Yeah it’s Monday, I’m a day late… I know! Anyway progress on OpenKatana is going pretty smooth at the moment and we’re doing bits and bobs pretty much everyday. I’d say this month has been the most productive in a long time 
Yesterday we gave out our tools and a build of OpenKatana to a very skilled mapper to see what he can come up with as a deathmatch level, it’s certainly very exciting as it’s a chance to see an actual living and breathing level for once! It’ll also be a good chance to get an idea of what kind of tools or details a mapper might want to add to their map. This is also great as it’s going to force me to get my ass in gear about sorting out our in-engine editing tools which I’ll go into more in the future.
While that’s all great we have had at least some problems recently, most namely a horrible problem in FitzQuake which has become pretty clear recently as we’ve made the move to support full-coloured lightmaps and ditched the older standard Quake format, it’s not stopping us from working but it is a large problem which I’ll have to look into at some point.
Over on the game-side of things we’re still rewriting a lot of the game-logic and weapons are pretty much sorted, still need to finish adding them in but we have some problems (and mysteries) solved now. I’ve been mainly working on monsters myself since I have some rather big plans right now but I just haven’t had the time to commit to working on them. Something I recently decided to do, sometime ago, was see if I could work on an entirely new gamemode only making changes to the game module and it went pretty well, It also gave me a chance to fix some very important bugs or mistakes I had made. Last time I had worked on the ctf mode (earlier this week) I had decided to try working with using states for the flags, for example if the player picks the flag up then that flags state will be changed to STATE_PICKEDUP, think, add in the necessary effects and such, then keep on checking we still are being carried, and then upon taking the flag over to the other flag we would change that to STATE_CAPTURED which once again we would then go into our think function and then quickly reset the flags position. Simple concept but its turning out to actually be rather messy… Anyway I’ll let you know how things are coming along next week
Category: OpenKatana
Merry Christmas from the OpenKatana team!
To sum up our view on this, no we will not be supporting other platforms. Today a lot of Quake based games are trying to support both the PSP and PC, on one hand you have a huge behemoth of unlimited power and on the other… Well you don’t have much so you should really either develop for either one or the other otherwise you’re going to find yourself just tweaking things to get them working right which is going to take a huge amount of time and in my view just be a waste. If we do decide to work on a PSP version then we would do that after the release of the PC version so that we can easily shrink everything down so that it works on the PSP more quickly and easily. Anyway thats just my view on the issue…
There are quite a few unlisted changes such as a launcher which Eukos created and some other content changes. Sadly for most of this month I have been unable to work on the engine due to some problems with my computer (which as of the 26th as you can see were pretty much resolved) and then after that we had some problems with the svn… 
Development screenshots can be found here!
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30/11/2011 hogsy
- Made several improvements to particles
+ Performance fixes!
+ Fixed a crash which occured after
current weapon is switched
- Made many changes to the menu
+ Menu will no longer cause a crash if
left open
+ Added in some experimental stuff and
some stability tests (missing texture
in the main menu and scaling texture
during gameplay)
29/11/2011 Eukos
- Added deco_vase, which is seen on a screenshot and
also mentioned in the pre-alpha. Strange thing is
that the ent doesn't appear in any version of e2m3
from the development hardrive.
26/11/2011 hogsy
- Ah it's gewd to be back! Moved QC code into
its own seperate folder so that it doesn't
get mixed up with the new game dll code
22/11/2011 Eukos
- Added powerups into the game (uses placeholder sounds)
- Added axe.md2 and implemented it
- Added vital.md2
21/11/2011 Eukos
- Added acroboost.md2, power.md2, speed.md2 and attack.md2
- Updated crossbow.md2
- Updated shotcycler.md2
20/11/2011 hogsy
- Fixed the attack sound for monster_skeleton
- monster_skeleton will now inflict damage
when attacking
19/11/2011 hogsy
- Did some more work on monster_skeleton
+ Added in missing attack frames
17/11/2011 hogsy
- Did some more work on monster_skeleton
+ Fixed the animations
+ Will now die correctly
16/11/2011 Eukos
- Changed alot stuff in the metamaser code
- Fixed the discus of daedalus
- Began working on the sidewinder
11/11/2011 hogsy
- Added r_nocull which disables model culling
- Models now support transparent textures
- Did some work on directional lighting for
models
11/11/2011 Eukos
- Added glock.md2, it's glock.mdl but with
draw and reload animations (alpha)
10/11/2011 hogsy
- Made some changes to how particles are
handled
+ Any particles that do not have a texure
assigned will automatically be given
a missing texture instead (rather than
using the last texture)
8/11/2011 Eukos
- Added the C4Viz viewmodel
6/11/2011 Eukos
- Added the daikatana (daikatana.qc)
- C4Viz now uses c4ammo.mdl for its bombs
6/11/2011 hogsy
- Fixed a bug with widescreen resolutions
(only for 1600 for now, let me know how
1400 etc fair)
5/11/2011 hogsy
- Added skeleton.qc
5/11/2011 Eukos
- Fixed the C4-Viz
- Began working on the metamaser
- Added one test decoration model to deco_e1
3/11/2011 hogsy
- Fixed skya skybox
2/11/2011 hogsy
- Did some more work on the menu
+ Textures can now be resized correctly
- Missing texture frames will no longer
cause the game to close
1/11/2011 Eukos
- Made some changes to the crossbow qc code
+ Added wet arrow impact sounds
Hello! Yet another blog post, I have nothing to really do right now since I have no outstanding work to do at college so in other words I’ve been sitting around with nothing to do for the past few hours.
