The Deluxe Pipeline, Nine Months Waiting

Closing A Caveat From v0.8.5

In January this project wrote down, in its own Known Limitations:

if ! deluxe / if deluxe blocks are not parsed correctly.
All stages from all blocks are merged

Nine months later: Q3ShaderParser and Q3ShaderTypes preserve Warsow/QFusion `material` payloads with their `if deluxe` / `if ! deluxe` branches intact, and resolveMaterialProps() is deluxe-aware and caches by deluxe mode.

The rest of the pipeline followed:

• ▸Classic $lightmap is no longer misclassified as multiply-transparent.
• ▸BspMeshBuilder prefers deluxe metadata over suffix guessing, falling back

to _norm/_normal/_bump/_gloss/_spec only when absent.

• ▸Glow and emissive survive the lightmap pass.
• ▸Warsow _gloss → microSurfaceTexture with metallic = 0.
• ▸Lightmap index 0 handled correctly.

Two cvars, both default-on and both reload-only: r_deluxe and r_bsp_pbr.

Highlights, Automatically

DemoAnalyzer scores frags, multi-kills, airborne kills, first blood and high speed. SequenceBuilder makes timed cuts with padding, de-duplication and a budget. CinematicCameraPaths builds Bezier spline paths with tracking and easing. demoplay cinematic is wired to CameraSystem.

And The Byte-Pinning Tests

988 tests across 52 files (up from 838)
ProtocolCodecs.test.ts   73 tests

MessageCodec round-trips, MessageType bytes 0x01-0x0F and 0x81-0x8F, all 12 event codepoints, and the full delta-flag matrix 0x01 0x02 0x04 0x08 0x10 0x20.

Writing a test that fails when a wire byte moves is a different kind of promise from writing a test that a function returns a value. This is the first release where the protocol is treated as a compatibility surface.

Also

Demo archive cards with 140px levelshot banners, CRT scanlines, a bottom vignette, a 404 fallback to gametype hue, and hidden-<img> preloading for every map in the pool. A grenade launcher trail bug fixed — single ribbon, "avoids reading as delayed duplicate".

Known Issues: none stated.