hrttf111/faithful

OpenGL renderer for Populous: The Beginning

Faithful

Faithful is a project dedicated to the game "Populous: The Beginning". It was 3rd game in a Populous series, so it is commonly known as Pop3 or PopTB. It tries to fulfill two goals:

• To implement modern renderer for Pop3
• To implement utils to convert Pop3 resources to modern formats

Result for renderer should be as close to an original as it is practically possible, hence the project is called "faithful". But for many reasons it does not make sense to implement "pixel perfect" renderer.

Right now there are two executables in this project:

• "faithful", which is an OpenGL renderer
• "pop3-res", this is an 2D renderer and resource viewer

Faithful app

This is an OpenGL renderer. It allows to render levels of an original PopTB version (not UW at this moment). At this point it is in a very early stage of development, so it has a limited functionality. Application renders landscape only and textures it. There are 4 possible textures for the landscape:

• Completely generated by fragment shader on GPU. CPU only loads original resources to a shader and does not perform any additional work
• CPU/GPU renderer. In this mode palette indices are generated by CPU, while actual colors are rendered by GPU
• CPU renderer. This renderer generates texture on CPU and loads directly to a fragment shader, which does mapping without any additional processing
• Hights renderer. It generates simple texture denepnding on hight of a certain point of a landscape, it does not need any additional resource except hight map

By default only GPU and hights texture renderers are enabled, other renderers could be enabled by a application arguments. It is possible to switch between different renderers with a keyboard. Application allows to use different resource for a specific level and switch between levels using keyboard. The rendering itself is very simple, it does not perform any light manipulation.

Pop3-res app

This application is mainly used to view Pop3 resources and render levels in 2D (as BMP images). See "scripts" directory to understand how it works.

Notes

Both applications are very "raw", so there are many bugs and inconsistencies in rendering (seams, not correct hight ratio).