Getting Even with Field Pointers

This is the third post in the series on field pointers, and since it resolves the problems raised in the second field pointers post, it’s worth reading that first. Today we try to rewrite our extended SUB_UseTargets function to retain the extra functionality, but also not use as much of the stack. We’ll explore two QuakeC compiler extensions in our solutions – both of them require FTEQCC.

Normals in .mdl format

Along with how skins vertices work, normals are one of the hardest to understand aspects of Quake models. Both how they are stored in the .mdl format and what the quake engine with them is obscure, but hopefully this article will do something for that. The idea behind normals is that they store which direction the surface faces at each vertex, so that the engine can calculate better lighting and shading for the model. We’ll start with what they do for us visually.

Poster

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Going Overboard with Field Pointers

This is a follow up to the last field pointers post and I recommend you read that first. That post took a successful piece of code and used it as a hook to explain the whys and hows of field pointers in QuakeC. Today we’re going to start with another real bit of code, but this time it’s a promising-looking disaster! It does give us some more exercise with the field pointers but the new learning will be about something else entirely. Intrigued? Then read on…

Field Pointers in QuakeC

Field pointers are a topic with a scary name! Don’t be put off by the word “pointer” – there’s no way to do pointer arithmetic in QuakeC, so we won’t have to do anything scary with them. Field pointers will prove to be surprisingly powerful, they let us write generic code in QuakeC, which stops us from doing a bunch of copy-pasting.