Zircon Engine - a "DarkPlaces Mark V" project mod for Quake

The Warpzone - Impossible Geometry Connecting 2 Areas

Dr. Wakey cued me in and raised the issue of his interest in warpones a while back. Dr. Wakey has some great experiments and recently I saw a couple that impressed/inspired me. I thought I would take a crack at understanding warpzones. Ow!

It's not very fair sifting through the code. To fully understand them you need to see the engine code, the QuakeC code, examine the map, look at the textures on certain brushes and look at the client side QuakeC and server side QuakeC.

Then if you got that far -- are you a 3d math wizard? Because there is 3D plane math and frustum calculations and ... well ... now I understand why the knowledge of warpzones is so sparse.

That lack of knowledge issue will be changing and when the opportunity presents, I will make warpzones easy to use and write up a tutorial on them.

Pac-Man (Or Clone Version)

Pac-Man will in some shape or form be included in the next Quake3_Quake1, I need to determine where or how to integrate it in a way where it seems like a plausible part of the map it gets integrated into.

"How is this even possible?" It was interesting challenge, that's for sure. A future date I'll go into detail how it was accomplished. It was not magic, there is no silver bullet. One may notice there are 2 Pac-Man. I knew from the start I wanted to design it with unlimited instances possible, in practice the maximum is 4 due to memory use and the number of variables per machine (with the design I used at the time).

When I was doing some warpzone tests, I had the following issue:

"Where is it?" Anticlimatic discovery: My Quake folder was just a big mess. Image compression turned the green into gray. Unlucky.

2D Experiments (will they become 3D "2D experiments"?)

I am working on making a 2D graphics system in CSQC that should be able to do sophisticated animation scripting.

This was a circle sector drawing test that also tested some of the various blending filters. To do this, I knew I was going to have to chart out how to draw rounded circle slices with rounded inner and outer edges. I did not have "math mode" in my head enabled and was struggling with some calculation considering I needed to draw either with triangle strips or a triangle fan. Then I got bailed out, I had written that code a year ago and stumbled into the existing QuakeC source in draw2d.c.

This is why when coding and the iron is hot and you are "locked in" ... keep going. You may write something you need later when you are not "locked in".

The above video recorded in DarkPlaces. In the current form, the text to generate the above looks like this: (yes, planet Earth is to the left in the above, I found a Earth .obj model with a CC0 license and wanted to try it out.)

word origin:38.000 40.000 size:30.000 30.000 text:"Hello"
word origin:38.000 100.000 size:30.000 30.000 text:"DarkPlaces does not support"
	depth 5
word origin:38.000 130.000 size:30.000 30.000 text:"drawing text in 3D space"
word origin:38.000 160.000 size:30.000 30.000 text:"but that would be no fun"
	colormod:.90 .50 .10
	
image origin:'220 220' 
	size:' 30.0  30.0' pic:"footstep1"	
	colormod:1 .30 .0
	bob_cycle_secs:2
	bob_cycle_radius:2.5
	bob_cycle_offset:0.5
	bob_cycle_start_frac:0	
	
image origin:'250 260' 
	size:' 30.0  30.0' pic:"footstep2"	
	colormod:1 .30 .0
	bob_cycle_secs:2
	bob_cycle_radius:2.5
	bob_cycle_offset:0.5
	bob_cycle_start_frac:0.5	

And that wraps up Lab Report #2 of 12.