High-Resolution/Luma Textures and Monsters

Thursday, 26th July 2007

Ah, makes sense! According to the Unofficial Quake Specs it's p-code, which at least makes parsing easier. Working out which opcodes do what will (I assume) require a perusal of the Quake/QuakeC compiler source.

Personally, I'm not too keen on these packs - high-resolution textures on low-poly structures emphasises their sharp edges, and texture alignment issues - Quake's textures are aligned pretty badly in places - are made even more obvious. In the same vein, low-resolution textures look very bad to me when magnified using a smoothing filter - I'd much rather see chunky pixels.

Anyway, adding support for them is very simple. When loading textures from the BSP, I simply check to see if a file textures/texturename.tga is available, and if so load that instead.

   

The Slipgate Complex with the original and high-resolution textures.

One advantage of these high resolution texture packs are their luma variations. These are available for certain textures that need to 'glow', such as lights, computer displays or runes. These are mostly black textures with the only the part that lights up drawn.

I draw the world geometry twice. The first time I draw it normally. The second time I disable lighting and fog, enable alpha blending, use an additive blend function and the luma textures instead of the regular textures.

   

The Abandoned Base before and after the addition of luma textures.

Quake's maps have limited support for animated textures. If the texture is named +0xyz (where xyz is the descriptive name of the texture) then chances there's a +1xyz, +2xyz (and so on) texture to go with it. Once a level's textures have been loaded, I go through looking for any names starting with +0. From this I can search for the indices of its other frames.

Texture2D OldFirstWall = this.WallTextures[ATD.TextureIds[0]];
Texture2D OldFirstLuma = this.LumaTextures[ATD.TextureIds[0]];
for (int i = 0; i < ATD.TextureIds.Length - 1; ++i) {
	this.WallTextures[ATD.TextureIds[i]] = this.WallTextures[ATD.TextureIds[i + 1]];
	this.LumaTextures[ATD.TextureIds[i]] = this.LumaTextures[ATD.TextureIds[i + 1]];
}
this.WallTextures[ATD.TextureIds[ATD.TextureIds.Length - 1]] = OldFirstWall;
this.LumaTextures[ATD.TextureIds[ATD.TextureIds.Length - 1]] = OldFirstLuma;

Once I've collected up the indices of each animated texture's frames, I simply rotate them using the code above.

The levels do look rather lonely without the various monsters patrolling them. This can be remedied by parsing the entities lump. In the true brute-force tradition, the models are loaded once (at startup), but to render them I just loop through the entire entities block (which contains many irrelevant entities) hunting for types referencing a model - if so, I pull out their angle and offset and render the model at the specified position.

      

Most of the items spread out throughout the level - powerups, weapons and armour - are represented by Alias models, so adding support for those is easy enough:

   

Some of the other items - such as ammo crates - are represented by BSP models, so are currently not supported.

Models

Wednesday, 25th July 2007

I'm not sure either (I haven't looked into it). As the source code for Quake and the QuakeC compiler have been released I might be able to do something. I have a hunch that said code is responsible for level events (switches, bridges, lifts, doors and so on) so it would seem pretty important.

So far I've had one minor problem that was resolved with a hex editor (something simple like a short becoming an int or vice-versa). I'll take a look at your MDL code - thank you!

   
zombie.mdl before and after texturing support.

Animation isn't handled very well just yet - the frames aren't grouped by action (such as the 'attack' animation, 'walk' animation and so on) and the Draw call just takes a frame number.

It'll do for the moment as a test.

I'm still having problems with textures not wrapping correctly.

As you can see the texture above the hand is distorted. I was pointed in the direction of a solution via the texture wrapping options, and have added these lines:

graphics.GraphicsDevice.SamplerStates[0].AddressU = TextureAddressMode.Wrap;
graphics.GraphicsDevice.SamplerStates[0].AddressV = TextureAddressMode.Wrap;

This, unfortunately, hasn't helped. Experimentation has shown that this does change something, and by using the TextureAddressMode.Mirror I get the following -

Note the orientation of the red symbols

I still can't get decent looking light maps out of the level - they all have the "diagonal stripes" effect that usually is caused by an erroneous width. I think I'll have to start trawling through Quake's source code.

