[quake3] Elite Force Raytraced

[Stephan Reiter]

Danke, Thilo!!

I think it should be feasible to run this at 800x600 @ 30fps on any computer 
with a more or less up to date CPU. My computer is more than two years old 
and has a pretty limitting Athlon X2 3800 processor. So I really shouldn't 
be the one creating benchmarks here.

Hopefully we can release this as a patch very soon. There are some minor 
problems and things to take care of first:
1. The raytracing library is pretty much finished already, but I plan on 
adding another acceleration structure (BIH) for dynamic scenes in the next 
weeks. I think EF raytraced could really benefit from that, because the 
current BVH-structure is more suited for retained mode rendering and not so 
much for rebuilding every frame.
2. At the moment I have an external tool that collects all shaders from the 
scripts-directory and outputs C++ code for sampling with scalar and SIMD 
code paths. The result is basically a huge code file that has to be compiled 
into a shared object (or dll) and is loaded by the game at runtime. I'd like 
to get rid of this and create shader code at runtime, probably using LLVM 
(llvm.org). But this remains to be investigated ...

Btw, that floating head problem was an artifact of some jumbled up matrix 
calculations. So they're in no way related to your work and had already been 
fixed when the second video was recorded. I'll look into applying your 
latest patch though, so thanks for that!
I really owe you a lot for creating such an excellent patch. I don't have 
Quake 3 and definitely wouldn't have bought it just to try my raytracer 
library. EF on the other hand is a mighty fine game and I'm glad I can play 
it on Linux now, too. Thanks to you!

Regards,
Stephan

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Thilo Schulz" <arny at ats.s.bawue.de>
To: <quake3 at icculus.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 5:55 PM
Subject: Re: [quake3] Elite Force Raytraced

On Dienstag, 4. März 2008, Stephan Reiter wrote:
> I've posted two videos at YouTube showing Elite Force Raytraced, which is
> based on Thilo Schulz's excellent Elite Force patch for ioquake3. The 1st
> video focuses on raytraced reflections and other changes of the look:
> http://youtube.com/watch?v=jLFrP0c7VWw The 2nd video is basically a record
> of a bot deathmatch: http://youtube.com/watch?v=C_6Icf2m_C4
>
> I intend to release this code soon, but I plan to take some more time to
> polish it some more. Comments are appreciated.

Dude, this is totally awesome!

I am curious about whether this could be made playable. I guess this is a 
long
shot given that you demonstrated this on low resolutions only. Then again -
you were capturing a movie at the same time which probably had a 
considerable
impact on the framerate.

FYI: the fact that the head model of the bot is not attached to the neck 
after
it dies on the video suggests that you have used a pretty old version of my
patch / of ioquake3. Maybe you have changed it, but there was a bug in early
versions of my MD4 model implementation where tags were not correctly
calculated.

By the way, an updated version of my patch which applies against newer
revisions of ioquake3 can be found here:
http://thilo.kickchat.com/efport-progress/patches/quake3-ef_rev1245.diff

I wish you good luck with your diploma thesis!

-- 
Thilo Schulz