additive blending in realtime.

This makes sense for hardware rendering, but it's a bad, bad approach for software rendering. It's much slower than the standard "color shading map with fullbright colors" (aka colormap) approach of the software renderer.

In the scene shown in this screenshot, I've manually adjusted (upscaled and alphamapped) the _luma textures of the top side of the boxes with GIMP to see how they would look using the colormap approach.

I'm not happy with the idea of having to implement an algorithm to convert the _luma textures like that, so manually editing the _luma textures may be required. Also, I'm not sure if support for non-power-of-two HD textures will be implemented, as that would require huge surface caches. 

Also, I've gotta make the engine save the compiled textures to disk, as compiling HD textures takes a bloody long time. 

Are you writing your own conversion code? What part of the process it time consuming (at runtime)? is the code just unoptimised? 

All of the improvements I'm implementing are custom coded by me. External textures are pre-compiled into a special 8-bit data format I've created for per-pixel dithered quantization.

The texture compiling routines are very optimized already, but due to the very complex nature of the process it takes a long time. 

So you'll just convert the textures on the first load of the map then? Seems like a fair approach.

Out of interest does the conversion prefer a single thread or parallel processing? 

I haven't implemented any kind of parallel processing yet; will do after the core architecture of the engine is complete.

In fact, this engine is still compiled for first-generation Pentium CPUs. It could probably run (unbearably slow) on a 486 too, except for the memory requirements.

I'm following Michael Abrash's philosophy of "the best optimizer is between your ears". Compiler optimizations, CPU-specific compiler flags, multi-core processing and so on will only be implemented after all the possible manual optimizations are implemented. There's tons of code refactoring going on, I'm trying to rethink every single routine of the engine. 

 

Even when properly formatted, some _luma textures still looks bad. Oh well.

Personal tastes aside, it's nice to see Retroquad being able to support such high-res textures. 

(Waiting for someone to say "Now you just need overly saturated colored lighting, N64-thick fog, obnoxious specular lighting, myopic bloom and abyssal normalmaps to make everything caked in vaseline and raise hell.")