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Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

code.idtech.space

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Re: Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

#21
post #8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but Half Life 2's Source engine was itself a continuation of Goldsrc which was itself a continuation of the Quake 1 engine. The lineage is there but beyond a certain point it's not really Quake anymore. GZDoom/UZDoom is a similar grey area, it is built on the original Doom codebase but they've added so many features that it's practically its own distinct engine now. Those forks can even render arbitrary 3D mode…

We'd have to come up with definition of quake :-) FTE has a lot bolted on it but the focus us in Quake, quake mods, lifting some limitations and making mod dev convenient. But it is the same overall code structure, the same game, etc. All these oss quake engines, are they quake? Ironwail, quakespasm vkQuake?

Qames/quake from 9front =). It can run LibreQuake with Malice as a MODs, and that's it. Quake, Quakeworld and everything for vanilla, no modern changes like QuakeSpasm or worse, DarkPlaces. If someone backported HL2 to the original Quake with reduced physics and still run under a Pentium III fast enough, it would be something astonishing.

I see impressive stuff with reimplementations such as Surreal Engine, but they will require far more powerful machines.

If Surreal had a software renderer (not requiring AVX or similar) running under an SSE2 machine, that would yield even more respect, because if your reimplemented engine runs in legacy machines the portability would explode. Just have a look on Scummvm on how many platforms and OSes can it run. Or the Super Mario port for PC, where some fork supports even 3DFX under DOS, and GL 1.2. Thus runnable under TinyGL with no 3D accelerators and even under Plan9/9front with custom tweaks.

Re: Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

#23
post #8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but Half Life 2's Source engine was itself a continuation of Goldsrc which was itself a continuation of the Quake 1 engine. The lineage is there but beyond a certain point it's not really Quake anymore. GZDoom/UZDoom is a similar grey area, it is built on the original Doom codebase but they've added so many features that it's practically its own distinct engine now. Those forks can even render arbitrary 3D mode…

We'd have to come up with definition of quake :-) FTE has a lot bolted on it but the focus us in Quake, quake mods, lifting some limitations and making mod dev convenient. But it is the same overall code structure, the same game, etc. All these oss quake engines, are they quake? Ironwail, quakespasm vkQuake?

There already is a term: Quake Source Port

https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Source_port

Re: Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

#24
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even simple Half-Life 1 mods built on textures and models from Half-Life 2 look much closer to 2 than one would expect. For example this mod, but not only: https://moddb.com/mods/half-life-dark-future You won't confuse it with modern Half-Life 2, but the original HL2 engine had far worse graphics than the latest version. Makes you realize how much of the difference between HL2 and HL1 is due to different textures and…

And Viktor Antonov (rip) art style. edit: there is also the fact that map compilers for gold source games have advanced far beyond what they could do back in 1999. The lightmaps and light sources alone can be far more intricate nowadays than what you would get from the official valve ones in 1999.

The other thing though is that Original Quake Back In The Day ran on a Pentium 75 (needed the maths co-processor) with a dumb framebuffer. All the rasterising of polygons was pure software, as was all the geometry processing. Running GLQuake was a huge improvement but it required an expensive add-in card that piggybacked onto your VGA card, and a whole different binary.

Now you can just kind of pile it into a block of RAM, aim a chunky ASIC at it, and pull the trigger every frame.

In the late 90s a mate of mine did a phenomenal video of a Quake demo (you could record all player movements and camera positions as a "dem file") that he'd rendered out, raytraced in POVRay. I printed it to VHS for him as part of a showreel, and never thought to keep a copy myself.

Re: Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

#25

SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN Seems to be using a dnsft.cloud.zyxel.com certificate. Is this a home router?

https://community.zyxel.com/en/discussion/23595/why-i-get-bl...

Seems like you or someone upstream of you uses a Zyxel brand device that has some kind of dns content filtering enabled. You should be able to get around this on a given machine by configuring an alternate dns provider (dns over https, cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, google's 8.8.8.8, quad9's 9.9.9.9, etc.) or doing something similar at your own router/dns resolver/dhcp server if it's not the thing doing this.

Re: Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

#27
Super interesting! I'm curious what the purpose is, though?

Edit to answer myself: Looks like this is more of an offshoot of the FreeHL projects by the same author, which rewrite GoldSrc game logic to QuakeC to get those games to run on open source engine stacks, where the utility is more obvious. I guess it was just fun to see how hard it'd be to get HL2 content running.

A bit similar to the OpenMW project working on Oblivion and Skyrim content loading on the side, though perhaps that's a more obvious future vector for that project.

Re: Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

#28
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even simple Half-Life 1 mods built on textures and models from Half-Life 2 look much closer to 2 than one would expect. For example this mod, but not only: https://moddb.com/mods/half-life-dark-future You won't confuse it with modern Half-Life 2, but the original HL2 engine had far worse graphics than the latest version. Makes you realize how much of the difference between HL2 and HL1 is due to different textures and…

And Viktor Antonov (rip) art style. edit: there is also the fact that map compilers for gold source games have advanced far beyond what they could do back in 1999. The lightmaps and light sources alone can be far more intricate nowadays than what you would get from the official valve ones in 1999.

I used to do a bit of mapping back then (nothing that survived to this day, thankfully); as I recall, practically nobody used official map compilers. As it often happens, the community wrote replacements that were much faster for debug "-O0" builds, and generated lightmaps of a significantly higher quality for the release "-O2" builds.

It was either ZHLT or VLHT, or something like that; looks like more alternatives have been written since then.

https://gamebanana.com/tools/5391

https://github.com/seedee/SDHLT

Re: Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

#29
De-makes are interesting because they continuously seem to show what may have been possible long ago in ancient engines if teams pushed them even further.

Then again maybe that level of detail even in idtech1 would have required more computing than was available for many years.

Re: Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine

#30
post #20

Would it work under vanilla quake 1? Ah, no. I can't check it out. Good job keeping me away with Anubis, btw.

[flagged]

No, just a 9front user with a web browser, Netsurf. I shouldn't need JS to read an article you know.
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