Half-Life WAD3 and MAP support in DirectQ?

[OpenMaw]

Is Half-Life WAD3 and Map support possible in DirectQ? I was looking at one of the tutorials posted on here about adding it to basic GLQuake, but apparently it would be much harder to do with an engine that is not in line with GLQuake. It seems to be down to the way that Direct3D would handle the colors?

[leileilol]

It can do it, but whether MH wants to is a different matter. HL map support would mean supporting maps built with SDK tools that have strict usage rights tied to them (i.e. for use with Half-Life only) so it's not something that would be encouraged anymore...

[Spike]

both rendering apis boil down to 4 channels in the end. only difference is that d3d9 is explicitly bgr, while opengl will automatically translate from rgb to what the hardware prefers. its easy enough to just rewrite the various channel ordering.
the real problems will be from the fact that all the tutorial code that's already written for you is completely incompatible with directq's changes that do not relate to pure rendering api.

considering how MH has gone missing, you'd need to fork directq anyway, regardless of his ideals.

[OpenMaw]

[Spike]

by 'sdk tools', he means the halflife qbsp etc programs that take your map and generate an optimised bsp. the ones that you can't make a halflife map without, regardless of the actual editor you use.

you could use wad3 files with a quake map... but what's the point? just use paletted tgas or something. or pcx if you're going for that vibe... many quake engines already support pcx. its just a stupid format that noone bothers to mention it, but hey, if you're going for 256 colours per individual texture then its right up your street!...
of course, you'll have redundancy as each bsp has a copy of every texture.

[OpenMaw]

[Dr. Shadowborg]

Hmmm, you might also want to check out the possibility of using Q2BSP map format and FTE instead of that nasty ol' HLBSP.

[Spike]

excess file clutter? put the bsp AND the pcx files inside a pak/pk3, which is less file clutter than both a bsp and a wad would be.

[leileilol]

[goldenboy]

Use dxt compression / .dds format for replacement textures. Saves a lot of video RAM. DirectQ should support that. Usually a good choice anyway.

[leileilol]

Good luck with those patents! DXTC also contradicts his direction......

[OpenMaw]

[leileilol]

[frag.machine]

I second what leileilol said. Darkplaces has a lot of man/hours in feature additions and bug fixes.

[OpenMaw]