𝟶𝚡𝚊𝟷𝚋𝚊𝚊𝟷𝚋𝚊

Posting about this with small delay here, but this month my friend and a very talented programmer under nickname @numas13 made his Xash3D FWGS main menu UI implementation public. It is written from the ground up in Rust programming language using ratatui library, making the main menu look like it's something out of Unix terminal.

For now, it's more tailored towards Half-Life and not generic enough to support mods, but maybe with few modifications it might fit into your own Xash-based game if you want something with different design... and in Rust, this thing is very popular these days. Hell, maybe it's the first step towards engine oxidation. :)

For demonstration purposes, this menu is included with engine on Windows, Linux and macOS builds (cross-compiling it for other platforms is another can of worms...) and can be enabled with `-menulib menu_tui.dll` command line switch on Windows or with `-menulib libmenu_tui.so` on Linux.

Posting about this with small delay here, but this month my friend and a very talented programmer under nickname @numas13 made his Xash3D FWGS main menu UI implementation public. It is written from the ground up in Rust programming language using ratatui library, making the main menu look like it's something out of Unix terminal. For now, it's more tailored towards Half-Life and not generic enough to support mods, but maybe with few modifications it might fit into your own Xash-based game if yo…

To combat an old Half-Life bug with cut-off dlights on overly scaled textures, I've introduced a radius multiplier for dynamic lights, so we can enable lighting on the neighbor surfaces as well.

This however has a problem by actually lighting up too many surfaces that do not receive any lighting, potentially hurting the performance.

... Until I found a fix for that in JoeQuake, which seems has been taken from FitzQuake, which attributes LadyHavoc, best known for DarkPlaces engine. It exactly checks whether the surfaces receive any lighting or not, which turned out to be perfect for my case here.

Attached comparison screenshots description:
1) The demonstration of a bug. The texture of helicopter landing site on crossfire.bsp is stretched, which causes the dynamic light (Half-Life flashlight on the screenshot) to be cut off. For the purpose of demonstration, lit surfaces are marked with red color and the map lighting is toned down to better see flashlight.
2) With increased radius dynamic light lits the neighbor surfaces as well, giving more correct result.
3) This screenshot shows the crossfire bunker entrance, which has lesser amount of stretched textures, but with the increased radius it lits surfaces that don't get any light from the flashlight.
4) With enabled LadyHavoc's fix, only the surfaces that's lit by the flashlight get marked

To combat an old Half-Life bug with cut-off dlights on overly scaled textures, I've introduced a radius multiplier for dynamic lights, so we can enable lighting on the neighbor surfaces as well. This however has a problem by actually lighting up too many surfaces that do not receive any lighting, potentially hurting the performance. ... Until I found a fix for that in JoeQuake, which seems has been taken from FitzQuake, which attributes LadyHavoc, best known for DarkPlaces engine. It exactly c…

3

hm, it's almost as if some of these maps were intended to have lit water...

...no, of course, they mostly weren't, but soon level designers would be able to easily configure it through worldspawn's key/value settings in a new feature coming to xash3d-fwgs

hm, it's almost as if some of these maps were intended to have lit water... ...no, of course, they mostly weren't, but soon level designers would be able to easily configure it through worldspawn's key/value settings in a new feature coming to xash3d-fwgs

3

Finally added a hotkey handlers to my mainui_cpp from Xash3D FWGS, featuring Half-Life WON menu. However, behavior differs from WON launcher. In WON it handles it on key press, which makes navigation confusing, and sometimes it might react twice or more. Like if you're in main menu, pressing 'C' to open configuration menu, and it jumps straight to controls menu instead. This is probably due to mishandled button repeat, but I'm not sure. Instead, I do it on key release, which allows in my opini…

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Merged gamma fixes and overbright implementation into Xash3D FWGS. Now everything looks as intended.

Support of lightmapped water from ericw-tools. It's so ugly but people like it for some reason.

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Finished decompiling animated logo from HL25, might not be very accurate, but I tried. The code: github.com/FWGS/mainui_cpp/pull/… Of course, now I'm having fun drawing custom strings...

(Edited)

Instead of trying to add my software water implementation into our software renderer, I did it in an OpenGL renderer that everyone uses and will use anyway. This code waited for this moment for two year until somebody reminded about it... It doesn't use shaders, it's really just that software effect implemented modifying the texture and re-uploading to GPU. I thought it will be slower but I guess generating and uploading 128x128 is not a problem for modern computers. I also found some bugs and…

(Edited)

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Link on github.com

github.com

Did you know that @nekonomicon, one of Xash3D FWGS contributors and hlsdk-portable maintainer, tracks the list of opensourced and reverse-engineered Half-Life mods? Yes he does!

(Edited by Moderator)

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Found a solution for signed integers, sort of. At least it's less glitchy, but still undone. By the way, source code is published in our repository, branch goldsrc-proto: github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs/tree…