News

Most of the changes for this release were under-the-hood fixes to various issues. The FMOD sound system used by UQE Quake to perform music playback were ported to UQE Quake 2, updated to the latest build and the playback code has been tweaked to conform to Quake 2 music playback rules.

The list of video mode slots have been freed-up to allow the possibility to run at 4K screen resolution. The libraries exposing OpenGL 4.5 extensions were updated. There were various tiny NPOW2 flaws with model skin texturing that has been fixed.

The infamous "ReadLevel: function pointers have moved" bug has been fixed. It occasionally occurs while loading a saved game when running either one of the official mission packs. The code attempts to make sure that the saved game being loaded is the same version as the gamex86.dll that created it initially. It appears to have been an unnecessary paranoia-check since the compilation date of the gamex86.dll should be sufficient as verification.

The ability to render the world in wireframe mode were added. It gives an interesting perspective on how the world is rendered on a more technical level by showing how geometry move, rotate and gets culled by the renderer based on the position and direction the camera is facing.

The changes made to UQE Hexen II largely mirrors updates that has been done previously for UQE Quake. The FMOD sound system used to perform music playback were updated to the latest build and the playback code has had a total overhaul. An update to the view size were introduced to adjust the world view to hide as little as possible of the world behind the status bar on very low resolutions. The defaults for mouse sensitivity as well as gamma level were also slightly tweaked for this build of the engine.

The list of video mode slots have been freed-up to allow the possibility to run at 4K screen resolution. The libraries exposing OpenGL 4.5 extensions were updated. There were various tiny NPOW2 flaws with model skin texturing that has been fixed. Some models for torches and magical projectiles that emit light were not properly lit themselves have been fixed.

The ability to render the world in wireframe mode were added. It gives an interesting perspective on how the world is rendered on a more technical level by showing how geometry move, rotate and gets culled by the renderer based on the position and direction the camera is facing.

Most of the changes for this release were under-the-hood fixes to various issues. The FMOD sound system used to perform music playback were updated to the latest build and the playback code has had a total overhaul. The ability to change the view size were re-introduced to finally allow the ability to show or hide the top inventory area on the statusbar. Another tweak were introduced to adjust the world view to hide as little as possible of the world behind the status bar on very low resolutions.

The list of video mode slots have been freed-up to allow the possibility to run at 4K screen resolution. The libraries exposing OpenGL 4.5 extensions were updated. There were various tiny NPOW2 flaws with model skin texturing that has been fixed. Some models and textures had issues rendering fullbright pixels properly with regards to animated skins and textures.

The ability to render the world in wireframe mode were added. It gives an interesting perspective on how the world is rendered on a more technical level by showing how geometry move, rotate and gets culled by the renderer based on the position and direction the camera is facing.

From the outset of this project the idea was to ensure that the engine is as much as possible a purist build of the game. Most of the changes made to the engine were under-the-hood with a very small amount of actual visual changes. It is the perfect engine for those that are not inclined to care about having any extras like custom 32-bit texture support and other eye candy that transforms the game into something other than what was intended by the original.

Most probably it is also a pretty good candidate to be used when buying Quake 2 through digital online services like Steam since the effort required to make the jump from the original to UQE Quake 2 is extremely minimal from an upgrade perspective only requiring the original fully patched PAK files and optionally also the CIN files for cinematic playback.

The most obvious addition to the engine is the ability to set the screen resolution from 320x240 right up to more contemporary HD resolutions like 1920x1080. Functionality were also added to automatically recalculate the appropriate FOV based upon the selected screen resolution. All 2D art like the menus and other UI elements also gets scaled appropriately to remain at a consistent size.

The past two days I've spent some quality time with the idTech4 (Doom 3) engine. The sheer amount of source code and major differences between the older idTech engines and idTech4 is quite overwhelming. After carefully looking at how the engine is structured I thought its about high-time to fix two issues that has been bugging me about Doom 3 for a long time.

The number one issue is the lack of widescreen support within the engine's list of available resolutions as well as on the main menu. The only way to get something widescreen going is to mess around with the custom width and height console variables. The field of view (FOV) needs some manual adjustments for the screen rendering to look correct. After some thought a decent mix of letterbox and widescreen resolutions have been added to the engine as well as both the menu scripts of the base Doom 3 game as well as the "Resurrection of Evil" expansion pack.

There has been numerous times where I started work on a fixed-up version of Quake, but never got around to finish it. Sometimes life has a way to get in the way of things. This time around I stuck it out and got it finished! I've worked on Quake development the day its sources got released back in 2000, but eventually ended up working on Hexen II instead. With UQE Hexen II now done, I decided to start work on UQE Quake and get all the great fixes I did on UQE Hexen II back-ported to the new UQE Quake project.

The UQE project is a very personal one where the goal is to fix the engine just enough to enable me to once again enjoy one of my most favourite games of all time without having to use DOS emulation software or an older version of Windows because of compatibility issues with modern day hardware, drivers and operating systems. Its been a long time coming indeed!

Its unbelieveable that its been almost a full year since the previous version of UQE Hexen II were released! When I released the previous version of UQE Hexen II with additional higher and widescreen resolutions gamers pointed out that the field of view (FOV) is still set at a fixed 90 degrees which is typical for the classic 4:3 letterbox resolutions.

When I investigated the FOV implementation in the engine I decided to port the original Quake engine's FOV setup code over to Hexen II as it seemed as if its implementation pretty much fixed it to 90 degrees. Changing the FOV on the console did not change the field of view at all. After some work on the subject I succeeded in changing the code to actually calculate the FOV value dynamically based upon the currently used resolution.