So a little break from all these coding posts. A few days ago I took the skip/detail window trick which I posted here and wrote it up for my blog. No new content, just a extra diagram, and a hint that you needed some visual cues to make a window like that work.

Well, that was a precursor to the next few models I'm gonna post, which are all attempts to highlight a window in quake, in such a way that it doesn't require alpha support (although often the models will be enhanced by alpha support in engines). Today is an example of a progressive enhancement model:
http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/glass-panes/

There's a couple of screenshots, one with and one without alpha. Hopefully the one without looks passable by winquake standards, and the nicer one from fitzquake sells the model. If you worry that the window still isn't yet well-defined enough, there will be more models to come very soon... 

I'm fairly sure that you can stop all waving effects in most engines these days, couple this with transparency and you could probably get a decent effect going with a nice texture (rather than use a solid colour to mask the fact that it's a water volume), quoth even allows you to run the correct cvar's on map load. 

It's interesting that you can now make glass without adding entities to the map.

I have some cool tricks in my new map that are kind of neat and made possible with skip (but nothing cool with detail yet...) 

Well, you can use the water trick, if you don't mind your glass having no pattern (you disguise the ripple effect by having a flat texture), and imposing the same wateralpha value on all your lava and slime. But that's kind of beside the point of the challenge, like saying you can make 100-brush maps bigger by just adding some more :-p

The models are still nice as a compliment to more conventional windows. If you add a translucent brush which removes itself from engines without the alpha checkextension value you get this effect:
http://tomeofpreach.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/panes3.jpg
Then in engines which support alpha but don't report it you get:
http://tomeofpreach.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/panes2.jpg
and in engines with no alpha you get:
http://tomeofpreach.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/panes.jpg
which is quite a nice progression from getting the most from fully-featured engines, while staying functional everywhere.

In keeping with this, today's models are some decals to apply to windows.
http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/decals/
The models received some last minute tweaks so that they play well with a semi-transparent brush behind them. 

I'm sure there is a command variable to turn off the water ripple effect completely (animation and all)... Maybe I was mistaken? 

it's r_waterwarp 0 in fitz (most engines?)

Doesn't turn off the texture ripple effect though, if that's what you are talking about. The glass trick I used requires a plain texture in order to make sure that the ripple is not noticeable. The polygon distortion effect that is used by glquake and some other engines still affects maps using the glass trick unless the effect is disabled. 

At the risk of derailing- than, why did you not just use func_wall with .alpha values? 

see title.

Also, is that supported in all modern engines? 

If it doesn't support entity alpha, it's not a modern engine I would say. 

http://i.imgur.com/95OA964.jpg 

...is really awesome ! 

Bringing back some old idea of breaking-the-grid for textures. I know RMQe does it for the waterwarp...

http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/7909/dudvdetail.png
http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/4481/dudvdetail2.png

Anyone know if it can be done in some Quake engine.
I don't know how to code so... :'C 

(i also wonder if using a custom dudv map on bilinear could give you the equivalent of bicubic filtering) 

Wow! 

but does it work on 64x64 textures? those examples are quite high resolution. (relative to quake anyway) 

You do have have a point with that.
Resolution doesn't really matter, but might not be appropriate for all kinds of textures, it's all about getting rid of the perfect squares by distorting with a higher res dudv map. You can have the detail texture roughly correspond to 1px boundaries (glorified dithering scheme?), but I found it tends to look better when using 2*2 blocks since with 1 px there's still some leftover blockyness. You lose some of the definition of the original that way though. I'm not sure if Quake textures are a good candidate for this since the textures tend to have very defined features. It's just about getting a less perfect cg look, something more tailored to NPR probably. Could be interesting for something like Rage to obscure some compression artifacts maybe.

Those images are just done with Photoshop's glass filter by the way, just to illustrate the point. 

I actually like the 'perfect squares'. I always play with nearest neighbour now, so this is definitely a 'to taste' thing. 

I can remember there was this fat round bimbo in Shrak, that used deathframes with the transparant colour.

It was a very strange apearance of splitting open from the centre to expand the little side it had in the middle with that colour.

In game it looked as if the monster exploded, but in the last instance it just disapeared fading in the background.

Can anyone rember this, or is it just me making it up? 

Models can't have transparant colours. 

About time for another model I think. I knocked this whole thing up today, so it's not that complex or in-depth. It's a monitor for a base themed map with a nice wave animation on the screen.

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/oscillator-screen/ 

Great model, Preach!
And totally without snow.
I'm getting jalous. 

all your models were bundled into something like Quoth for ease of use. It would be nice for some maps to use them :) 

The thought had crossed my mind. I hesitate though, because once they get added to the pak they're difficult to update. Coming up with another skin or adding extra animations is possible, but you need another patch and the old files lurk about. The waterfall is an obvious candidate for mappers to customise with a skin to fit their map - and having a standard model might discourage that in favour of making-do with the stock skins.

It gets worse if a model has a problem like a badly placed origin - as you usually can't fix that in a backwards compatible way. Seeing the models in use would allay some fears, not just these technical worries but also how useful the models are. Of course, now we are back where we started...

I will admit that lots of the models would benefit from a combined code-and-model solution, which is the kind of thing that Quoth is meat to deliver. Maybe in the short term the interesting models could be deployed in the pak, to be revisited in a later patch. 

to my point I'm fairly sure that Quoth also has the ability to deploy any model for use as a decorative mesh along with any particular key frame...

I think my fanboyism for Quoth is showing through (though I haven't made a map specifically for it yet I probably will soon). 

I decided to make a follow-up model to the oscilloscope about an hour ago. Here's the result:

http://tomeofpreach.wordpress.com/2013/06/29/levels-monitor/

Essentially it's the same monitor model with a different animation on the front. Still, it's a nice complement to the oscilloscope - a lone animated screen might stand out as too weird. If anyone has any other suggestions for screens that would be easy to animate only using polygons then post 'em so I can take a look at making them.