Trinity is created by Andrew and developed by Andrew for a long time. Then, Andrew stopped and I moved on Trinity which just made a trinity a little bit silent among the gaming.
Among the internet, I saw some people saying that trinity uses paranoia's render but paranoia is better than trinity. Since, trinity was developed to version 2.4, Andrew included a warning to people who use paranoia's dll instead of trinity's original dll. But still, words are spread.
So, why they say trinity use paranoia's render? Because of contents? like decals? detail textures? flashlight? There are still some differences between trinity render and paranoia render. For example, while trinity has water reflections, projective shadows, external texture support and hd sky, paranoia does not. However, while paranoia have smoother and brighter lighting and bumpmap support for textures, trinity does not. A big example is while paranoia needs hacked opengl32.dll to work flawlessly, trinity does not need it. But, when trinity is run with hacked opengl32.dll, bugs can be seen like flashlight not working.
So, when I spent some time thinking, the decals of paranoia and trinity are the same. So, in this graphical patcg, I will fix it. By what? by overall decals found on the web with were released open source, which means they gave full permission to anyone to use it for any purpose. So, graphical patch is on the way. Remember, you need custom edition or original trinity to install this patch. I forgot to put readme file in patch so here the installation instructions:
- download custom edition, extract it somewhere and copy folder "trinity" into Half-life folder. (If you wanna use this for your mod, after copying, rename if to your mod's name)
- download patch, extract it somewhere and copy the folder "trinity" into half-life folder, replacing some files. (or if you are using trinity for your mod, rename folder "trinity" to your mod's folder name)
If you are not sure how to use trinity for your mod, check here: Moddb.com
I made this patch because I want to show that trinity is NOT same with paranoia's render, so, if you just don't install this patch its ok. Changes are
- new decals
- new particles
- new textures
- new flashlight
- water fog removed (since the water fog seem strange and crappy)
Enjoy!
Best regards
RedFog
Trinity does NOT use Paranoia's render, the code differs completely, people are being misled by the fact that 3 years ago when Trinity started being developed, Andrew used portions of Paranoia code to build Trinity.
I understand that people not technically aware of both engines can make this assumption, afterall is two different renderers for the same engine, it is likely that they are visually similar, specially when Trinity used the very same flashlight texture as Paranoia.
Trinity does not contain any code from Paranoia, apart from merely half a dozen lines (that really didn't require to be replaced), when people judge side to side Trinity with Paranoia they assume Paranoia is better, because one has a very visually noticeable feature while the other does not, the normal mapping system. But it really isn't as simple as that..
You know, its a pity, very few projects are actually using Trinity wisely and making full use of all it's features, and all these belong to close friends of the developer, everyone else has merely attempted to improve Half-Life with it, and obviously with poor results, this is not what Trinity is for folks.
I am entirely convinced that Trinity has a lot more features than Paranoia ever had, Paranoia didn't came with a particle engine, or a shadowmapping system, or a actual multipass lighting system or watershaders, or real-time mirrors, etc, etc, the list could go, not to mention that Trinity has faster and cleaner code.
Andrew considered implementing bumpmapping, he can do it, but since Trinity was designed for personal use, he thought he didn't need it, so he didn't code it.
Just saying really, I don't want to tear down Paranoia, but the fact is that one is a lot more robust and complete than the other, but people judge by what is visible, and since Trinity has no officially complete mods using it yet, it's easier to fall over the one that has (Paranoia).
Well, there are some good points of trinity that people doesn't know. While paranoia have full bright on model lighting, trinity does not. Here, I am posting this mod in modDB because I want more of the developers to use trinity engine, I didn't mean they shouldn't use paranoia's render, just to say that trinity is better. You know, while paranoia's render need to use hacked opengl32.dll, trinity does not. That's one point for developers.
The interesting thing about Trinity is exactly that, a full shader system for Half-Life without the need to use any kind of library outside the mod folder, the codebase was entirely written under assembly shaders, making it a lot faster for video cards. If anything, Trinity would be a very improved version of Paranoia, just without normal mapping but with a lot of other things instead.
So Trinity engine and FX engine , which one better ?
There is no better or worse, they are both different, you use the one that best requires your needs.