Category: OpenKatana


Who’s dat cat?

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.

Mumble mumble…

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.

OpenKatana progress…

So we’ve been working on OpenKatana for about two months now and during that time I’d say quite a lot of progress has been made, I think I should try to keep this blog updated a little more with what we’re currently doing or any other related information but I really doubt there’s much interest in the project. Today I’ll be starting work on build 45 of OpenKatana (or will be when I get home) and there’s quite a lot of things all being bashed into the engine, I’m cleaning it up as best I can but I feel I keep on moving onto something else half-way through working on something and then I end up just leaving it half finished. It’s a bit hard when you’re the only programmer and mapper on the team though that said Eukos said he’ll work on some qc code but I wish he’d take a look at what’s in the todo list, he keeps on telling me he’s going to add loads of new stuff or redo something which gets me worried a bit. I’ll list the major changes so far…

  • IDP2 (.md2) support
  • DKPO (.mdl) support
  • External texture support for models
  • Support for Daikatana pre-alpha (30) maps
  • Limited support for Half-Life (30) maps
  • Full colour particles (no palette limitations)
  • And this is what I’m in the middle of adding…

  • DKSP (.spr) support
  • LMPO (.mdl) support
  • Mirrors
  • Texture based particles
  • Support for external scripts (for maps and sprites)
  • A replacement for QuakeC
  • And this is what I’m hoping to add support for at some point…

  • Detail textures
  • Support for Quake 2 maps
  • Support for Daikatana maps
  • Full support for Half-Life maps
  • There were some other things too but I can’t quite remember but anyway you can probably see that there’s a lot of work to do. I’m hoping at some point to find someone willing to make a soundtrack for OpenKatana although I’m still trying to decide on a style of music, personally I think if Daikatana was more serious and had a more atmospheric soundtrack the game would’ve seemed so much interesting to play and that’s something I’m considering aiming for when we get to doing the singleplayer story but the focus first is the multiplayer and I think that deserves a more fast pace soundtrack somewhat similar to the music in Quake 2 or Daikatana.

    What is OpenKatana?

    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.

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