The Engine Meets a Quake Map

Everything Up To This Point Was Loading Nothing

Ten months of work on cameras, plants, pots and console commands, and the honest summary of the renderer was: it could draw shapes we made ourselves.

Quake 3 and Warsow maps are not shapes. They are a 1999-era binary format full of lightmaps, PVS clusters, fog volumes and faces that assume a coordinate system Babylon.js has never heard of.

What Landed

BSP loading, both dialects:

• ▸IBSP v46/v47 — Quake 3 Arena maps.
• ▸FBSP v1 — Warsow maps.

Face types are polygons, bezier patches and meshes, with UV coordinates converted from Quake's Z-up right-handed axes into Babylon's Y-up left-handed ones. One mesh per texture group, which is a decision made for phones, not for our GPUs.

PK3 archives, because a BSP on its own is a husk. Textures live in packages, so: multi-path archive loading, an index that maps file to package (cached in localStorage), and automatic loading of whichever texture PK3s a given map actually needs. TGA, JPG, PNG and KTX, all read straight out of the archives.

The Quake shader system — .shader files parsed from the PK3s into a registry, with the old underscore-to-slash name translation handled once instead of at every lookup. Material properties are real: cull, blendFunc, alphaFunc, polygonOffset. Alpha testing gives fences and leaves proper cutout transparency, and cull none makes surfaces double-sided.

The Whole Thing Is Nine Console Commands

This is the part that made it feel like a real engine rather than a demo:

pk3 path game/basewsw/
pk3 index build
scene empty
bsp load wdm11
bsp loadrequired
shader load
bsp render
bsp applytextures

That is a Warsow map, with its textures, in a browser, driven from a console.

Known Issues

Stated here because the changelog states them, not tucked away:

• ▸Alpha blending may be wrong on some transparent textures.
• ▸Some decals still z-fight.
• ▸Lightmaps are parsed but not yet applied to materials. The data is in

memory and on screen it is going unused.

That last one is why this post is a beginning rather than a arrival.