The first commit happened on Nov 14 2016. I cloned the official id Quake repo and started with removing the stuff that I don't need. I know there are more advanced source ports available but I wanted to start my work from zero, so the official repo is the perfect starting point for me.
Code cleaning up took almost an entire month. I aggressively removed all platform specific code and replaced them with SDL2 or the C++ standard library. By Dec 15, I had fully ported sound/music/input and the software renderer to SDL. All platform specific files and unused #if blocks were also removed. I was happy with the much cleaner code base, but also a bit unsure about whether I'd be able to finish this project as it seemed to be a lot of work.
Two days later I had my first model on screen.
There are 3 kinds of models in Quake: the world model, which is the static part of the level, brush models, which are similar to the world model but are smaller movable parts of the level (doors, elevators etc.), and alias models (monsters and projectiles).
I went with the alias model first because their data structure looked easiest to me. At first my renderer just drew a static model frame on screen while the game ran its simulation and audio in the background. The highly modular design of the engine was really impressive as the graphics subsystem was completely ripped out but it didn't affect any of the other subsystems at all.
It took me another few days to get model animations working. But once I could draw one model, I could draw many, just throw in the world and viewpoint transformation and here we go:
It was quite an exciting moment to see the monsters and objects appear on screen all at the right spot.
Level geometries were a bit harder than alias models, mainly due to the way they were stored in the data structures. I eventually got the level on screen on Dec 29.
Above is one of the first screen shots and you can see some polygons had wrong facing. This was later fixed and it looked much better.
Here's another shot
At first I just dump the entire level to the GPU without using the BSP tree at all. But it actually wasn't very hard to walk the BSP tree and only render the polygons in the PVS of the current leaf node. So I got this done in the new year holidays. Walking the BSP tree also had the nice side effect that I could add some of the small objects (mainly torches) to the rendering as I passing through the leaf nodes because these objects are stored inside the BSP tree.
The next thing was rendering brush models, these are the doors and moving floors. Thanks to the holidays I had the time to implement these in just a couple days. Once these are in, I kind of reached a milestone that all 3D objects were rendered. Monsters, projectiles, torches(with animated flames), ammo boxes, moving floors and other level mechanisms, all there. So I captured a video of it running the opening demo.
The next big challenge was texturing. Quake has diffuse textures and up to 4 light maps. light maps seemed a bit more complex but also more interesting so I went for them first.
The big problem with light maps was that every polygon had their very own light map. In order to render the polygons with their light maps I would have render them one by one while binding their light map textures, instead of putting everything in a vertex buffer and render them in one draw call.
So I took the obvious solution which is adding all light maps to a texture atlas. I had to write a texture atlas builder that allows me to add sub textures and then return a texture atlas and to translate texture coordinates to the coordinates within the atlas.
The way Quake stores its texture coordinates is also rather strange. Instead of storing the UV coordinates together with the vertexes, Quake stores a plane equation with each polygon. So I had to project each vertex coordinate to the texture plane to get the texture coordinate.
I was quite surprised that it only took me two days to get light maps working. Perhaps I'm getting better at this now. Oh yeah, weapon models were added too but these were fairly easy. They were simple alias models, just a matter of setting up the correct transformation matrices.
The first screenshot above still had an off by 1 bug. If you look closely, some shadows doesn't align well with the geometry. The light map is 1/16 res as the diffuse map. So I just divided all texture coordinates by 16 but turned out that's not enough. I actually had to + 1 so it's like s = s / 16 + 1 instead of just s = s / 16. I don't understand why there's this +1 but once this was fixed, everything aligned perfectly. Here's another shot with texture filtering turned off.
This is where I'm at right now. It's quite an adventure for a graphics noob like me but I learned a hell lot and more importantly, had great fun doing it. Now I'm more confident than ever that I will be able finish it in the sense of reaching feature parity with the software renderer and even go beyond.
These are the things still remain to be done:
- Diffuse maps
- Procedural textures (sky, water, lava)
- Particals
- Dynamic lighting
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