Top posts by 𝟶𝚡𝚊𝟷𝚋𝚊𝚊𝟷𝚋𝚊

(this is old news, I know, I'm just reposting stuff from my idtech.space account)

One of the highly requested features in Xash3D FWGS was player decals.

The GoldSrc implementation, to be honest, sucks ass. For some reason, they generate a WAD file, then pack it into a special file format archive that acts like a cache called HPAK (that custom.hpk file!). File limit size was a pathetic 16 kilobytes, but understandable for it's time.

Step by step, we got rid of this mess. Unkle Mike implemented storing BMP directly, then @SNMetamorph found and fixed every bug in HPAK parsing code, proposed increasing the limit to 128 kilobytes and I just added PNG support for it.

With PNG and that size limit it's easily abusable though. There is nothing wrong to draw a big smug John Carmack face or draw some memes, but not pixel art that's basically the size of the map...

UPDATE: The limits were enforced to 512x512 pixels and 128 kilobytes, which is OK for PNG images and not abuses the compressed format too much.

(this is old news, I know, I'm just reposting stuff from my idtech.space account) One of the highly requested features in Xash3D FWGS was player decals. The GoldSrc implementation, to be honest, sucks ass. For some reason, they generate a WAD file, then pack it into a special file format archive that acts like a cache called HPAK (that custom.hpk file!). File limit size was a pathetic 16 kilobytes, but understandable for it's time. Step by step, we got rid of this mess. Unkle Mike implemented…

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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…

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

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

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

This weird Xash bug (that just doesn't reproduce anymore) still makes me giggle. The mod is Snow War btw. The entity info thing on the right is GoldSrc Monitor.

(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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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…

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During another sleepless night, I tried to hack GoldSrc protocol into Xash3D FWGS. This isn't something I really want to implement and support in the engine, just want to see what could be improved in further Xash protocol extensions. There isn't so much to show off yet because client doesn't connect to HLDS yet. But I noticed a few interesting things. 1) In GoldSrc there are still remnants of old authentication with CD keys, which cannot even be used anymore. The only way to authenticate is the so-called "Steam protocol" in LAN mode, in which it doesn't validate the certificate cookie in Steam. I guess that's how networking works on pirated games? Honestly, I never looked into this. 2) To prevent protocol reverse-engineering, Valve tried to mangle the network data. This isn't a problem anymore, because the algorithm itself was RE'd a long time ago. It's a pure comedy of security through obscurity: github.com/dreamstalker/rehlds/b…. You t…

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