Göld - Löve but for Goldsrc

This is a simple, LuaJIT-based game engine that allows people to write full 3D games in Lua. It intends to emulate the simplicity and fun of modding games on Goldsrc/Source and the first 3 Quake engines, but with something closer to Löve's attitude where native code is used for performance- intensive things but Lua has as much control as possible. Having said that, I'm perfectly happy to restrict things significantly if it makes things simpler, and as long as it'd be somewhat reasonable to implement a game of similar technical complexity to Half-Life 1 on this then I'd be happy.

Currently all this does is load and render Quake 2 maps, although it does render them pretty nicely. I hope to eventually seamlessly be able to load Goldsrc and Quake 1 maps, too, and possibly even Quake 3 maps if it's not too much extra work (it's a format which lends itself far better to being rendered on the GPU). Goldsrc and Quake 1 store mipmapped textures inline, though, so it's not just a case of just converting it to the same structure as a Quake 2 map while loading. That's really the only hurdle to implementing Goldsrc and Quake 1 maps, however.

I've also got a parser for the monstrosity that is the Goldsrc .mdl format, so my next task is to get Half-Life 1 models loading, displaying and animating in this engine. It's very, very likely that I'll switch to updating the already-existing bindings to assimp and using those instead, since I'm certain that my existing parser is buggy (since the format is a mess) and integrating with assimp allows me to support every model format that it supports, instead of only .mdl.

How to use

Extract Quake 2's .pak files into a folder called data in the working directory that you'll be executing the program in (so probably the project root, if you're executing with cargo run). You can do this with a tool like pakextract. I don't parse .wal textures, so you'll have to bulk-convert any textures stored as .wal to .tga, .png, .gif or suchlike. I'm just using the image library for my image parsing, since Goldsrc uses .png and .tga textures anyway and the game that I have in mind as an "end goal" for this project primarily reuses Goldsrc assets. To convert .wal to .tga, I would like to recommend Wally since everyone else online does, but I've found that it consistently crashes when batch processing images under Wine, and so the best way I've found to do the conversion is by a simple Python script using the Pillow library:

from PIL import WalImageFile

for vals in os.walk("."):
    root, dirs, files = vals
    for file in files:
        pre, ext = os.path.splitext(file)
        try:
            WalImageFile.open(root + "/" + file).save(root + "/" + pre + ".png")
        except:
            pass

If you don't do this, you'll see something which I'm sure will be familiar to many modders and tinkerers of this era of games: