Ender's journey into XReal

So, a friend of mine expressed some interest recently in making some maps for TremFusion. Thing is, he wanted to make them for the xreal_renderer branch. Well, that's a branch that evilchampion put together months ago that incorporates highly experimental XreaL rendering capabilities into TremFusion. Since I wanted to get him involved, I decided now was a good time for me to figure out what it would take to get TremFusion using the new features. I know it's going to need assets - bump maps, textures, new maps, etc. But, to figure out precisely what, I had to delve in to what changed and how the XreaL renderer works. This is a small post on my journey.

First off, I used the instructions found at the new xReal site to download the source. It takes a while - there's a lot of it. Then I had to install scons, which I've never used before. Thank Ubuntu and their package-manager, I was able to install it with

sudo apt-get install scons

Then run 'make' and it'll build xreal. Unfortunately, I run x86_64, so I had to make it again with

scons arch=linux-x86_64

At which point, it built again and the game would actually start up. First impression: Wow. XReaL is PRETTY. I want TremFusion to be pretty. I tried to load up a map, only to discover that no compiled maps are included with the source. Figures. Well, at least they include the code for building maps. First you have to build the map compiler though. To do that, you use scons again, but make sure you have the dependencies. I, for one, needed some libs

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev libgtkglext1-dev libxml2-dev

Now, for actually building the thing

scons mapping=1

After you get that built, you can follow the instructions on this forum post to build some maps.

cd base
../xmap.x86_64 -map2bsp maps/yan_test.map

It'll compile, and you'll end up with a yan_test.bsp. Then we start up xReal and try to play yan_test. After a 40 second load time....we get a black screen. Yay! That's what I got anyways. Maybe I'm missing something. Probably. I'll let you know when I figure it out.

Edit, an hour later
Okay, so I downloaded their pre-alpha release from FileFront. After doing that, I unzipped it and copied the .pk3 files into the xreal base directory. Then ran xreal. Now I have maps I can actually load. The only problem is that I still have a 40-second load time, and the maps play at 0.5 - 5 fps, on a dual core laptop. Not so hot. Well...at least it does something, and that will allow me to figure out how to get TremFusion to use the same assets. I hope.

Edit, next morning
Last night I got XreaL running much better. I just needed to reset some drivers and stuff, then I had it up to about 20 fps, which was nice. Here's a few screenies, as requested:




-Ender