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by phusion 3643 days ago
I was a little late to the game and didn't get a 3d card until Quake 2 was out and had been patched a few times. I bought a Diamond Monster 3d (add on card), plugged it in, installed the drivers and loaded up Quake 2... no difference. After being frustrated, I finally found that I had to enable the OpenGL driver/mode and the console screen dropped, then revealed those rockets flying down the hallways in glorious, well lit 3d! I played for hours before finally going to bed, that was truly amazing.

I eventually got GLQuake and did the same for Quake 1, it was so exciting!

1 comments

Wow, I have almost the exact same memory. Think mine was a 3dfx-branded Voodoo 2 (released after the Voodoo 3 came out, but I couldn't afford it). The switch from nearest-neighbor to bilinear texture interpolation was amazing, but it was the yellow cast light from moving rockets that I remember most clearly. Q3A and UT were soon to follow, Rainbow Six, it was a good time for PC gaming.
Anyone know what they were doing for lighting by rockets? Seems like per vertex wouldn't work and pixel shaders were a lot way off. Did early opengl have specific functionality for that?