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#### GLQuake

The second (and, according to current plans, last) port of Quake to a hardware accelerator was an OpenGL version, GLQuake, a native Win32 application. I have no intention of getting into the 3-D API wars currently raging; the observation I want to make here is that GLQuake uses two-pass alpha lighting, and runs very well on fast chips such as the 3Dfx, but rather slowly on most of the current group of accelerators. The accelerators coming out this year should all run GLQuake fine, however. It’s also worth noting that we’ll be using two-pass alpha lighting in the N64 port of Quake; in fact, it looks like the N64’s hardware is capable of performing both texture-tiling and alpha-lighting in a single pass, which is pretty much an ideal hardware-acceleration architecture: It’s as good looking and generally faster than surface caching, without the need to build, download, and cache surfaces, and much better looking and about as fast as Gouraud shading. We hope to see similar capabilities implemented in PC accelerators and exposed by 3-D APIs in the near future.

Dynamic lighting is done differently in GLQuake than in software Quake. It could have been implemented by changing the light maps, as usual, but current OpenGL drivers are not very fast at downloading textures (when the light maps are used as in GLQuake); also, it takes time to identify and change the affected light maps. Instead, GLQuake simply alpha-blends an approximate sphere around the light source. This requires very little calculation and no texture downloading, and as a bonus allows dynamic lights to be colored, so a rocket, for example, can cast a yellowish light.

Unlike Quake or VQuake, GLQuake does not use the edge list and draws all polygons in the potentially visible set. Because OpenGL drivers are not currently very fast at selecting new textures, GLQuake sorts polygons by texture, so that all polygons that use a given texture are drawn together. Once texture selection is faster, it might be worthwhile to draw back-to-front with z-fill, because some hardware can do z-fill faster than z-compare, or to draw front-to-back, so that z-buffering can reject as many pixels as possible, saving display-memory writes. GLQuake also avoids having to do z-buffer clearing by splitting the z range into two parts, and alternating between the two parts from frame to frame; at the same time, the z-compare polarity is switched (from greater-than-or-equal to less-than-or-equal), so that the previous frame’s z values are always considered more distant than the current frame’s.

GLQuake was very easy to develop, taking only a weekend to get up and running, and that leads to another important point: OpenGL is also an excellent API on which to build tools. QuakeEd, the tool we use to build levels, is written for OpenGL running on Win32, and when John needed a 3-D texture editing tool for modifying model skins, he was able to write it in one night by building it on OpenGL. After we finished Quake, we realized that about half our code and half our time was spent on tools, rather than on the game engine itself, and the artists’ and level designers’ productivity is heavily dependent on the tools they have to use; considering all that, we’d be foolish not to use OpenGL, which is very well suited to such tasks.

One good illustration of how much easier a good 3-D API can make development is how quickly John was able to add two eye-candy features to GLQuake: dynamic shadows and reflections. Dynamic shadows were implemented by projecting a model’s silhouette onto the ground plane, then alpha-blending that silhouette into the world. This doesn’t always work properly—for example, if the player is standing at the edge of a cliff, the shadow sticks out in the air—but it was added in a few hours, and most of the time looks terrific. Implementing it properly will take only a day or two more and should run adequately fast; it’s a simple matter of projecting the silhouette into the world, and onto the surfaces it encounters.

Reflections are a bit more complex, but again were implemented in a day. A special texture is designated as a mirror surface; when this is encountered while drawing, a hole is left. Then the z-range is changed so that everything drawn next is considered more distant than the scene just drawn, and a second scene is drawn, this time from the reflected viewpoint behind the mirror; this causes the mirror to be behind any nearer objects in the true scene. The only drawback to this approach (apart from the extra processing time to draw two scenes) is that because of the z-range change, the mirror must be against a sealed wall, with nothing in the PVS behind it, to ensure that a hole is left into which the reflection can be drawn. (Note that an OpenGL stencil buffer would be ideal here, but while OpenGL accelerators can be relied upon to support z-buffering and alpha-blending in hardware, the same is not yet true of stencil buffers.) As a final step, a marbled texture is blended into the mirror surface, to make the surface itself less than perfectly reflective and visible enough to seem real.

Both alpha-blending and z-buffering are relatively new to PC games, but are standard equipment on accelerators, and it’s a lot of fun seeing what sorts of previously very difficult effects can now be up and working in a matter of hours.

#### WinQuake

I’m not going to spend much time on the Win32 port of Quake; most of what I learned doing this consists of tedious details that are doubtless well covered elsewhere, and frankly it wasn’t a particularly interesting task and was harder than I expected, and I’m pretty much tired of the whole thing. However, I will say that Win32 is clearly the future, especially now that NT is coming on strong, and like it or not, you had best learn to write games for Win32. Also, Internet gaming is becoming ever more important, and Win32’s built-in TCP/IP support is a big advantage over DOS; that alone was enough to convince us we had to port Quake. As a last comment, I’d say that it is nice to have Windows take care of device configuration and interfacing—now if only we could get manufacturers to write drivers for those devices that actually worked reliably! This will come as no surprise to veteran Windows programmers, who have suffered through years of buggy 2-D Windows drivers, but if you’re new to Windows programming, be prepared to run into and learn to work around—or at least document in your readme files—driver bugs on a regular basis.

Still, when you get down to it, the future of gaming is a networked Win32 world, and that’s that, so if you haven’t already moved to Win32, I’d say it’s time.

#### QuakeWorld

QuakeWorld is a native Win32 multiplayer-only version of Quake, and was done as a learning experience; it is not a commercial product, but is freely distributed on the Internet. The idea behind it was to try to improve the multiplayer experience, especially for people linked by modem, by reducing actual and perceived latency. Before I discuss QuakeWorld, however, I should discuss the evolution of Quake’s multiplayer code.

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Graphics Programming Black Book © 2001 Michael Abrash