The fragfest is on the wall
Quake III Arena in projector vision!
Even if you are a Quake addict, it's highly unlikely you've ever seen anything like this before. CQ3A is a Quake III renderer for CAVE, described as the world's best virtual reality platform. Developer Paul Rajlich has created a system that piggybacks Steve Taylor's Aftershock engine, and adds "simple collision detection and improved performance by adding support for multi-texturing and compiled vertex arrays." The game can be used with several VR interfaces, but it's not really a game yet, just a test. Paul is responsible for CAVE Quake II however, which is a proper port of the game. But why on earth put Quake III on a VR projector setup? "In many ways, Quake3 Arena represents the state of the art in real-time rendering," says Paul on his website. "The CQ3A engine implements many of the features that are in the real game including multi-pass shaders, curved surfaces (bezier patches), bsp tree with pvs testing/culling, lightmaps, animations, skybox rendering, etc." "Even if you don't care about gaming, the Quake3 format is a great format for creating original 3D content." There is a lot of umming and aaring on Slashdot about CQ3A, and VRSource.org has also written about it (although the site seems to be down at the time of writing). Of most interest though, are the pictures. Screenshots of this thing are quite amazing, and can be found here. There is also a particularly good one which appears on the main page of Paul's site, here. Naturally, if any of our readers own a CAVE setup and fancy giving CQ3A a shot, then we would be thrilled to hear from you. In the meantime, why not check the website out and just soak up the ownage.