Trinity HL25 fixes and what's to come

So Valve's 25th anniversary update pretty much broke all custom renderers that would replace Half-Life's world renderer code, and that meant I had to jump into Trinity and apply some fixes. I initially thought I only had to change one engine structure, but oh boy, Valve had some surprises for me. Turns out they now use a variable which I previously used for storing indexes, as it was never used previously. I had to totally rewrite everything that dealt with that particular bit.

You can find it here:
https://github.com/TheOverfloater/trinity-engine

• Abyss Engine

I also wanted to provide some updates on some stuff I spoke of in the Discord. As most of you know, Trinity eventually evolved into the Abyss Engine, used in Abyss-048 and Half-Life Episode Two, and now also a mod called Nohra's Concealment. This engine revision has improved code, such as studio models rendered in retained mode, and support for vertex weights. It's also an all-shader based renderer, which means it's far faster than Trinity was. It uses OpenGL assembly shaders, which means it has very wide support across different GPUs.
So why do I bring this up? I'm planning on revising the Abyss Engine and bringing it into a form that can be open-sourced. I will post that also on my Github page once it's done. My plan is to give it as part of a clean SDK much like Trinity, but that'll also require some work.

• Reckoning Engine

The third and final revision of the engine is known as the "Reckoning Engine", which is what it became before I moved over to my custom engine, Pathos. Now the Reckoning Engine is a very different beast and it also breaks compatibility with some HL features, like switchable/animated lights, but instead it supports those features for dynamic lights. This revision of the engine is completely shader-based also, and uses GLSL. The list of features is way too long to discuss here, but things like a rudimentary facial animation system, variance shadow mapping, support for Paranoia's bump map data in the BSP, specular light reflections, etc are there. I plan on eventually open-sourcing this engine version as well. Opensourcing this version would be a rather difficult piece of work, but it's doable.

• Raven City

I have been thinking of releasing the corpse- er, I mean, the most playable version of Raven City for those who might want to see this mod. Time here is a major factor, of which I don't have much when it comes to fixing some broken things to make it work. It also doesn't help that the mod is in some ways an absolute cringe-fest and I want to just remove some... really embarrassingly cringey crap from it. Another issue is that it requires a very specific version of Cg to work properly, which I need to dig up from somewhere.

• Half-Life : Retail

I think it goes without saying that with the HL25 update, this is effectively cancelled, but I will probably upload the source code at least on Github, but I won't create a final release.