Tread 3D

Author: Alexander Malmberg & Joe Riedel + Nicholas Randal

Downloads Page
Tread Documentation
Official Site

to focus on the major lackings of our last version, and fix all the problems. Tread3D2 has been rewritten from scratch. Not a single line of 1.12 lives on in this version.

Speed A lot of hindrance came from 1.12's inherent lack of support for hardware acceleration. Part of this was remedied by visgroups, however, this often proved to be inadequate. Tread3D2's rendering engine has been completely reengineered to be more flexible, and way faster. On an AMD K6/2 450 with a diamond Viper V770 (or 550) Tread3D2 is wicked fast. You can pan a thousand brushes in the 3D view without a hiccup. An entire Quake2 level will move in real-time at about 2-5 f.p.s. That may not sounds impressive, but trust me, it is. Often a designer works with much smaller subsets of a level, but sometimes you need to see the whole thing, and Tread3D2 makes it possible. As far as the flat views go, don't even try to slow those suckers down, you just ain't gonna do it

Ease of Use with Power for the Pros Nick Randal's partnership in Tread3D2 has taken editing to the next level with user interface. If only he'd been able to work on 1.12 when it was still in its infancy. Nick's thrown new controls and functionality into the interface this time around. You'll sit back and say: "This is how it should have been the first time." All colors can be customized to your liking. If you hate the way a hot spot looks, then change it. Fully bindable action and mode keys are still here. A debug window sports the ability to show what's going on inside Tread3D2. This will be useful for plugin designers. Nick has also come up with a new editing paradigm: anchors. Points in your map that can be centered on by a simple click of the mouse. You can also expand and collapse views with the press of a key.

Eye Candy One of the biggest new eye candy features of Tread3D2 is a ZombieLight Plugin. Tread3D2 will precompute the lighting in your level in literally seconds and show you what it will look like in the game. Currently this supports has only been tested with Quake2 and HalfLife. It's fast! Tread3D2 can compile the lighting for base1 of Quake2 in under 20 seconds on an AMD K/6 450 machine. With this feature the full source code is also included. That conveniently leads me to the next topic.

Fully Extendable with Plugins Tread3D2 can be extended to do anything an end user wishes it to with a fully integrated plugin system. Users can code new texture loading, model importing features, just about anything their hearts desire. Full source code to five plugins is included to get you off on the right foot. Two of them are used in Tread3D2 as major features: the leaktrace and ZombieLight ( Lighting preview).

Currently Tread3D2 provides the following plugins source code:

Leaktrace
ZombieLight (Lighting preview)
Quake2 Pak Reader (Reads the Quake2(tm) pak file format)
Quake Map (Read and write maps of Quake type)
Shapes Plugin for Arches, Cones and Cylinders