Raytracing Quake demos
I decided to combine these two problems into one solution:
- Modern CPUs are idle way too much of the time. Why have all this computational power if we don’t use it?
- I have these funny old Quake demos that there’s no good way to convert to something playable.
My solution is to convert Quake .dem files to .pov files and render them with POV-Ray.
Quake scene rendered in POV-Ray. Two more here and here.
Quake is closing in on 20 years old now, and it’s starting to get annoying to make it even work. Yes, it’s opensource, and there are a couple of forks. But they’ve also always been annoying to get working. Hell, even GLQuake in Steam won’t start for me. (yes, I know this is a bad reason, but I’m doing this for fun)
Many of the tools and resources are hard to find. I couldn’t find ReMaic, and only found lmpc thanks to FreeBSD having made it a package. Converting demos to an ASCII format using lmpc helped in confirming that my file parsing was correct.
The steps needed to render a demo:
- Extract .mdl files to .pov and .png (skin) files.
- Extract .bsp files to .pov Continue reading