Date: Mon, 15 Apr 1996 17:36:08 +0200 (METDST)
From: Uffe Friis Lichtenberg <uffefl@diku.dk>
To: Quake Editing Mailing List <quake-editing@nvg.unit.no>
Subject: No texture patches
Hej all, and especially Bernd,
Just read a bit on Bernds QTEST1 RFC at
http://www.nero.uni-bonn.de/~dn/q-sup/info/q_rfc.html
I have some comments on the "No texture patches" limitation.
It is clear to us by now that Quake does not support Doom-like
texture patches, so that we could create a multitude of textures using
only a small set of building-block-textures. The question is: is it a
problem that we somehow can circumvent?
We can, at least for static textures, somehow simulate the existance of
texture-patches for signs using an approach like this:
Say we got a wall, and want some sort of sign, or message, shown on
this wall. It could be accomplished, with relatively little memory
overhead, by making a sign-sized polygon in the wall we want the sign
on, and assigning a sign texture to it.
Something like
+-------------+ +-------------+
| | | wall |
| | +---+-----+---+
| original | becomes | w | sign| w |
| wall | +---+-----+---+
| | | wall |
+-------------+ +-------------+
Unfortunately this surely adds some overhead to the renderer, and isn't
completely flexible. (Unless we are using signs that fit a polygon
perfectly we need to provide one sign texture for each kind of surface
we want to assign it to.)
And I'm unsure whether qbsp wouldn't just merge the two brushes sides.
But perhaps it will only do so when the brushes has the same texture
parameters (texture mipmap and NAT-coordinates).
But is there a better way?
The best I can come up with is implementing signs using billboard
objects. (http://www.nero.uni-bonn.de/~dn/q-sup/info/qedit_info.html)
And, as ids name suggests, this is probably the main purpose of
having billboard objects.
If a billboard object exists that "stay-in-place" all of the time we
could layer any number of textures, thus getting the desired sign effect.
The question is: is this flexible enough? I can't really think of a
situation where I would wan't the texture patches from Doom available,
but then I didn't ever do much creative work with textures in Doom.
Anyway, I think that the problems of integrating texture patches in the
Quake engine now would surely exceed the gained flexibility (unless
ofcourse they already are supported, and nobody found out yet :).
Zonk,
Uffe. [uphfe]
uffefl@diku.dk
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