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
Tag Archive: Work
Merry Christmas from the OpenKatana team!
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!
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…
Image
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.
