QuakeDS release 3

[simonjhall]

Hi everybody

It's surprisingly one day short of a year ago now I messed around with the Quake source "just for a weekend" and decided to show my findings in this thread:
http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?p=107263#107263
...however I didn't expect it to take this long to complete!

The game is now feature-complete, aside from ad-hoc wifi play (which is in the game but disabled) so I figure it's time to release it! I hope you enjoy it - it's taken an insane amount of work and the help of dozens of people to get here.

For full info, visit http://quake.drunkencoders.com

Notable changes:

* The game now supports the RAM available from certain slot-2 flash cards in order to obtain near-perfect compatibility with Quake mods and total conversions. Everything I've tried works correctly, however some mods overload the DS' GPU and stuff starts to disappear...
* Rendering performance has improved by ~30%
* In game performance has improved by ~20%
* All graphical effects are now drawn, included animated sprites (for explosions), and particles (eg for blood)
* 99% of texture maps are rendered correctly
* The sky box is now rendered correctly
* GUI corruption has been fixed
* Animated skins are now supported
* The on-screen keyboard has been improved
* Eight user-configurable quick-access touch buttons have been added
* Pen sensitivity has been fixed and view snap disabling a la GLQuake has been added
* QuakeC compatibility has been enhanced
* Command line (through qdsopts.txt) is now easier
* Sound corruption has been fixed
* Console corruption has been fixed
* Cut scenes and 'intervals' have been cleaned up
* 'freeing precaches' bugs have been fixed
* Improved support for the second Quake Mission Pack: Dissolution Of Eternity
...and too many other fixes to list

Downloads from here:
http://quake.drunkencoders.com/downl...w_to_play.html

The slot-2 build (aka the EXRAM build) is not the silver bullet that many of you hoped it would be. The #1 issue is the poor performance of this memory - when overclocked, this memory seems to have 4-5x the latency of the already-slow internal DS memory and this will of course slow down the game. I've spent many months hiding this latency, but you can still see it on some heavy levels. Quake's random access patterns to memory don't help, neither does the size of the data cache.
Also when using this build I would *highly* recommend using a slot-1 card in conjunction with it where you keep your data files (make sure you patch it with your slot-1 DLDI driver). To know more about the EXRAM build please see http://quake.drunkencoders.com/exram.html
If you're too lazy to read it, don't forget that you can hold 'R' during startup to force detection of your flash card and overclock your RAM :-)

Anyway, a big thanks go out to all the people who have given me technical help, tested the game, donated money, donated hardware or just general support :-D

Legal: I take no credit for the development of Quake, that all goes to the guys at id Software. I also claim no copyright, trademark etc. Again, all work, copyrights, trademarks are owned by them.

Simon

BTW: A lot of my hardware disintegrated in the last month or so. Gonna need donations of new stuff if I'm gonna finish the ad-hoc build... :thumbup:

Example config file in the downloads section or at available at:
http://quake.drunkencoders.com/downloads/config.cfg

Download and Give Feedback Via Comments

[slaanesh]

Just tried it. Absolutely awesome! I'm amazed at how good this has turned out.

[souLLy]

Just tried it. Absolutely awesome! I'm amazed at how good this has turned out.

x2, this is awesome. Great, great stuff Simonjhall

[XDelusion]

So the RAM on the EZ 3 in 1 does infact work for games like this. I can't tell you how many people told me it would be impossible to use such devices to give extra RAM to games such as this. Yet here we are with a game that supports it no doubt...

...maybe not perfect, but it's working to a degree and should be effective on some less intensive games or apps I would think.

Great work! I'm still trying to find double jump, but outside of that I'm perfectly pleased!

Oh ya, Barrel explosions no longer explode, but that's no biggy.

[iso jussi]

Can anyone tell me if this works correctly on M3 CF?

I have heard that the DLDi file of M3 CF on DLDIwiki "fails read aligment test". Could I play this not even patching the file? Or would it work by patching it with eg. Gba Movie Player's DLDI file?

[Sir_Voe]

Yay, bloody giblets! :thumbup:
This is a shining example of great DS development IMO. Thanks for sticking with it Simon .

[mr game porter]

WTF?? the last version worked perfectly on my g6real 2 gb, but this one doesent, it starts, then i shows the black screen with white text. but it just say: fat_initialasing....and that's it nothing more!

[XDelusion]

Aghh, got touch screen going thanks to the info on the Quake DS page! Wonderful!

[RamZee]

First the good news, nice inprovements and it's good to see this 3rd release (adhoc is what I'm still waiting for).

Now the bad.
The plain quakeds_271007 build can't run on my M3 Simply (should be the fastest version?) with my M3 Lite plugged in even though it shouldn't be using it?

...
Init ARM7...done
ARM7 is initialised
Host_Init, memory base at 0x021050c0
2.9 megs of memory available 15.66 kb free, 21.00 kb needed not enough memory for info section!

If I unplug the M3 Lite it runs fine as does quakeds_exram_271007 with it in (using the shareware pak file).

It's a worthy update, I'm just disappointed that it didn't work first time for me like the previous versions.

Edit: I've found that if I hold L (bypasses qdsopts.txt) as quakeDS loads the plain build will run with the M3 Lite plugged in. The chance to press L happens so quickly you need to know what's coming next when you load the game. Is there anyway round this?

[sethsez]

view snap disabling a la GLQuake has been added

This is the one feature I was hoping would be added, and sure enough, here it is!

This is a fantastic port and you've done an amazing job getting it to this point. Thanks so much for this!