1 Glquake v0.97, Quake v1.09 release notes
2
3 3dfx owners -- read the 3dfx.txt file.
4
5 On a standard OpenGL system, all you should need to do to run glquake is put
6 glquake.exe in your quake directory, and run it from there. DO NOT install
7 the opengl32.dll unless you have a 3dfx! Glquake should change the screen
8 resolution to 640*480*32k colors and run full screen by default.
9
10 If you are running win-95, your desktop must be set to 32k or 64k colors
11 before running glquake. NT can switch automatically.
12
13 Theoretically, glquake will run on any compliant OpenGL that supports the
14 texture objects extensions, but unless it is very powerfull hardware that
15 accelerates everything needed, the game play will not be acceptable. If it
16 has to go through any software emulation paths, the performance will likely
17 by well under one frame per second.
18
19 3dfx has provided an opengl32.dll that implements everything glquake needs,
20 but it is not a full opengl implementation. Other opengl applications are
21 very unlikely to work with it, so consider it basically a "glquake driver".
22 See the encluded 3dfx.txt for specific instalation notes. 3dfx can only run
23 full screen, but you must still have your desktop set to a 16 bit color mode
24 for glquake to start.
25
26 resolution options
27 ------------------
28 We had dynamic resolution changing in glquake for a while, but every single
29 opengl driver I tried it on messed up in one way or another, so it is now
30 limited to startup time only.
31
32 glquake -window
33 This will start glquake in a window on your desktop instead of switching the
34 screen to lower resolution and covering everything.
35
36 glquake -width 800 -height 600
37 Tries to run glquake at the specified resolution. Combined with -window, it
38 creates a desktop window that size, otherwise it tries to set a full screen
39 resolution.
40
41 You can also specify the resolution of the console independant of the screen
42 resolution.
43
44 glquake -conwidth 320
45 This will specify a console resolution of 320 by 240 (the height is
46 automatically determined by the default 4:3 aspect ratio, you can also
47 specify the height directly with -conheight).
48
49 In higher resolution modes such as 800x600 and 1024x768, glquake will default
50 to a 640x480 console, since the font becomes small enough at higher
51 resolutions to become unreadable. If do you wish to have a higher resolution
52 console and status bar, specify it as well, such as:
53 glquake -width 800 -height 600 -conwidth 800
54
55 texture options
56 ---------------
57 The amount of textures used in the game can have a large impact on performance.
58 There are several options that let you trade off visual quality for better
59 performance.
60
61 There is no way to flush already loaded textures, so it is best to change
62 these options on the command line, or they will only take effect on some of
63 the textures when you change levels.
64
65 OpenGL only allows textures to repeat on power of two boundaries (32, 64,
66 128, etc), but software quake had a number of textures that repeated at 24
67 or 96 pixel boundaries. These need to be either stretched out to the next
68 higher size, or shrunk down to the next lower. By default, they are filtered
69 down to the smaller size, but you can cause it to use the larger size if you
70 really want by using:
71
72 glquake +gl_round_down 0
73 This will generally run well on a normal 4 MB 3dfx card, but for other cards
74 that have either worse texture management or slower texture swapping speeds,
75 there are some additional settings that can drastically lower the amount of
76 textures to be managed.
77
78 glquake +gl_picmip 1
79 This causes all textures to have one half the dimensions they otherwise would.
80 This makes them blurry, but very small. You can set this to 2 to make the
81 textures one quarter the resolution on each axis for REALLY blurry textures.
82
83 glquake +gl_playermip 1
84 This is similar to picmip, but is only used for other players in deathmatch.
85 Each player in a deathmatch requires an individual skin texture, so this can
86 be a serious problem for texture management. It wouldn't be unreasonable to
87 set this to 2 or even 3 if you are playing competatively (and don't care if
88 the other guys have smudged skins). If you change this during the game, it
89 will take effect as soon as a player changes their skin colors.
90
91 GLQuake also supports the following extensions for faster texture operation:
92
93 GL_SGIS_multitexture
94 Multitextures support allows certain hardware to render the world in one
95 pass instead of two. GLQuake uses two passes, one for the world textures
96 and the second for the lightmaps that are blended on the textures. On some
97 hardware, with a GL_SIGS_multitexture supported OpenGL implementation, this
98 can be done in one pass. On hardware that supports this, you will get a
99 60% to 100% increase in frame rate. Currently, only 3DFX dual TMU cards
100 (such as the Obsidian 2220) support this extension, but other hardware will
101 soon follow.
102
103 This extension will be autodetected and used. If for some reason it is not
104 working correctly, specify the command line option "-nomtex" to disable it.
105
106 GL_EXT_shared_texture_palette
107 GLQuake uses 16bit textures by default but on OpenGL implementations
108 that support the GL_EXT_shared_texture_palette extension, GLQuake will use
109 8bit textures instead. This results in using half the needed texture memory
110 of 16bit texture and can improve performance. This is very little difference
111 in visual quality due to the fact that the textures are 8bit sources to
112 begin with.
113
114 run time options
115 ----------------
116 At the console, you can set these values to effect drawing.
117
118 gl_texturemode GL_NEAREST
119 Sets texture mapping to point sampled, which may be faster on some GL systems
120 (not on 3dfx).
121
122 gl_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP
123 This is the default texture mode.
124
125 gl_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR
126 This is the highest quality texture mapping (trilinear), but only very high
127 end hardware (intergraph intense 3D / realizm) supports it. Not that big of
128 a deal, actually.
129
130 gl_finish 0
131 This causes the game to not issue a glFinish() call each frame, which may make
132 some hardware run faster. If this is cleared, the 3dfx will back up a number
133 of frames and not be very playable.
134
135 gl_flashblend 0
136 By default, glquake just draws a shaded ball around objects that are emiting
137 light. Clearing this variable will cause it to properly relight the world
138 like normal quake, but it can be a significant speed hit on some systems.
139
140 gl_ztrick 0
141 Glquake uses a buffering method that avoids clearing the Z buffer, but some
142 hardware platforms don't like it. If the status bar and console are flashing
143 every other frame, clear this variable.
144
145 gl_keeptjunctions 0
146 If you clear this, glquake will remove colinear vertexes when it reloads the
147 level. This can give a few percent speedup, but it can leave a couple stray
148 blinking pixels on the screen.
149
150 novelty features
151 ----------------
152 These are some rendering tricks that were easy to do in glquake. They aren't
153 very robust, but they are pretty cool to look at.
154
155 r_shadows 1
156 This causes every object to cast a shadow.
157
158 r_wateralpha 0.7
159 This sets the opacity of water textures, so you can see through it in properly
160 processed maps. 0.3 is very faint, almost like fog. 1 is completely solid
161 (the default). Unfortunately, the standard quake maps don't contain any
162 visibility information for seeing past water surfaces, so you can't just play
163 quake with this turned on. If you just want to see what it looks like, you
164 can set "r_novis 1", but that will make things go very slow. When I get a
165 chance, I will probably release some maps that have been processed properly
166 for this.
167
168 r_mirroralpha 0.3
169 This changes one particular texture (the stained glass texture in the EASY
170 start hall) into a mirror. The value is the opacity of the mirror surface.
171
172