Quake4XR Update

So the last time I left you folks, we had no particles in Quake4 whatsoever and needed to come up with some alternatives to make this game playable. As shown in the video, I have made significant progress! 

The particles themselves were quite a challenge if I didn't want to completely replace the existing renderer. Even when they were working due to the extra complications of Multiview, there were a number of effects which were causing unpleasant flickering in both eyes. Multiview is the technology that means each frame is completed with just one pass, rather than rendering 2 views. Quake 4, much like Doom3Quest before it simply wouldn't be performant enough to be playable.

Along the way I audited a large part of the rendering process, adding real-time switching of a lot of features for debugging. One potential positive side-effect, is I may be able to get stencil "dynamic" shadows back in the game (previously lost during the MultiView conversion). I've had a very rough prototype with them working, and although performance was noticeably worse, it wasn't utterly terrible. No promises that performance will be ever good enough for smooth play with stencil shadows on, but will be interesting to see how Quest 3 performs and bodes well for the eventual PCVR version. Of course, any success in this element and it could be backported to Doom3Quest. 

Why are there two guns?

Currently I am showing both the 3rd person character and the first person gun view. My ultimate aim is to give players the choice of a floating gun (1st person) or of a full body that moves with your gun position. The two you see in the video represent te early stages of both of these techniques. For the first playable in-development version we will just provide the first person version. 

What's Next? When can we see a playable version?

Previously all guns were firing in the right direction. Post-particles quite a few are back to firing on a head gaze basis. The first step is to fix all of these. I need to align the floating gun with the controller (its currently offset) and better scale the weapons as they appear. Then I need to fix the monitor interactions, even if that is just head gaze to start with. 

It sounds a lot but the lion's share of the work has been done, so I am hoping to make quick progress with these remaining issues. 

In the meantime Bummser has been doing an excellent job of comparing versions of Quake 4, reporting issues and tweaking the config settings for the best balance of performance and visuals. Its fair to say a lot of the issues wouldn't have been found without this work and it certainly wouldn't look as good as it does. Its still early days, but things are looking positive in terms of performance whilst maintaining sharp visuals.  

I appreciate all of your support and patience. I really hope this will be worth the wait!

-BaggyG