ETXreaL Brings New Renderer to Wolfenstein: ET

A new version of the ETXreaL graphics modification for Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory has been released. Now up to version 0.3.0, ETXreaL enhances Wolf: ET’s renderer with several new visual bells and whistles. The feature list is quite exhaustive (and we’ve got the full thing after the jump for the curious) – suffice to say, the end result is a boost in visual fidelity that fans of Wolf: ET are sure to appreciate. While the mod isn’t finished yet, people test-driving this version and providing feedback will be most helpful to the development team behind ETXreaL.

YOu can download ETXreaL from SourceForge. More information about this release along with the full changelog can be found in this forum thread for more information about ETXreaL 0.3.0. Keep reading for ETXreaL’s full feature list.

ETXreaL id Tech 3 Features

• Modern OpenGL 3.2 renderer with all deprecated OpenGL calls removed
• Clever usage of vertex buffer objects (VBO) to speed up rendering of everything
• Avoids geometry processing each frame using the CPU (worst bottleneck with the Q3A engine)
• Renders up to 500 000 – 1 000 000 polygons at 80 – 200 fps on current hardware (DX10 generation)
• Optional GPU occlusion culling (improved Coherent Hierarchy Culling) useful for rendering large city scenes
• Doom 3 .MD5mesh/.MD5anim skeletal model and animation support
• Unreal Actor X .PSK/.PSA skeletal model and animation support
• True 64 bit HDR lighting with adaptive tone mapping
• Advanced projective and omni-directional soft shadow mapping methods like EVSM
• Real-time sun lights with parallel-split shadow maps
• Optional deferred shading
• Relief mapping that can be enabled by materials
• Optional uniform lighting and shadowing model like in Doom 3 including globe mapping
• Supports almost all Quake 3, Enemy Territory and Doom 3 material shader keywords
• TGA, PNG, JPG and DDS format support for textures
• Usage of frame buffer objects (FBO) to perform offscreen rendering effects
• Improved TrueType font support that does not require external tools
• Linux 64-bit support
• Linux sound backend using SDL
• .avi recorder from ioquake3 including sound support
• Optimized collision detection routines
• Support for Omni-bot

ETXMap BSP Compiler Features

• Based on q3map2 by Randy ‘ydnar’ Reddig including additional fixes by the NetRadiant edition
• Supports Doom 3 and Quake 4 .map formats
• Built-in mini BSP viewer using -draw