So you’ve probably started Anachronox up on a modern computer and found that it crashes whenever you start it… Despite applying all the patches the problem continues to persist and it feels like all hope is lost, you probably read that you could limit the extensions via your graphics cards control panel but thats not really fixing the problem perminately, so may I present my patched ref_gl.dll! This stops the engine from printing all those extensions into the console and thus solves the problem.
Category: Games
So the situation is rather complex right now. Me, Eukos and a few others have several different branches of the source-code for Daikatana, two from 1998 and two “final” branches (one being the 1.2 patched code and the other being the “gold” rc code). The “gold” code can be compiled out the box without any changes in VS 6.0 however there’s a few differences to the actual released client (for example the code for the renderer selection seems to be disabled or something… I should probably check) and obviously it suffers from a few nasty crashes on NT based operating systems (like Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7/8). Then “why not just clean up and release the 1.2 source-code?” you might be asking? Well currently the source-code is somewhat broken but when I have a chance I will properly try to go through it and see what I can do. We have considered also just bringing over the changes from the 1.2 branch into the “gold” branch (literally only takes five minutes to do some of the fixes) however I’d like to move all of it over into VS 2010 before doing so since today using VS 6.0 isn’t exactly an easy thing to do especially when using Vista/Windows 7 and it also saves people the trouble from doing it in the future!
I’m sure a lot of people would want to throw the code out there but we cannot do that as firstly we don’t yet have permission to release the source-code and as far as I know there’s some third-party stuff in there which needs to be taken out / replaced. John Romero deserves a real thumbs-up however as he would personally like to see the source-code being released and I really think he deserves quite a bit of respect considering what the game went through during its development.
Another possible thing we could do is perhaps firstly release somekind of SDK while we finish up cleaning the engine so that anyone can start making modifications, they’ve done quite a nice job at trying to make Daikatana as modular as possible so that new dll’s can easily be compiled, thrown into the “dlls” folder and loaded by the engine.
Laters!
Since apparently I’m not allowed to state my opinion in the comments section I’ll state it here.
Looks retarded and is an obvious clone of a game we all know. Setting might be different but it’s hardly something that hasn’t already been done, good luck on trying to crash the gaming industry again though since that’s what you’re contributing towards tbh.
Aha more Daikatana stuff to talk about and let’s start a little on what they were doing during 1999! So the transition to the Quake 2 engine was quite a huge change, the majority of content was basically just ported to the new engine but a lot of it was indeed hugely improved upon, but it wasn’t an excuse for the massive delay as a lot of this was built on top of what already existed, it didn’t need to be “redone” like Romero has claimed as that’s a complete lie… Though it was certainly worth the transition as it truly allowed them to do what they were aiming to do and well obviously a lot of the content from when they were using the Quake engine was rather rough or just plain bad. All this said it seems everything just went downhill afterwards, a lot of the dll system they were using for the Quake engine was just brought over, I can’t really comment too much on the extent of changes they made from when it was being used for Quake and then moving it over for the Quake 2 engine however from what I can see they had not initially changed all that much so it was in some ways completely horrible but I think in another sense it was cleaner than the monster they ended up with in 1999. It’s obvious that 1999 was a pretty unproductive time, I’ve mentioned it quite a few times to people and I still wonder what on earth they were thinking during most of that year.
During that time there was a lot of stuff being removed and added code wise but the progress with models and maps just almost ceased to be, most of it seems to have been just going over the layout of a level over and over again. All I can really say is that in-term of those two things during 1999 all the way to its release, not much changed at all.
A lot of things were simply dropped during 1999, in fact some things were removed pretty much right before the games release in 2000. The hierarchy system for player models was dropped however I still think it’s used for turrets in the final game (I was up late last night snooping through a lot of the code), the procedural textures were dropped and the software renderer was dropped during this time too. They obviously were planning on adding a extreme amount to the game however a lot of it is left unfinished, there was some work done on a D3D renderer and some work also done on a Glide renderer (I’m pretty sure in the final game it uses a wrapper for 3dfx cards). Something else worth mentioning is that a lot of the menu system is pretty horrific in the final version, especially compared to the 1998 version, yet both look the same and (to some extent) work the same.
I’ll carry on with this tomorrow since I’m kinda wasting time right now…
Eukos recently uploaded a video of 1997 version of E1M2 running in the Daikatana pre-alpha which you can find here
I also recently uploaded a video of the 1998 version of E1M2 here
Now compare and remember that that’s 1997 to 1998. Now compare the 1998 E1M2 with the final version. Yeah… Sums up everything else really.
So as some of you know Rage was recently released, it was admitted by Carmack quite sometime ago the development had been focused more towards consoles however he said that he regretted it… or something like that anyway but either way people were pissed off anyway, and so Carmack did a 180 turn and responded in quite a general way I must say was almost insulting, also where’s this “id studio” tool-set we were going to see at release? Where is it still!? Something else I’d like to know, if the engines development was focused on using 6 year old technology (it’s not even using the latest version of OpenGL) then why did you require Nvidia and ATI to release new drivers for the PC platform? I’ve heard Carmack talk numerous times on how hard it is to develop for PC’s due to all the differences in hardware etc (remember that this game isn’t taking advantage of that many new features, it was developed with consoles in mind which means in other words 6 year old technology and even GLQuake or Quake 2 can still run fine on modern hardware even today). Shit like this just blows my mind really. Obviously the engine is far more complex than the id tech 4/Doom 3 engine was but I’m pretty sure hardware differences today shouldn’t be a problem, especially when you consider that today we only have Nvidia and ATI developing graphics hardware and about %70 of people are using an Intel CPU. If there was a worry about drivers on different machines then why require Nvidia and ATI to release new ones? Why not use what’s already available!?
I’m probably wrong about a lot of this but overall developing for PC’s is not only cheaper but should be far FAR more easier than trying to take a modern engine and trying to get it working but looking great on seriously limited 6 year old hardware, if you have a problem with supporting older hardware on the PC platform then you shouldn’t even bother.
OpenKatana is a new project I’m currently working on which is a recreation of Daikatana as it was when it was using the Quake engine. The main focus right now is just the multiplayer, I’ll be focusing on the singleplayer once the multiplayer proves to be fun and easy to get into. I’m hoping to start private testing in December (yeah long time away) and then hopefully release a public beta sometime next year. Why am I working on a huge number of projects at once? Quite easily really, Gabriel has been working on TDP’s design document and now and then I’ve been making changes to TDP when I can (perhaps not as frequently as I’d like), but really there’s still plenty of progress being made on other things.
