Its been a long time coming, but finally its here!
UQE Hexen II v1.14!

This new and second release of UQE Hexen II came almost five years since the very first release back in 2006 and it boasts a number of really great additions and fixes to the engine. Here we will highlight the most important ones, but for a complete list of new features and changes see the change log.

When it comes to the technologies used; I have updated the DirectX libraries to the latest and compiled and linked to them as well as updated the OpenGL extensions header files to make sure the code is aware of any new extensions that are available. The engine have also been compiled with Visual Studio 2010 which in itself fixes a lot of issues with the binary engine. All 16-bit video modes have been removed from the engine to create room for higher resolutions up to HD resolutions.

The 2D rendering logic managing things like statusbars, text, menus and the likes had to be updated to allow for the proper scaling there-of since the addition of HD resolutions makes the 2D stuff to become ridiculously tiny. The 2D scaling logic in the engine has been significantly improved. Also featuring is the ability to load non-power-of-two textures which fixes that “corrupted” or “malformed” look the engine shows which is aparent with most of the 2D graphics when compared to the software version of the engine. The OpenGL renderer now match perfectly with the quality of the software renderer in that regard.

External texture loading support have been sigificantly improved. Not only can bump mapping textures be internally generated, but the ability has been added to allow authors to load their own bump mapping textures. Normal mapping would be a more correct term. External texture loading was also simplified a lot by not forcing the loading of Hexen II WAL files. External luma textures are also supported now to allow “glowing” texture overlays. It’s also possible now to load external sky textures for classic Hexen II style skies. Another nice addition is the support for colored lighting via external .LIT files to give the world a more natural feel.

A feature people have been asking for ages to be added to UQE is interpolation. Well, the good news is that its finally and fully implemented. There are three major interpolation technologies implemented in UQE Hexen II v1.14 now. Translation interpolation smooths the positional movement of entities. Rotation inperpolation smooths the rotations of entities. Animation interpolation smooths the rendering of MDL model animations attached to entities. Translation and Animation interpolation are enabled by default with only Rotation interpolation which is disabled by default since I’m not 100% satisfied with its results. The documentation that comes with the engine contains all the information on how to enable/disable any of these interpolation methods.

The nicest feature of all that has been added to the engine is frame buffer objects using the OpenGL extension “GL_EXT_framebuffer_object”. With this the engine now features an all new bloom post-processing effect, written from the ground up to replace the dated bloom method used in previous UQE releases as well as other engine mods. The full power of the GPU is harnessed to process bloom using GLSL. Not only does it look better, but it also performs better. The addition of frame buffer objects also opens the floodgates to even more impressive post processing features that could be added in the future like for example motion blur!

This new bloom technology is my contribution to the Quake community. Read on the change log for more information regarding what has been done with this version of UQE Hexen II.

Download UQE Hexen II and enjoy it!