HD Texture Support on MD5 Models (Patreon)

Now Retroquad supports compiling HD textures from 24-bit color TGA images for MD5 models.

Technically, higher-res textures are easy to use on MD5 models because the positions of their skin vertices are already independent from the resolution of the skin. The work I'm doing is to implement texture replacement (that is, loading multiple texture types for each texture image so you can swap them in realtime), integrating Retroquad's texture compiler into the MD5 skin loading routines, and replacing the original texture data format with my FWQ texture data format in the mesh model renderer so it can output Quadricolor texels.

There is still a bunch of issues to solve in the current implementation, including the texture compiler crashing the engine because its memory management conflicts with the memory management of the model loader. The next version will be released this week after fixing the current issues, and will include preliminary versions of the AI-upscaled HD skins I'm making.

To work well, the renderer will also have to support multi-layered skins (e.g. with luma maps), mipmapping and anisotropic texturemapping (to eliminate noise).

MDL models still doesn't support HD skins, and it will be more complicated to implement it on them, but I'll do it after the MD5 support for them is complete.