Float drift and other stupidness...

Discuss the creation of various model formats for Quake engines, and related matters to modeling.
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Willem
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Float drift and other stupidness...

Post by Willem »

Is there an understanding in the Quake modeling community that you won't be loading/saving MDL files over and over with any success? I'm struggling to get my model editor to load and save MDL files repeatedly but float drift and precision issues are causing it to eventually end up with the wrong number of vertices and blam, down she goes.

Do people just rebuild MDL files scratch each time they write them out or do editors typically allow you to load and save the native MDL file format repeatedly?
MauveBib
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Post by MauveBib »

The mdl format just basically sucks no matter what.
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Urre
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Post by Urre »

I've heard of the problem you describe existing in Quark, but I've never encountered it in QME. Maybe QME does some form of correction between loads and saves, to reduce the effect?

But yes, mdl is best exported to, not used as an editable format.
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Spike
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Post by Spike »

QME has separate save/export options, so I think it adds some lump on the end, so should be able to load/save okay.
Other editors which use the basic format will struggle if you move the outer verticies.
Urre
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Post by Urre »

That's true actually, I recall someone saying that earlier, that QME saves extra info at the end of the file, making it slightly larger, but still able to load in Quake, but not lose any precision between saves when editing. It also has an export to Quake model thing in the menu, which gets rid of this extra info, if you want the filesize reduced
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FrikaC
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Post by FrikaC »

At one point I was trying to reverse engineer their additional lump of data for Quaded. It also contains the object hierarchy ("joints") and a number of other things.

At another point I was working on an "optimizer" specifically for Dreamcast/GP32 Quake that would go in and look at all the files in a .pak and reduce the memory footprint of them all (downsample wavs, optimize progs.dat, strip QME data off of mdls, attempt to optimize UV maps, decrease texture resolutions on maps, etc, etc) with the goal of making the mod work on < 8mb of ram. That was a neat project, wish I had finished it.
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