Tag Archive: Work


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…
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.

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.

    Some more progress…

    Although nothing interesting.
    Yesterday I finished work on build 61 of TDP, the biggest change being finally getting the flashlight done!

    Changelog:

    18/7/2011 hogsy
    – Added weapon_stdcg
    – Fixed the weapon_flashlight

    Yeah not many changes at all, but we’re getting there. I think tomorrow I might do some work on some textures and new sounds for the mod, also need to remember to finish the icon for the flashlight.

    More changes…

    So progress has been slowly coming along lately and I’ve finished work on build 59.

    11/7/2011 hogsy
    – Made some optimisations for when checking
    for the number of players that are alive
    so that we only check when a player is dead
    and only for the number of players that
    are in the server rather than checking for
    4 players everytime (yes we’ll still only
    have 4 players on a server by default but
    for people that want to have more or even
    less this should make things more optimal)
    + Made some changes so that this can be
    used for the singleplayer mode too
    – Fixed a crash that occured at the start of
    a “team” match due to players being killed
    as they were switching from the unassigned
    team

    Other than that I really don’t have much to say about it. Planning on redoing the camera at some point and finally sorting out a bug that makes aiming a pain in the ass. I’ve also been meaning to sort out the player animations too (currently using npc animations) although it’s not that much of a big deal right now and is pretty much on the bottom of my todo list.

    From now on…

    I’m kinda bored so I think I’ll make more posts on TDP’s progress overtime.
    Today I’ve finished work on build 57 which includes quite a few fixes and changes but most of which I felt no real need to mention them. Earlier today I was also looking at some people’s work whom of which I might ask to work on the soundtrack for the mod but we’ll have to see, I really haven’t been doing too good with getting a soundtrack done myself as I either can’t find the time or I just plain fail at it.

    Build 57′s changelog

    9/7/2011 hogsy [hogsy@oldtimes-software.com]
    - Fixed a bug that caused multiple players
    to be assigned to the first team
    - Fixed a crash when the XP system began
    parsing xpsdata.dat
    - Removed convar hud_healthmode
    - The round will now end when all players
    are dead

    Some rambling…

    So Top Down Project (not the final name obviously) has been in development for quite some time now and we’ve been thinking a lot on how we’ll be doing the hud. I’d personally say we’ve spent a bit too much time thinking about it and I’ve literally ended up implementing two separate styles into the mod. Anyway our mapper recently left us (well no… I guess I kinda kicked him off the team) and I’ve decided to scrap the “glow” idea that he had as it really just seems too bizarre, although it’s quite a unique idea I guess. Anyway I wanted to show some old stuff off and what will probably end up being our final design.

    Here are the “glow” concepts (The one in the bottom left corner represents the players health):
    glow
    glow

    And here’s what we’ll probably be doing:
    final-maybe

    We also talked about having an experience system in the mod so that players could level up and gain new items over time, I’ve finished implementing the base for this but still not sure on whether it will be such an easy job and if it’s really worth the trouble. I’ve recently thought about just letting players get points while playing on a server and spend those points on new weapons when they get to the next level. Anyway early days I guess.
    Now that our mapper has left I’m pretty much doing all the mapping myself again (and I suck at it) so things are going to be very slow…

    EDIT!
    Found another old concept which I actually have to say I really like the look of.
    glow2

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