Just an update

For those who actually read this (and not the main QDS web page or gbadev stuff), here's a quick update on the whole Quake-on-the-DS situ'.

Pre-release one went fantasic and I received an overwhelming response from the community - so thanks everybody for the great comments! Thanks again for all the people who made it possible - the game wasn't the single-handed effort I expected it to be (well, I did do all the coding myself though). I haven't gotten an exact count but at least 20000 people downloaded pre1, which I think is pretty epic.

Next up are a bunch of YouTube vids, in particular the very early one of Quake2 running on my DS. They said it couldn't be done... ;-)

Back on QuakeDS, pre-release two was released towards the end of April. It's hard to believe that pre1 and pre2 are the same game, just with a bit of graphical gloss. I really didn't expect it to take ten weeks for it to happen though! The little things (such as menus) took a lot longer than I really expected.

On Friday I finally got round to cleaning up the network play menus, so I could get the wifi build out for everyone to play...but it's still a bit too early to know how that's gone down though!
There's stuff still left to do in Quake, such as sort out the extended-memory build, for big mods. I haven't decided if I can be bothered to properly finish this though, as I just don't have the time to spend on the game any more.
There are also graphical effects which still need to be finished in the game and the QuakeC virtual machine still needs a lot of work, as this is mostly responsible for the game's crappy framerate.

Next up is Quake2.

Pre-release one

It's out!
http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=12488

Nearly ready...

First up, here's the most recent video I've uploaded:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq94rwfig8s

I'm planning on doing a public pre-release tomorrow, so I'm trying to fix as many things as I can before then...

So, here's the project status:
- game runs, lots of memory free :-)
- most 3D rendering is in there
- brush models are now back after going away for the last few months
- still no textures on models - haven't looked into that yet
- lighting it still broken - need to spend more time on that
- texture co-ords are still off - MUST fix this
- no particle effects yet, but they can't be too hard to get in there...
- sprites got broken when I did the big 3D change a few months back - hopefully won't be too hard to fix
- we've now got sound! Still needs work to get it working properly: it needs to be fully moved to the ARM7 to save me some (code) memory and cycles, but also I want to move the sound storage to VRAM. That way I can do my own memory management and I'll be able to get rid of the pops and clicks during disk access. I'll also be able to get rid of those 3D sound bugs.
- MP3 music is in there, but there are still IPC problems and I'm not too sure of the licensing of the decoder. This prob won't be included in the pre-release build
- now works with r20 of the toolchain (used to use vanilla r19)
- now uses DLDI and libfat, so should hopefully work on all DLDI-supported cards (although I've had weird problems on my M3 Simply)
- no proper networking yet
- proper Quake console has been added, but it's still not finished (too low res)
- lots of code has been moved to fixed-point, but in-game performance still is poor
...that's about it :-D

I wanna say a big thank you to the people who have given me donations and hardware. Teh pwn, teh pwn.

Watch out for some action on gbadev (and maybe dcemu) tomorrow.

That video

Here's that video, as I've been asked to provide a link to it here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIA7VHEBulM

It was originally hosted on my ISP webspace but it "used excessive bandwidth" so now it's on YouTube!

It's still the old version btw, and doesn't show the new super-fast version. As a result it chugs a little in the open areas.

Oh and thanks again to the people who've given me donations. I'm gonna get a Supercard soon. 

73H fr4M3R473 N0 l0n93r 5uX0r5!

Hi, first up I hope everyone had a great Christmas and a new year!
It's back to work tomorrow for some of us :-(

Anyway I nearly quit QuakeDS a few weeks ago - Christmas eve and my CF card decides to die. I go around town looking for cheap cards but of course there are none... When I finally get a couple of them I get home and my gbamp refuses to boot from them! I coax my old CF card back into working again, only to blow another fuse inside my DS! So basically I'd gone home for the Christmas period with nothing to do but Quake and I'd just bricked my DS. Not cool.

But anyway, once I got back in London it was straight onto eBay to get myself the screwdriver to open the thing, then once it arrived there was a fruitless hunt for solder so I could fix the thing. But I'm back up and running now!

So regarding the game progess, all brush models are now textured (mostly) correctly. Some texture co-ordinates don't line up properly but I'm not gonna bother looking into that for a bit. I also just the other day solved the weird texture problems and palette corruption, so it now looks fantastic :-)

One bi-product of fixing the texture weirdness was that it has forced me to do more transformations in hardware, improving the performance. It has also broken the Alias model rendering - something I'm going to work on next. I then spent today completely pulling apart the poly generation/dispatch to use absolutely no floating-point numbers, removing the software clipping (which is a shame) and putting even more transformations into the hardware. But it's been totally worth it and the frame rate is just dynamite :-D