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quake: play the 1996 id software game

this input node cannibalises quakespasm to read quake input geometry and textures. the data is sent to vulkan ray tracing kernels. you can try vkdt examples/quake.cfg to test it. requires a bluenoise input texture, see below. also it assumes that you have the original game data installed in /usr/share/games/quake/. this module is optional, you need to have compiled with VKDT_USE_QUAKE=1, see config.mk.defaults.

for added fun, you may want to install the excellent arcane dimensions mod. it installs additional pak files to /usr/share/games/ad. for more detailed textures, get the hd textures from the quake revitalisation project. place these in the /usr/share/games/ad subdirectory too, use consecutive numbers in the pak filenames. i don't know how these interact with the newfangled re-release of quake, so be sure to use the original game paks from your 1996 cdrom in your drawer. to run arcane dimensions, use the examples/ad.cfg file.

algorithm

the rendering core implements guided importance sampling as described in the paper
Markov Chain Mixture Models for Real-Time Direct Illumination.
Dittebrandt et al., CGF (Eurographics Symposium on Rendering), 42(4), 2023.

cli operation

if you run this through the cli, be sure to pass --audio (before the --output option), since the audio callback does gamelogic stuff (worldspawn) that can only be done outside the video graph processing.

for instance, render to jpg image and only output the last frame:

vkdt cli --last-frame-only -g examples/quake.cfg --audio quake.aud --format o-jpg \
  --output main --config frames:40 fps:24

or, to render out a video directly:

vkdt cli -g examples/quake.cfg --format o-ffmpeg --filename qu.vid --audio qu.aud \
  --output main --config frames:3000 fps:24
ffmpeg -i qu.vid_0001.h264 -f s16le -sample_rate 44100 -channels 2  -i qu.aud \
  -c:v copy quake.mp4

(add -r 60 before -ito resample for different frame rate) (replace -c:v copy by -vcodec libx264 -crf 27 -preset veryfast for compression)

you probably want to use the svgf module to remodulate the albedo and apply temporal anti aliasing after this module.

screenshots

these are taken with the hd textures and the ad mod, using an rtx 2080ti device.

connectors

output the rendered frame, irradiance part. this is not a source because it doesn't require cpu copy (rendered on gpu directly)
blue blue noise input textures. see this github issue for an example file
aov the demodulated albedo, to be multiplied to output after denoising
mv input estimated motion vectors here, see the align module
gbuf will write gbuffer information here: normal, depth, two moments of irradiance
debug randomly changing debug pixels, as i change my mind

parameters

cam grab the mouse/keyboard input to play the game
pause frame number after which to pause the game. useful for reference renders. will also set a fixed quake time per frame. zero means no pause
exec command string to execute after loading quake. use with cli/config files. accepts ';' separated lists of commands
ref reference render mode. either use guided vMF mixture models or reference/plain cosine hemisphere sampling
wd the width of the rendered image in pixels
ht the height of the rendered image in pixels

September 2024