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.

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…

And this is what I’m in the middle of adding…

And this is what I’m hoping to add support for at some point…

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.