Anyone interested in client development?

[PiB]

First poster here, also working on re-creating a EQ client using OpenGL. Seems to be a popular pastime here

PixelEngineer, are you using backface culling? I have tried to turn it on but this removes a lot of faces that should be visible:



When backface culling is disabled:



Looks like the normals and winding order of many faces are wrong in the s3d files. Or maybe there's some flag to invert them that I overlooked? In Blender, the normals of the Pedestal are pointing down instead of up:



I could just leave it disabled but this sometimes causes z-fighting (look at the water in the second image).

[KLS]

If you know the order of the vertices you can just calculate your own normals (hint: you do!) which is what we do in azone for .map files.

[PiB]

I know how to calculate face normals, but I think the order of the vertices in the file is wrong. Half of the faces use clockwise order (first picture) while the other half use anti-clockwise order (second picture).

The reason I mentioned the normals is that, if all the normals were pointing in the right direction I could detect which faces have the wrong order and change it. Unfortunately it seems faces specified clockwise have wrong normals and vice versa.

[PiB]

My bad, I was looking at the faces from the wrong direction. Looks like they are all specified in clockwise order. Asking OpenGL to cull front faces did the trick. D'oh!