Quake II PSP - Public Beta in three days

Mczonk posted this news:

I added a lot of new stuff to Quake II PSP the last week: Inline models (like doors or ladders) and sky support.

The Quake II archive format (.pak) is now supportet. So you don't have to copy 1000 small files to your memorystick anymore. Just one big .pak file which is much faster transfered.
My current tasks are: clipping, lightmaps, a simple test mod, sound and music player.
The clipping on the psp is a mess. You can see clipping problems in some commercial games as well as in some homebrew stuff. You can read more about psp and clipping on pspdev.org: Thread 1 - Thread 2
My first idea was a brute force polygon subdivision algorihm. Each polygon is divided into 4 new smaller polygons. That's my current version and it is bad. It costs a huge amount of power for subdivision and a huge amount of sceGumDrawArray(GU_TRIANLGES, ..., 3, 0, verts); is called. That's why Quake slows down at the moment.
This implemmentation is not really good because you still have some errors.

This errors can be fixed with a dirty hack. It is just fake but it reduces black spots completly and it is fast. There are still some graphic errors but they are not so eye-catching anymore.

I'm working at a new clipping algorithm for the psp. Which solves the problem and not avoid it. I'll release more information for the developers if I found a good solution. Solve this problem is more important for me than light or sound in Quake because it is a generic psp problem.

Public Beta

In the next three days the first public beta of Quake II PSP will be released. My testers already played around with this beta version. Thanks to all of them for their work.

Features:

Simple test level
All weapons (including bfg, hint: give all)
All items: Quad Damage, etc
Different monsters
Full configurable button layout
Load and Save (little bit buggy)
Missing:

Lightmaps
Sound and background music
Multiplayer
Mod support

The development is a currently a step further. But I only want give away a well tested version.

Awesome News, check out the screens via the coments:

Freakin' Sweet! :D

i cant wait i already have my quake 2 iso waiting im guessing will need the pc version of the game for this

Cool news, as always!

BTW, I might know why you get a clipping problem. I don't know much about coding, only using 3D engines in general. For instance, 3D Studio uses a 3D engine to preview models in realtime. And when I make an object that is too small and put the camera too close, although it should show the object fine, the object is instead severed at the point where the engine can no longer handle it's proximity. The camera seems to cut the object in half like a hot knife through butter. So basically, maybe your level geometry is too small and too close to your camera for the 3D Engine to handle?

This can happen at distances that are too far as well. For instance, if I put a super size object in front of a camera that's too far away, sometimes objects disappear entirely. They just blink out of existence at some point because the engine can no longer calculate how to display them. I guess it has to do with ray transformations between vertex points exceeding the largest numbers the engine can calculate, or something like that.

Since 3D Space is hard to judge because there is no really good fixed scale, it can be hard to see when you are reaching the minimum and maximum size of objects, unless you have some kind of measuring device turned on. If you are having polygons clip for no reason, you might want to consider changing the scale. Video game objects, like those in Unreal for instance, are often made WAY too small. You might just be running into a "minimum" issue that's causing the camera to stop working appropriately.

But again, this is only a guess from my experience using 3D Engines. I don't know anything about coding them. Can you upscale the models in code? Maybe inflate your universe so the models don't clip as easily?