Read on for what we’ve been up to lately, and what we’re in the process of working on.

We’ve added another major feature to the renderer, with the work done by gimhael on color grading. Essentially, color grading allows for us to alter and enhance the colors of an area in subtle ways, which can change the mood of a map, or reinforce a certain look that a mapper is going for. It’s still very much a work in progress, but we’ll have more to show you as we get closer to our release, and you can test it out yourself if you compile from source. In the above shot, the same area of Parpax is shown with four different settings. Clockwise, from upper left, you can see the room in blue, red, neutral, and green tones. Of couse, you’re not just limited to those, and the effect can be as strong as you’d like it to be. Naturally, color grading will have more applications than just altering the appearance of maps. One potential application would have a fade-in to red while the tyrant is trampling around.

Something else we’ve had progress on is the reactor by chris, who you might recognize as the one behind our turret and grenade models. It’s his largest model for us yet, and going off his previous work for the project, it will surely impress. Having been in production for a few months now, the base reactor model is finally finished, and it is currently in the process of being textured. As you can tell from the model, it’s quite a bit more complex in appearance than the old reactor, with the base of the structure giving off the impression that it’s supposed to be a portable device, while the upper portion has a more detailed core, one that will probably utilize the glow maps supported by our engine. As we have additional work done on the reactor, more updates will be posted.

For mappers, we have some assorted goodies in store. Besides color grading, which is a powerful tool on its own, we also have a texture swapping utility, as well as a restructuring of the entities system. The utility, called Chameleon, has been made by Viech. It allows for a mapper to swap out the textures on a map with an entirely different set, and it’s what was used to upgrade Parpax from its old texture set to the new one you experience today. Chameleon should also work with other games that use the same map format, and may be of interest to mappers in the communities of other Quake-based games. Timoteo, known for his work on our console system, is the one behind the major changes to entities. So far, he has managed to refactor how entities work, majorly cleaning up the related code while laying foundations for new features for mappers to use. Much of the obsolete and redundant code that we have inherited has been removed, for instance. As new features are progressively added, they’ll be reported here. You can also follow his work on the entities branch.

See you all next week! There’ll be even more to show off as we prepare for our release on April 7th.