Rool Cockscape more like... 

Nice one. 

A Deadly Drainage Pit

Despite all the mapping I've been doing, I'm actually still (mostly) on top of my coursework. I think they call this a "work/work balance". 

Awesome man, keep sharing the progress...love seeing these!

And extra points for staying on top of your coursework...yeah buddy. 

Looks great - reminds me a bit or Markarth in Skyrim. Which is a good thing. 

Pritchard: Holy crap, that's jawdropping. Great texture choices.
At first I thought it was a corridor, though; didn't pay attention to the link name.

mfx: Amazing work, that vehicle looks like something out of the Alien movies. 

First, here's how the vanilla slime looks in Retroquad's 8-bit color software renderer, with translucency and lighting enabled:
screenshot

Now I've also implemented support for HD textures on liquids, including luma textures, mipmaps, and properly scaled turbulence:
screenshot
The slime's QRP HD texture in this screenshot was manually edited by me to make the luma texture more subtle, because by default all QRP lumas on liquids are too uniformly bright. 

Can't wait to see this in motion. Looks amazing. 

That's some lovely liquid right there. 

Awesome! 

For retroquad to "come out". 

Will Retroquad support bsp2, protocol 999, and enhanced limits?

Or is that too "modern" for Retro? 

BSP2 and enhanced limits would be nice.

Specific protocols from other engines will likely not happen, and I'll probably develop a custom protocol tailored to Retroquad's specific features. Also, hardware-accelerated engines will always be a better choice for multiplayer.

The only part of the BSP renderer still missing HD texture support is the scrolling sky renderer. There's also a bunch of usability improvements and some other stuff to do in the texture code, and the texture format still needs some changes & additions.

The palette management subsystem needs some big changes that will allow the implementation of a new color selection algorithm which should be more accurate in some cases, and also allow for colored lighting. 

Decal support?

Also I was thinking that the tech that you've got in retroquad would make for a great 8 bit paint. Not very many programs let you paint with a palette with opacity. 

Proper decals would take a lot of work to implement, and would slow down the renderer even more.
A more possible alternative would be to implement stainmaps similar to the ones in Darkplaces, but it's not in my plans yet.

Hmm, I didn't think about using it for 8-bit painting before. Nice idea.

The closest I had thought about was to create a modified version of the texture compiling algorithm as an alternative dithering method for quantizating standard 2D images (converting TGAs to PCX, etc.). It would be interesting to compare against usual 2D dithering methods such as Floyd-Steinberg. 

if you're still using a surface cache, you could try painting your decals into that. That should make them free other than for adding/removing them(or when dlights are around).
I believe this is the way halflife did them.
(stainmaps suck)

regarding 8-bit painting, increase the lightmap resolution and just megatexture the entire map! 

Retroquad's surface cache only contains light levels, not texture data, and because of this there's no way to paint a decal texture into them. Lighting & textures are combined in realtime, per-pixel.

Also, decals aren't strictly necessary to achieve a cohesive visual style - they're an addition, not an improvement per se. Part of my main focus is on making the engine easier to produce content for, not on raising the amount of content to work on.

But it will always be possible to use sprite-based decals like the ones in Scourge of Armagon. 

RetroJam 6 map: The Legacy of Giants, by khreathor. Edited version with soft-depth sand.

screenshot 

Pretty nifty. 

 

that's a clever use of soft depth effect, i've usually only seen it for liquids/smoke.

question, does it look good in motion or does the parallax give it away? 

It looks good in motion because it's dithered in screen space, using an ordered dither. 

 

Noice 

any chance of a video?