Custom Levels and Model Skins

Tuesday, 24th July 2007

An XNA Quake implementation the way I intend on working - that is, to start from scratch - is not really worth it (as far as getting the gameplay 100% identical to DOS Quake).

As a learning project, there's a decent quantity of further material (as far as maps, high-resolution textures and so on go), and I intend on trying to learn how to write a 'FPS-friendly' 3D engine based around Quake's data. Whether I shoehorn some sort of game into that or not is yet to be decided.

Anyhow, I mentioned that I'd be moving on to light maps. Unfortunately the documentation I have is rather vague on this topic (the Unofficial Quake Specs), and I can't get meaningful data out of the BSP files.

I had a slight issue to resolve. Certain textures were appearing as a single colour, like the above. As far as I know this is a symptom of using crazy texture coordinates. I wrote a crude routine that attempts to shunt vertices into the 0..1 range, and the result looks a bit better:

As you can see, the top edge of the large texture is still badly distorted.

I modified the resource loader slightly to handle loading files outside the main pack files.

The result is that I can low load resource files - such as external levels - as you would any other resource, with a call to LoadResource<Data.Level>("maps/ikspq5.bsp"). The level loader also parses the entity declaration block inside the .bsp, putting the player in the correct starting place and - more noticably in the screenshots - finding out the title of the level.

I've made a start at loading the Alias .mdl files, but their structure is rather convoluted so the only visible result thus far is a dump of all of the skin pictures.

There doesn't seem to be much information about Quake BSPs (plenty on Quake 3 BSPs, however!) so if anyone has any recommendations I'd be grateful. Looking at flipcode's article on Quake 2 BSPs it would appear that they're not too different, so I'll have a go with that.

XNA Quake

Thursday, 19th July 2007

After pratting around with DOOM with MDX, it's logical to move up to Quake with XNA. After all, the levels are "true" 3D, and there's a healthy amount of new textures (including bump and gloss maps) so that it would make creating an advanced engine easier. My problem is always finding resources.

On the subject of resources, I'm using a system whereby the various classes for game resources (such as the Level or Model class) can implement ResourceLoader.ILoadable<T>, so I can do things like this:

ResourceLoader = new ResourceLoader(@"C:\Program Files\Quake\ID1");

Palette DefaultPalette = ResourceLoader.Load<Palette>("gfx/palette.lmp");
Level SomeLevel = ResourceLoader.Load<Level>("maps/start.bsp");

This way the ResourceLoader can handle dragging data out of multiple pack (.pak) files or loading override files.

First things first - loading levels. This is nice and easy (unlike DOOM) - the .bsp files contain a list of vertices and a list of edges (each edge contains a start and end vertex index). For testing purposes, I used the Graphics class to draw out each level in 2D:

Next up, I create a point list and render those in 3D:

...and now the edges as a line list:

That seems to be on its side. Quake uses (x, y) as a 2D floor plan and z for height, so I need to swap z and y (and negate y whilst we're at it).

Quake uses faces for solid walls, which are simply convex polygons made up from lists of the aforementioned edges (and may have more than three sides). I'm creating a simple triangle list, and applying some fog to make the world look 3D (there's no lighting):

   

Texturing would make a welcome addition. Quake uses a rather novel texture coordinate system (at least, I've never seen anything quite like it) whereby each face references a TextureInfo structure, which contains the index of the texture itself, a pair of vectors indicating the horizontal and vertical axis (for aligning the texture against the surface of the face) and an offset in texels (so the texture can be aligned to the edges of the face). Fortunately, the BSP documentation I have indicates how to use this information to calculate the texture offset per-vertex, and by dividing by the texture's width and height I can get "conventional" texture coordinates.

