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Thread: My visulally enhanced renderer for Quake2

  1. #1

    My visulally enhanced renderer for Quake2

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    ] ======= WHAT IT DOES ==================================== [

    This MOD greatly enhances the visulal quality of Quake 2,
    it upsamples all the game textures using the
    powerful Lanczos filter specially designed
    to increase the visual quality of the resampled image.

    The original Quake2 renderer DOWNsamples the textures
    to fit the weak 3d accelerators of its days,
    using a visually degrading linear filter at that.
    So, I can say, the original renderer
    MUTILATES the game art turning it into a blurry crap.

    It's not Carmack's fault, it's just the harsh reality
    of the late 20th century hardware. Keep in mind that
    the monsters of Quake2 were intended for *software*
    rendering, their non-power-of-two skins are proof enough.

    Screenshots comparing the original renderer with my enhancement:





    ] ======= REQUIREMENTS ==================================== [

    1. Original quake2.exe v3.21. Alternately, you can use
    a custom-built quake2.exe, just don't forget to set the
    stack limit to at least 16 Mbytes.

    2. A video card that supports the S3 texture compression
    and has 32Mbytes of memory or more.
    I think, even GeForce 2 will do.

    3. It works with all mission packs, including "Ground Zero"!




    ] ======= INSTALLATION ==================================== [

    1. Back up your quake2.exe and ref_gl.dll, just in case.

    2. Copy stackhack.exe and ref_gl.dll to your Quake 2 folder,
    replacing the original ref_gl.dll

    3. Run stackhack to patch quake2.exe. This should take
    care of the stack overflow crash.

    4. Start your Quake 2 and enjoy ^_^




    ] ======= NOTES ON USAGE ================================== [

    1. The "use 8 bit textures" option switches off the texture filtering making the image look more pixellated.
    The mipmapping is disabled, the gl_texturemode variable is ignored. Use the option above to switch between GL_LINEAR and GL_NEAREST.

    2. The texture quality slider in Q2 (which does have 4 positions) greatly affects the texture quality, just like it does in the original renderer. The lowest setting limits texture size to 256x256 (just like the original).
    At the maximum quality most of the wall textures and monster skins are upsampled to 1024x1024.
    This setting also controls the power of the underwater warping/blurring effect.

    3. The video modes below 640x480 are substituted with your desktop default.

    4. The menus and GUI are scaled up in the high resolution video modes.



    ] ======= THANKS ========================================== [

    1. To Jan Horn (R.I.P) and everyone who did the Quake2
    to Delphi conversion. This renderer is compiled
    using Turbo Delphi Explorer.

    2. To Marek Mauder for his powerful Vampyre Imaging library,
    native to Pascal and available as sources.
    Last edited by Chebmaster; 05-04-2017 at 08:23 PM.

  2. #2

    My visulally enhanced renderer for Quake2

    The image is not showing. I tried looking on your website but there seems to be nothing about quake 2.
    The views expressed on this programme are bloody good ones. - Fred Dagg

  3. #3

    My visulally enhanced renderer for Quake2

    Sorry, just now had a downtime due to fsck bitching that it should be started manually and having a good time checking my hard drive. It seems the Windows XP Ext2 driver often trashes my Linux partition.

    Try again please. ops:

    It's not on my website yet, only in the temp dir on my home web server (that also holds a mirror of my home page).

    The problem is I need to reboot in Windows (where Delphi lives) each time I need to recompile this stuff, then reboot back in Linux.

  4. #4

    My visulally enhanced renderer for Quake2

    The enhancement is rather impressive. Nice work.
    The views expressed on this programme are bloody good ones. - Fred Dagg

  5. #5

    My visulally enhanced renderer for Quake2

    Very impressive
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    <br /><IMG SRC="http://www.myhpf.co.uk/banners/60x468.gif" BORDER="0">
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  6. #6

    My visulally enhanced renderer for Quake2

    I glad you liked it. It was my dream for many years to fix that bug-feature of Q2. And now I achieved that dream - using Pascal, not less!

    For the future, I plan, if I manage to find time for that, to add the replacement for the software shader used in Q1 and Q2 software mode under water (blur + distortion). It was also lost because Voodoos were unable to do such things...

    I also plan to add a page on my web site for such things.
    For now, here's the folder containing the before/after screenshots, for comparsion:
    http://host-17-99.imsys.net/_share/_001/_q/

  7. #7

    My visulally enhanced renderer for Quake2

    P.S. Just noticed, there is a minor bug with the sky being a bit too bright - It's because it was exempt from any processing but I put it through the same pipeline as the other textures, and it gets affected by the procedure that controls brightness... I'll fix that later.

    Also note to self to move that brightening stage to *before* resampling, the loading times are unacceptably long as it is now.

    P.P.S Also fixed the bug in original DelphiQuake caused by erroneous conversion ( += translated as := ) that caused corruption on the polygons affected by more than one light map.

  8. #8

    My visulally enhanced renderer for Quake2

    Quote Originally Posted by technomage
    Very impressive
    ditto :thumbup:

  9. #9

    My visulally enhanced renderer for Quake2

    Great job :shock:

  10. #10

    My visulally enhanced renderer for Quake2

    Quake 2 shows blackscreen and ends without a message. Game did work before the replacement.

    Copied all files and applied stackhack, used graphics card is Radeon 9200. (At least it runs World of Warcraft with my 512 memory and 933Mhz :twisted: Time to get new comp somepoint soon)

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