Friday, August 10, 2012

Quick and Dirty Q3A Level Viewer (2001)

In 2001, because of a bet of sorts with some friends, I spent the Canada Day evening and night trying my hand at writing a very simple Quake 3 Arena level viewer.  The morning after, I had basic walls, lightmaps, and broken static meshes rendering; I spent a bit more time that evening fixing the meshes' appearance, and came back a few days later to briefly look into curved surfaces (patches) for curiosity's sake.

I did not reverse-engineer the data format myself; I merely based my code upon Kekoa Proudfoot's excellent documentation.

Though this was really just a one-night, one-file experiment/hack that was never really meant to go anywhere, the results are visually amusing, so I thought I'd post a short video.  The orange "mystery" texture is where either I failed to export some textures by hand, or where the code discards materials because of over-complexity (I did not dive into supporting the material/shader system).


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