The real Quake textures would be nice, I suppose. As I break up the faces into triangle indices, I group them by texture index. The final triangle list is made up of groups of triangles by texture, so that (for example) triangles 0 to 10 will be texture 0, triangles 11 to 14 will be texture 1, triangle 15 will be texture 2 and so on. I also maintain a list of which triangles use which texture, so to render I simply set the texture, draw a range of triangles from the single list, then move on to the next texture.

   

   

It's all pretty brute-force stuff at the moment, but it's still very fast on modern hardware. Next up will be lightmaps.

Event-Driven Keyboard Input for XNA

Friday, 6th July 2007

Edit: The following code has a bug in it. Please make sure you use the corrected code!

/* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
 * XnaTextInput.TextInputHandler - benryves@benryves.com                                     *
 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
 * This is quick and very, VERY dirty.                                                       *
 * It uses Win32 message hooks to grab messages (as we don't get a nicely wrapped WndProc).  *
 * I couldn't get WH_KEYBOARD to work (accessing the data via its pointer resulted in access *
 * violation exceptions), nor could I get WH_CALLWNDPROC to work.                            *
 * Maybe someone who actually knows what they're  doing can work something out that's not so *
 * kludgy.                                                                                   *
 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
 * This quite obviously relies on a Win32 nastiness, so this is for Windows XNA games only!  *
 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * */

#region Using Statements
using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Windows.Forms; // This class exposes WinForms-style key events.
#endregion

namespace XnaTextInput {

	/// <summary>
	/// A class to provide text input capabilities to an XNA application via Win32 hooks.
	/// </summary>
	class TextInputHandler : IDisposable {

		#region Win32

		/// <summary>
		/// Types of hook that can be installed using the SetWindwsHookEx function.
		/// </summary>
		public enum HookId {
			WH_CALLWNDPROC = 4,
			WH_CALLWNDPROCRET = 12,
			WH_CBT = 5,
			WH_DEBUG = 9,
			WH_FOREGROUNDIDLE = 11,
			WH_GETMESSAGE = 3,
			WH_HARDWARE = 8,
			WH_JOURNALPLAYBACK = 1,
			WH_JOURNALRECORD = 0,
			WH_KEYBOARD = 2,
			WH_KEYBOARD_LL = 13,
			WH_MAX = 11,
			WH_MAXHOOK = WH_MAX,
			WH_MIN = -1,
			WH_MINHOOK = WH_MIN,
			WH_MOUSE_LL = 14,
			WH_MSGFILTER = -1,
			WH_SHELL = 10,
			WH_SYSMSGFILTER = 6,
		};

		/// <summary>
		/// Window message types.
		/// </summary>
		/// <remarks>Heavily abridged, naturally.</remarks>
		public enum WindowMessage {
			WM_KEYDOWN = 0x100,
			WM_KEYUP = 0x101,
			WM_CHAR = 0x102,
		};

		/// <summary>
		/// A delegate used to create a hook callback.
		/// </summary>
		public delegate int GetMsgProc(int nCode, int wParam, ref Message msg);

		/// <summary>
		/// Install an application-defined hook procedure into a hook chain.
		/// </summary>
		/// <param name="idHook">Specifies the type of hook procedure to be installed.</param>
		/// <param name="lpfn">Pointer to the hook procedure.</param>
		/// <param name="hmod">Handle to the DLL containing the hook procedure pointed to by the lpfn parameter.</param>
		/// <param name="dwThreadId">Specifies the identifier of the thread with which the hook procedure is to be associated.</param>
		/// <returns>If the function succeeds, the return value is the handle to the hook procedure. Otherwise returns 0.</returns>
		[DllImport("user32.dll", EntryPoint = "SetWindowsHookExA")]
		public static extern IntPtr SetWindowsHookEx(HookId idHook, GetMsgProc lpfn, IntPtr hmod, int dwThreadId);

		/// <summary>
		/// Removes a hook procedure installed in a hook chain by the SetWindowsHookEx function. 
		/// </summary>
		/// <param name="hHook">Handle to the hook to be removed. This parameter is a hook handle obtained by a previous call to SetWindowsHookEx.</param>
		/// <returns>If the function fails, the return value is zero. To get extended error information, call GetLastError.</returns>
		[DllImport("user32.dll")]
		public static extern int UnhookWindowsHookEx(IntPtr hHook);

