Quake 3 renderer, some new stuff, and a girlfriend

I am finally nearing completion of my native TGE Quake 3 .bsp renderer =) Last week I finished getting all of the collision straight for the player. I still need to implement two more functions (getSupport and getFeatures) to have vehicles collide correctly.

You may notice that in the shot above there really isn't any lighting. This is b/c the Quake 3 tools started complaining about leaks when I added a light to the scene (it is not an enclosed interior). When I do use an enclosed interior, the lighting is very sweet =) Much prettier than TGE lightmaps. I'll see if I can't cook up a shot of that real soon. I still need to implement the code to cause the interior to cast shadows on the terrain and to have shadows created by the sun...potentially pretty hairy. My plan is to put an option in that if you use a certain texture name like "TGENULL" it will discard that brush. This will allow the "indoor only" tools for Quake 3 to be able to generate a leak-free bsp while allowing the interior to interact with the terrain.

Even once I finish this project, it will be a few more months before I can release anything as per the deal I made earlier this year. However, working out this code will make it trivial for me to implement native HL .bsp that I can release. I would also like to put together a .3ds sceneobject with simple animation support and collision. My goal is to make these two examples clean enough and robust enough that it will trivial to add new fully functional renderable sceneobjects to TGE. This should open up TGE to a lot more tools and plugins development! At least that is my hope ;)

All of this is on my plate for the very near future. I'd like to get it all done by the end of this month so that I can start up full-time on BoomBall in December. The response to BoomBall at IGC was amazing, overwhelming, and very encouraging! Hopefully, next year's IGC will feature a shipped BB =)

I've started to see a girl so my coding time has dropped dramatically (one of the few drawbacks but worth it ;) I really need to see about getting a laptop.