Any Darkplaces Updates In The Near Future?

[Junrall]

Was thinking about a reply to a recent post... clipping hulls were mentioned... stating that there were only three clipping hull sizes:

Bullet size - '0 0 0'
Player size - '32 32 56' (mins: '-16 -16 -24', maxs: '16 16 32')
Shambler size - '64 64 88' (mins: '-32 -32 - 24', maxs: '32 32 64')

I thpught, "wow... wonder if any future versions of DP will tackle this?"

This is not a "feature request"... I'm just wondering whats been cookin' under the hood of DP lately... any new updates on the horizon?

[Sajt]

That's a limitation of the Quake BSP map format, not the engine. Darkplaces supports HL BSP, which has different hulls, and Quake 3 BSP, which has no hull system at all so you can use any bounding box size.

As for recent Darkplaces activity, you could always watch the Subversion repository.

http://svn.icculus.org/twilight/trunk/darkplaces/?sortby=date

[leileilol]

darkplaces does have a cvar added recently that hacks in breaking the hull limitation for q1/hl bsps.

[scar3crow]

I should've Newsed this but sadly I just noticed earlier today, LordHavoc released a new stable build of DP on April 10th featuring shadowmaps (try it with GL_NEAREST, it looks like a peak into game engine's alternate reality path where no one figured out smoothing or blurring).

[Junrall]

As for recent Darkplaces activity, you could always watch the Subversion repository.

http://svn.icculus.org/twilight/trunk/darkplaces/?sortby=date

Thank you.

darkplaces does have a cvar added recently that hacks in breaking the hull limitation for q1/hl bsps.

Hacks in? The word "hack", in regards to Quake, always sounds bad... is this cvar not safe to use? And what is the name of this cvar?

[Error]

from what I hear, it's safe to use, as Nexuiz (the ps3/xbox360 one) now uses it. I forget what it is, but it's in there.

it breaks something... though I don't recall what.

[Spike]

hack: something that works based on assumptions, which may not always be true.

glorious hacks work on the assumption that there are no other assumptions. All other hacks break in some known situation.

its a vauge term, okay?

the internet was built on hacks, with people attempting to provide solutions that work with other people's buggy software. :)

You should generally avoid hacks if there is a more sane way to do it. They're only really a problem when people use them despite there being a better/cleaner/safer way. There's not always a lot of choice though. If the assumptions are reasonable then the hack is reasonable, but make sure you know the assumptions. :)
But then all programming is based upon the assumption that the cpu will execute everything in the correct order, rather than pulling out instructions from your program and executing them at random.

the assumption regarding darkplaces and hulls on hl maps is probably based on the assumption that the hull size is correct. The BSP does not announce the sizes of its hulls, and qbsp could be modified to use any size hull.
Hexen2 has 8 hulls instead of 4. Only 6 are used (instead of 3). But it is still has the same bsp version ident. FTE has a hack to ensure that certain fields are never 0 in order to find out if the structure has 8 slots or 4 slots. Or something like that. It works for hexen2's maps anyway.
If FTE sees a q1 map with 4 hulls in it, it will assume the fourth is 32*32*(-6 to 30), while a hl map will have 32*32*(-18 to 18).
Seriously, don't ask me why the difference. I don't know.
Hexen2 of course uses 32*32*(-12 to 16) for its third hull.

Hardcoded hull sizes are a hack. And expecting the mod to tell the engine what they are is vile at best. I'm almost tempted to use a worldspawn key. But also far too lazy.

To be honest, the only field actually used in collision in the engine is the min_z dimension. The others will generally cancel out nicely.
It does need to know which hull to use too, of course. There are more hacks for that.

In FTE, you can set .hull to the 1-based hull number to always use. Required for hexenc, but works for quake/hl/h2 maps with nq/qw/h2 mods.

Seriously though, just use Q3/Q2 bsps. No fixed-size hulls then.

[leileilol]

from what I hear, it's safe to use, as Nexuiz (the ps3/xbox360 one) now uses it. I forget what it is, but it's in there.

Nexuiz doesn't use Q1BSP (well it did use a form of HLBSP in its early 2002 days, but it's primarily q3bsp and has no need for it)

check the mod_q1bsp cvars for it

[Error]

LordHavoc told me it was one of the benefits of Nexuiz for consoles.

think this is it:

Code: Select all

mod_q1bsp_polygoncollisions is "0" ["0"] disables use of precomputed cliphulls and instead collides with polygons (uses Bounding Interval Hierarchy optimizations)

[Urre]

That feature was added ages ago. I recall LordHavoc didn't like it because clip brushes couldn't be used with it.