glqnotes.txt Glquake v0.99, Quake v1.09 release notes 3dfx owners -- read the 3dfx.txt file. On a standard OpenGL system, all you should need to do to run glquake is put glquake.exe in your quake directory, and run it from there. DO NOT install the opengl32.dll unless you have a 3dfx! Glquake should change the screen resolution to 640*480*32k colors and run full screen by default. If you are running win-95, your desktop must be set to 32k or 64k colors before running glquake. NT can switch automatically. Theoretically, glquake will run on any compliant OpenGL that supports the texture objects extensions, but unless it is very powerfull hardware that accelerates everything needed, the game play will not be acceptable. If it has to go through any software emulation paths, the performance will likely by well under one frame per second. 3dfx has provided an opengl32.dll that implements everything glquake needs, but it is not a full opengl implementation. Other opengl applications are very unlikely to work with it, so consider it basically a "glquake driver". See the encluded 3dfx.txt for specific instalation notes. 3dfx can only run full screen, but you must still have your desktop set to a 16 bit color mode for glquake to start. resolution options ------------------ We had dynamic resolution changing in glquake for a while, but every single opengl driver I tried it on messed up in one way or another, so it is now limited to startup time only. glquake -window This will start glquake in a window on your desktop instead of switching the screen to lower resolution and covering everything. glquake -width 800 -height 600 Tries to run glquake at the specified resolution. Combined with -window, it creates a desktop window that size, otherwise it tries to set a full screen resolution. You can also specify the resolution of the console independant of the screen resolution. glquake -conwidth 320 This will specify a console resolution of 320 by 240 (the height is automatically determined by the default 4:3 aspect ratio, you can also specify the height directly with -conheight). In higher resolution modes such as 800x600 and 1024x768, glquake will default to a 640x480 console, since the font becomes small enough at higher resolutions to become unreadable. If do you wish to have a higher resolution console and status bar, specify it as well, such as: glquake -width 800 -height 600 -conwidth 800 texture options --------------- The amount of textures used in the game can have a large impact on performance. There are several options that let you trade off visual quality for better performance. There is no way to flush already loaded textures, so it is best to change these options on the command line, or they will only take effect on some of the textures when you change levels. OpenGL only allows textures to repeat on power of two boundaries (32, 64, 128, etc), but software quake had a number of textures that repeated at 24 or 96 pixel boundaries. These need to be either stretched out to the next higher size, or shrunk down to the next lower. By default, they are filtered down to the smaller size, but you can cause it to use the larger size if you really want by using: glquake +gl_round_down 0 This will generally run well on a normal 4 MB 3dfx card, but for other cards that have either worse texture management or slower texture swapping speeds, there are some additional settings that can drastically lower the amount of textures to be managed. glquake +gl_picmip 1 This causes all textures to have one half the dimensions they otherwise would. This makes them blurry, but very small. You can set this to 2 to make the textures one quarter the resolution on each axis for REALLY blurry textures. glquake +gl_playermip 1 This is similar to picmip, but is only used for other players in deathmatch. Each player in a deathmatch requires an individual skin texture, so this can be a serious problem for texture management. It wouldn't be unreasonable to set this to 2 or even 3 if you are playing competatively (and don't care if the other guys have smudged skins). If you change this during the game, it will take effect as soon as a player changes their skin colors. GLQuake also supports the following extensions for faster texture operation: GL_SGIS_multitexture Multitextures support allows certain hardware to render the world in one pass instead of two. GLQuake uses two passes, one for the world textures and the second for the lightmaps that are blended on the textures. On some hardware, with a GL_SIGS_multitexture supported OpenGL implementation, this can be done in one pass. On hardware that supports this, you will get a 60% to 100% increase in frame rate. Currently, only 3DFX dual TMU cards (such as the Obsidian 2220) support this extension, but other hardware will soon follow. This extension will be autodetected and used. If for some reason it is not working correctly, specify the command line option "-nomtex" to disable it. GL_EXT_shared_texture_palette GLQuake uses 16bit textures by default but on OpenGL implementations that support the GL_EXT_shared_texture_palette extension, GLQuake will use 8bit textures instead. This results in using half the needed texture memory of 16bit texture and can improve performance. This is very little difference in visual quality due to the fact that the textures are 8bit sources to begin with. run time options ---------------- At the console, you can set these values to effect drawing. gl_texturemode GL_NEAREST Sets texture mapping to point sampled, which may be faster on some GL systems (not on 3dfx). gl_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP This is the default texture mode. gl_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR This is the highest quality texture mapping (trilinear), but only very high end hardware (intergraph intense 3D / realizm) supports it. Not that big of a deal, actually. gl_finish 0 This causes the game to not issue a glFinish() call each frame, which may make some hardware run faster. If this is cleared, the 3dfx will back up a number of frames and not be very playable. gl_flashblend 0 By default, glquake just draws a shaded ball around objects that are emiting light. Clearing this variable will cause it to properly relight the world like normal quake, but it can be a significant speed hit on some systems. gl_ztrick 0 Glquake uses a buffering method that avoids clearing the Z buffer, but some hardware platforms don't like it. If the status bar and console are flashing every other frame, clear this variable. gl_keeptjunctions 0 If you clear this, glquake will remove colinear vertexes when it reloads the level. This can give a few percent speedup, but it can leave a couple stray blinking pixels on the screen. novelty features ---------------- These are some rendering tricks that were easy to do in glquake. They aren't very robust, but they are pretty cool to look at. r_shadows 1 This causes every object to cast a shadow. r_wateralpha 0.7 This sets the opacity of water textures, so you can see through it in properly processed maps. 0.3 is very faint, almost like fog. 1 is completely solid (the default). Unfortunately, the standard quake maps don't contain any visibility information for seeing past water surfaces, so you can't just play quake with this turned on. If you just want to see what it looks like, you can set "r_novis 1", but that will make things go very slow. When I get a chance, I will probably release some maps that have been processed properly for this. r_mirroralpha 0.3 This changes one particular texture (the stained glass texture in the EASY start hall) into a mirror. The value is the opacity of the mirror surface.
glqnotes.txt