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After much work over the last couple of evenings I now have a working, but very basic renderer working. I decided against the Doom 3 type renderer and went for deferred shading type. Partly because they are not that difficult to do (apparently ), and partly because they can handle lots of lights with not much reduction in framerate - and the lighting is generated in real-time.

The BSP is still not optimized at all, but the deferred renderer can generate any scene and light it with 6 test lights and it only drops a couple of frames per second compared to the earlier lightmap renderer..!

In the new screenshots below the framerate is low as I have not sorted the lights into the BSP leaves yet, so I'm just processing every light in the map even if they are not visible.

There is no occlusion, shadows, or transparent surfaces yet, but as I mention its only been a couple of nights work, and that included going through every texture in the SR1 map and making a normal map. You can see the difference normal maps make when rendering in the bottom screenshot. Compare the texture with the orange arrow which has a normal map, to those around it that dont. All surfaces have medium reflectivity so they have a wet or plastic look about them. Not so good on bricks but looks good on windows...

Since the Kingpin lighting model is for lightmaps, it doesnt look like its going to translate well into a new renderer unless the existing lights are made over-bright (some maps are really dark), or someone recompiles the maps with the lights configured for a new lighting model (any volunteers to do SR1?)

I forgot to mention that emissive surfaces are not functional yet either. This should make a big difference to most scenes when I have implemented them.

Anyway, check out the screenshots below. As usual, click for hi-res.

In reply to the two questions above:

Modding - For full modding support and online play, I would have to integrate it with the complete Quake 2 engine which would be a lot of work. The Q2 engine doesnt support TGA or MDX formats as far as I can see from the quick look I had at the source. I would also have to override all of the loaders to load into my renderer and core engine. My core doesnt have network support yet so lots of work to fit the Q2 code into it. As I mentioned in the first post, I wasnt planning on using the Q2 source as this is primarily for my own games. Kingpin single player is a 'nice to have' as my core can already handle all of the bitmap and wave formats, and I was only going to code as much as was needed to play it. That said, it will interface to the main gamex86.dll for the game logic, so there should be no reason why other mods shouldnt work but without network support theres not much point.

Maps - Ideally the maps should have the lighting changed to take advantage of the new renderer. The screenshots show how messy some of the lighting is, but most of the KP single player maps look acceptable as they are. The polygon count on most maps could also be massively increased to add detail, but the time it would take to fix a deBSP'ed map then relight and remodel wouldnt be worth the effort.

In case anyone was wondering what has happened to this, as in, is it going to end up like the KingpinQ3 project, then worry not

I have been deep in some recoding of my core engine for the last few months to add some additional graphics managers and I have also updated the audio system to use OpenAL so Vista and Windows 7 users can have hardware accelerated 3D audio and effects again if their sound card supports it. Much work is also in progress on recoding the menu menu system, with edit boxes being a long awaited addition. Edit boxes are handy controls for entering IP addresses and port information (can you see where I'm going with this yet?)

What this has to do with my Kingpin renderer is this: After some head scratching about how to integrate the Q2 sub-systems into my engine I remembered that my Skill mod doesnt have a client-side DLL. After some experimenting I discovered that KP will connect to a server and run with ONLY the kingpin.exe & colormap.pcx files, downloading textures and the rest as it needs them. When running single player it is effectively running a server within the client, so all I need to do, once I have completed the renderer, is to add some network code to talk to a server - this means any server

BTW, fully lit and shadowed entities look nice - I'll need to get some new screenshots up soon

Here you go

Image has 5 point lights and 4 randomly placed entities. Entities are not yet placed into leaves so shadow rendering is not optimised for the entities.

If you read the whole thread you'll realise that this engine is not primarily for Kingpin. It will be used on some other games I am working on.
If you're a programmer you'll understand the *fun* element in writing something that shows the results you are looking for, learning something new, and using *existing* data makes the development process much faster.
As I've written a couple of mods for Kingpin I'm already somewhat familiar with its internal workings so its not such a stretch to expand on it to play the actual game.

You also have to consider there is still a relatively large fan-base for Kingpin. Theres a lot of very talented mappers, modellers, story writers, et al out there who *for fun* would probably enjoy writing a sequel to Kingpin on a completely new engine that could be fully customised and expanded.

Looking at it from my point of view, unless *you* work for a game company and are looking to recruit some new talent that pays better than my daytime job, my answer is as irrelevant as your question. C'est la vie.