Source entity mania #2
Put up a new Patreon post with images :)
Got a lot of work done on the Source entity side of things but as
always there's more work left to be done.
Here's what I said in the post:
Improved Source Engine Support
While more engine bugs get ironed out for the updater + Windows, here's
some exclusive screenshots of Half-Life 2 looking more complete than
ever under Nuclide. This is 100% running in OpenGL on Linux. There's
no Valve code running here, just Spoike's Source BSP loader for FTE,
my shaders and material parser and obviously my re-implementation
of all the various Source Engine entity classes. Steam, smoke, fog,
physics entities - all that stuff just works more or less correctly
now. Obviously it's hard to figure out if any obscure or undocumented
behaviour is fully implemented but we'll figure that out once more
of the logic is running.
The goal is to not re-implement Half-Life 2 now, please don't get
that impression. It gets you most of the way there, but there's
plenty of work I won't be able to do any time soon. The support
for the model format is rather crude right now , we don't support
animations let alone the bone controllers, their event system or
their physics or vertex-based facial animation data. I also don't
know anything about the in-depth changes to AI between Half-Life and
Half-Life 2. Getting general purpose entity classes implemented, such
as the physics based entity work, and seeing it all work in a well
tested environment (that being the various levels from Half-Life 2)
is a really good benchmark. Much like how Half-Life's maps were a
pretty good benchmark for its own entity work I've been supporting.
It also shows how much work we still have to do on the engine side. I
had to implement support for linear fog today (instead of using
the built-in exponential fog) just to name one example. There's so
many various areas where a game as massive as Half-Life 2 shows how
much work just truly is left to do before it becomes a viable Source
Engine replacement. That said, plenty of issues also simply stem from
the incomplete support for the Source BSP and model formats. So if
you use something else modern like our variant of the id Tech 3 BSP
format (which we used in The Wastes) you probably won't run into
many limitations.
One of the things I'll start doing for fteqw.org's binaries is to
bundle them with the plugins. So once we iron out the platform specific
issues Windows users can also install FreeHL by just loading up FTEQW
and run around in Half-Life 2 maps as seen above.
So what else is on the agenda:
- Support Spoike on the Quake II re-release stuff whenever that
comes up
- Crunch out the Win32 specific issues that prevent FreeHL being
easier to set up on Windows
- More work on the AI, which Xylemon has been helping with! I'll list
some more posts from our idtech.space account below!
https://idtech.space/notice/AZlN1ejuIwiizzRmG8
https://idtech.space/notice/AZC2VVmB8belkb6cwy
https://idtech.space/notice/AZmNaN5k6ZC7YhAqHo