Merry Christmas from the OpenKatana team!
Tag Archive: 2011
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.
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
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!
12:44 – hogsy: The censoring on YouTube is starting to get on my nerves
12:44 – hogsy: Why is it that I can watch videos of Gaddafi’s body
12:45 – hogsy: Yet I can’t watch a video of Saints Row 3 just because it apparently has “obscene” looking women in it?
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.
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.
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…