		/// <summary>
		/// Passes the hook information to the next hook procedure in the current hook chain.
		/// </summary>
		/// <param name="hHook">Ignored.</param>
		/// <param name="ncode">Specifies the hook code passed to the current hook procedure.</param>
		/// <param name="wParam">Specifies the wParam value passed to the current hook procedure.</param>
		/// <param name="lParam">Specifies the lParam value passed to the current hook procedure.</param>
		/// <returns>This value is returned by the next hook procedure in the chain.</returns>
		[DllImport("user32.dll")]
		public static extern int CallNextHookEx(int hHook, int ncode, int wParam, ref Message lParam);

		/// <summary>
		/// Translates virtual-key messages into character messages.
		/// </summary>
		/// <param name="lpMsg">Pointer to an Message structure that contains message information retrieved from the calling thread's message queue.</param>
		/// <returns>If the message is translated (that is, a character message is posted to the thread's message queue), the return value is true.</returns>
		[DllImport("user32.dll")]
		public static extern bool TranslateMessage(ref Message lpMsg);


		/// <summary>
		/// Retrieves the thread identifier of the calling thread.
		/// </summary>
		/// <returns>The thread identifier of the calling thread.</returns>
		[DllImport("kernel32.dll")]
		public static extern int GetCurrentThreadId();

		#endregion

		#region Hook management and class construction.

		/// <summary>Handle for the created hook.</summary>
		private readonly IntPtr HookHandle;

		/// <summary>Create an instance of the TextInputHandler.</summary>
		/// <param name="whnd">Handle of the window you wish to receive messages (and thus keyboard input) from.</param>
		public TextInputHandler(IntPtr whnd) {
			// Create the keyboard hook:
			this.HookHandle = SetWindowsHookEx(HookId.WH_GETMESSAGE, new GetMsgProc(ProcessMessages), IntPtr.Zero, GetCurrentThreadId());
		}

		public void Dispose() {
			// Remove the hook.
			if (this.HookHandle != IntPtr.Zero) UnhookWindowsHookEx(this.HookHandle);
		}

		#endregion

		#region Message processing

		private int ProcessMessages(int nCode, int wParam, ref Message msg) {
			// Check if we must process this message (and whether it has been retrieved via GetMessage):
			if (nCode == 0 && wParam == 1) {

					// We need character input, so use TranslateMessage to generate WM_CHAR messages.
					TranslateMessage(ref msg);

					// If it's one of the keyboard-related messages, raise an event for it:
					switch ((WindowMessage)msg.Msg) {
						case WindowMessage.WM_CHAR:
							this.OnKeyPress(new KeyPressEventArgs((char)msg.WParam));
							break;
						case WindowMessage.WM_KEYDOWN:
							this.OnKeyDown(new KeyEventArgs((Keys)msg.WParam));
							break;
						case WindowMessage.WM_KEYUP:
							this.OnKeyUp(new KeyEventArgs((Keys)msg.WParam));
							break;
					}

			}

			// Call next hook in chain:
			return CallNextHookEx(0, nCode, wParam, ref msg);
		}

		#endregion

		#region Events

		public event KeyEventHandler KeyUp;
		protected virtual void OnKeyUp(KeyEventArgs e) {
			if (this.KeyUp != null) this.KeyUp(this, e);
		}

		public event KeyEventHandler KeyDown;
		protected virtual void OnKeyDown(KeyEventArgs e) {
			if (this.KeyDown != null) this.KeyDown(this, e);
		}

		public event KeyPressEventHandler KeyPress;
		protected virtual void OnKeyPress(KeyPressEventArgs e) {
			if (this.KeyPress != null) this.KeyPress(this, e);
		}

		#endregion
	}
}

Might be useful if your Windows game needs text input. Win32 veterans, feel free to lambast my lack of skills.