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The past two days I've spent some quality time with the idTech4 (Doom 3) engine. The sheer amount of source code and major differences between the older idTech engines and idTech4 is quite overwhelming. After carefully looking at how the engine is structured I thought its about high-time to fix two issues that has been bugging me about Doom 3 for a long time.

The number one issue is the lack of widescreen support within the engine's list of available resolutions as well as on the main menu. The only way to get something widescreen going is to mess around with the custom width and height console variables. The field of view (FOV) needs some manual adjustments for the screen rendering to look correct. After some thought a decent mix of letterbox and widescreen resolutions have been added to the engine as well as both the menu scripts of the base Doom 3 game as well as the "Resurrection of Evil" expansion pack.

There has been numerous times where I started work on a fixed-up version of Quake, but never got around to finish it. Sometimes life has a way to get in the way of things. This time around I stuck it out and got it finished! I've worked on Quake development the day its sources got released back in 2000, but eventually ended up working on Hexen II instead. With UQE Hexen II now done, I decided to start work on UQE Quake and get all the great fixes I did on UQE Hexen II back-ported to the new UQE Quake project.

The UQE project is a very personal one where the goal is to fix the engine just enough to enable me to once again enjoy one of my most favourite games of all time without having to use DOS emulation software or an older version of Windows because of compatibility issues with modern day hardware, drivers and operating systems. Its been a long time coming indeed!

Its unbelieveable that its been almost a full year since the previous version of UQE Hexen II were released! When I released the previous version of UQE Hexen II with additional higher and widescreen resolutions gamers pointed out that the field of view (FOV) is still set at a fixed 90 degrees which is typical for the classic 4:3 letterbox resolutions.

When I investigated the FOV implementation in the engine I decided to port the original Quake engine's FOV setup code over to Hexen II as it seemed as if its implementation pretty much fixed it to 90 degrees. Changing the FOV on the console did not change the field of view at all. After some work on the subject I succeeded in changing the code to actually calculate the FOV value dynamically based upon the currently used resolution.