This week’s festive screenshot shows a bunch of test models that I’ve been using for developing environment mapping for 3D model reflections. While the current map renderer is not efficient enough for rendering cube maps on the fly, 3D models will be able to benefit from manually prepared cube maps.
This has been an interesting implementation challenge. It turned out the code I had previously written for transforming objects was not quite compatible with how cube maps needed to be rendered. I thought I was being clever by setting up player weapon models directly in view space, since they are affixed to the camera. For a while I was getting confused by all the different transformations needed for moving between tangent, model, world, and view space coordinates (cube maps are defined in world space). Models already in view space needed to be handled differently than objects in world space.
Eventually I decided to scrap that approach and wrote some new code that positions all models in world space, so their lighting and reflections can be done in the same way. This was much easier to get working correctly. K.I.S.S. wins again!
I’ve also been making some bug fixes for the upcoming 1.15.7 patch. Noteworthy fixes include support for Freedoom’s FreeDM multiplayer IWAD as a recognized game, and correct handling of command line options in the Shell app. The same fixes are already available in the 2.0 unstable builds.