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.") 

 

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.

Happy? 

I chuckled. 

A bunch of new screenshots at QuakeOne (and Twitter).

HD textures does have some significant impact on the framerate. d_mipscale 2 helps to recover the framerate, but anyway, those textures are huge. More mipmap levels are needed. 

it really needs high-res hud+font images now... 

Yes, but that's not a priority. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwxYkKdSD855SXY1ZFhNVVVCbW8/view?usp=sharing 

Beehive theme? Either way, looks interesting. 

Only thing I need is an actual bee enemies* but I assume vores will work too~ 

http://i.imgur.com/2QmGZzr.png 

<Shambler> finished solus project
<Shambler> made no sense to me at all
<Shambler> nice to see ur name in the credits
<Shambler> it was okay overall
<Shambler> some interesting vibes, some good mysterious / creepy bits
<Shambler> but far too long and far too many hexagonal rocks
<Shambler> i'm going to see a neurosurgeon to see if there is someway they can burn all visual acknowledgment of hexagons out of my mind 

Bad Memories about that Donkey Kong level? 

Plenty of it in Iceland. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=iceland+columnar+basalt&safe=off&tbm=isch 

I knew the famous Giants Causeway in Northern Ireland (pictured on Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy cover art) but I thought it was a unique formation and I wasn't aware of similar sceneries existing in Iceland as well. 

https://www.nps.gov/depo/index.htm
https://www.nps.gov/deto/index.htm
http://www.mountain-bike-diaries.com/oregon-mountain-biking.html
http://magmacumlaude.blogspot.com/2010/09/guess-this-means-its-columnar-jointing.html