by Nash » Sun Oct 31, 2021 10:51 pm
I do plan to do some basic tutorials to get people started, when the feature is ready to debut.
One thing to keep in mind (I've said this plenty of times on Discord, so I'll just repeat this here): ZDRay is, when you boil it down, just a really, really fancy version of ZDBSP. People have asked about things like whether it could bake transparent mid textures, or bake 3D models - the answer is, if ZDRay is modified to load in external data from mods, then, sure, in theory it could be done. But remember, ZDRay is based on ZDBSP, and you know ZDBSP is a very basic program - it knows nothing about files and resources from mods. It only recognizes the map WAD.
All of these extra features would mean someone would have to basically turn ZDRay into a mini mod resource loader itself - it'd have to have the ability to load in textures (and there are a million ways to read textures - textures folder, TEXTURES lump, TEXTUREx/PNAMES... etc etc etc oh and also don't forget, textures can be scaled and panned!!!)... and in the case of models, it would have to parse actor definitions (DECORATE/ZScript) and then MODELDEF... that is a LOT of work... something a simple node builder wasn't designed to do in the first place, at all...
EDIT:
A preview of what will be possible. As has been said before, early Quake/UE1/UE2 era visuals. Don't expect it to match Unity or Unreal Engine 4 :P
I do plan to do some basic tutorials to get people started, when the feature is ready to debut.
One thing to keep in mind (I've said this plenty of times on Discord, so I'll just repeat this here): ZDRay is, when you boil it down, just a really, really fancy version of ZDBSP. People have asked about things like whether it could bake transparent mid textures, or bake 3D models - the answer is, if ZDRay is modified to load in external data from mods, then, sure, in theory it could be done. But remember, ZDRay is based on ZDBSP, and you know ZDBSP is a very basic program - it knows nothing about files and resources from mods. It only recognizes the map WAD.
All of these extra features would mean someone would have to basically turn ZDRay into a mini mod resource loader itself - it'd have to have the ability to load in textures (and there are a million ways to read textures - textures folder, TEXTURES lump, TEXTUREx/PNAMES... etc etc etc oh and also don't forget, textures can be scaled and panned!!!)... and in the case of models, it would have to parse actor definitions (DECORATE/ZScript) and then MODELDEF... that is a LOT of work... something a simple node builder wasn't designed to do in the first place, at all...
EDIT:
A preview of what will be possible. As has been said before, early Quake/UE1/UE2 era visuals. Don't expect it to match Unity or Unreal Engine 4 :P
[imgur]https://imgur.com/ja8DNmB[/imgur]
[imgur]https://imgur.com/l1AIXtw[/imgur]
[imgur]https://imgur.com/QuPpMP2[/imgur]
[imgur]https://imgur.com/Edw3ZFy[/imgur]