Darkplaces material system

Introduction

Darkplaces material system is created to put more direct control over the surfaces qualities of textures into the hands of designers and artists. This article will contain a parts of Quake 3 Shader Manual by By Paul Jaquays and Brian Hook adapted for Darkplaces.

What is a Material?

Materials are short text scripts that define the properties of a surface as it appears and functions in a game world (or compatible editing tool). By convention, the documents that contain these scripts usually has the same name as the texture set which contains the textures being modified (e.g; textures_inn, models_mapobjects_crypt, etc,). Several specific script documents have also been created to handle special cases, like liquids, environments and special effects.

For Darkplaces, Shader scripts are located in 'Path_To_The_Game/gamedir/scripts'.

A Darkplaces material file consists of a series of surface attribute and rendering instructions formatted within braces ("{" and "}"). Below you can see a simple example of syntax and format for a single process, including the Q3MAP keywords or "Surface Parameters", which follow the first bracket and a single bracketed "stage":

// material definition
textures/mymaterial
{
   // parameters
   qer_editorImage radiant/textures/mymaterial
   q3map_textureImage radiant/textures/mymaterial
   dpglossexponentmod 0.5
   surfaceparm stone
   // base stage
   {
       map path/to/texture
   }
   // lighting stage
   {
       map $lightmap
   }
}

Inspired by Quake 3

Quake 3 shader scripts was an inspiration for darkplaces material system and visual look of material scripts is very very close to quake 3. So if you are familiar with Id Tech 3 shaders system, you will be right home with materials. Therefore there is some serious differences because Darkplaces material system was written independently and aimed to realtime lightning rendering and OpenGL 2.0.