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UQE Hexen II - Updated

Sunday, September 11, 2016
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.

Functionality have also been added to enable the engine to load inflated versions of the original 8-bit low resolution textures to double their original size which in turn doubles the amount of texels on any given surface. This reduces the blurriness of textures to a comfortable midway point between the pixelated look of the original software renderer and the excessively blurred look of the hardware renderer. This produces a much smoother and sharper view of the world.

Some engine tweaks to ensure it properly runs on Windows 10 as well as removing the ancient assembler code from the engine and rather use standard C code instead. The assembler code was required on very old hardware to improve performance, which with today's hardware is unnecessary engine bloat.

The engine were compiled using Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 and should run great for old-school gamers running on modern hardware.
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