Progress on OpenKatana is coming along, I’ll be able to make loads of changes next week which is great since it’s obviously half-term. We’ve done a lot this week, in fact I’d say Eukos has done more than I have, it’s mostly been about fixing bugs this week for me. I had a bit of a go at him a few days ago as I felt the QC code had become really messy but it was really my fault for not laying out any rules for any QC/C work, it’s important to keep all this clean especially when multiple people will need to be able to find their way around all of it. Today we’ll be releasing another private build (build 54 or something) for some people to play around with and well things are just going so smooth right now. We decided to start doing the private testing early since I found a lot of bugs were slipping in without my knowledge and that some computers seem to handle things quite differently, for example I was already aware that md2 shadows might not work correctly but it seems that for some people they have even caused crashes! This is why testing is important I guess. I’ll have to remember this time to list some extra notes concering all this to the readme as quite a few people were terribly confused last release.
Last night before going to bed I did some work on cleaning up some of the old 1997 songs for Daikatana which we’ll possibly be using.
And I also did some work on the first deathmatch map “dm_nem” though still not too keen on showing it as a lot of the lighting is unfinished and I still need to replace a lot of the textures with the newer ones… Ugh.
Just so you know the title has nothing to do with the contents of this post. Lately work on OpenKatana has been slow and bothersome, I recently felt like scrapping our current planned deathmatch level for the game for something a bit more closer to Daikatana’s style but found myself almost grabbing a pillow and screaming into it whenever I look at these older maps, I have to wonder what John Romero must’ve been thinking for most of Daikatana’s development…
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Anyone who thinks that people are too harsh on John Romero for this game should seriously reconsider what they’re saying, he fully knew what the game was like during development and he obviously didn’t care too much (or was too full of himself to care). Both me and Eukos were recently given access to a hard drive which contains just about everything from Daikatana’s development, at first seeing all this made me respect John Romero more but it seems the deeper you go into it the more retarded it gets. They seriously could’ve released the game in 1998 yet they seemed to have spent time fucking around for the majority of their time only to LITERALLY cut things out of the game at the “end” of the games development, it baffles me really, there’s some bugs present in the 1998 build which still exist in the final retail version of the game. Something else that baffles me is that a lot of the major stuff they were adding into the game (procedural textures and a hierarchy system similar to Quake 3 are just two examples) in 1998 were just dropped, the problems with the hierarchy system were never even fixed as they can be seen present in the various screenshots from 1998 to the start of 1999 and well I have no idea why the procedural texturing stuff was dropped but that said I can’t even understand why they started working on it in the first place.
So yesterday we did quite a bit of work on OpenKatana and I’m starting to finish up support for the md2 model format although today I’ll be going over it with a huge broom and some scissors if you get my meaning. Yesterday I began cleaning up the lighting stuff so now that all works for md2 models, shadows should be working fine too (still yet to actually check this but I’m pretty sure it’ll be fine other than the shadow probably being white) and lastly r_showtris shouldn’t cause any problems now. last night I totally realised I had forgotten about the older Daikatana maps and realised I had broken compatibility with those somewhat so tonight I’m planning to quickly go in and fix that (should only take a few seconds) and finally I’m hoping to do some more work on our little “tools” mode for OpenKatana, I’ll go into this some other time but it should be pretty nifty when it’s ready. I feel that the md2 stuff is cleaner than it was now, I went through most of it yesterday although I’m still not happy about there being two functions which could easily be merged, I’ll hopefully get round to sorting this tonight which will mean I can then fix some problems related to the shadows and the tris view.
Right now I feel pretty confident that we’ll make it in time for our deadline (sometime in December).
Anyway that’s that for now.
