Quake 2 for DS WIP Update

***wraggster*** · November 25th, 2007, 21:39

simonjhall the excellent coder who has brought an amazing port of Quake to the Nintendo DS has today gave some details of his work of bringing Quake 2 to the DS, heres the details:

Ok, just an update on this (dunno why I'm doing this!)
Thought I'd get off my arse this weekend and check out the Q2 code on my PC. I've not done a lot of work on it in the last six months, besides fix the load times. They were so slow that working on it is completely unproductive, as you've gotta sit around and surf the net for three minutes until you can get it to crash again!

Anyway, here's some info for those who care
- the game now takes about a minute to load (once the program has started)
- the world is now rendered with the DS' 3D hardware; the framerate looks very playable
- I'm an inch away from getting texturing in
- no models, GUI, etc
- the proper palettes are in (hence I can now nearly texture), as are the game fonts
- I've got the RAM usage down to a pretty low level. The existing system required an MMU and (virtually) allocated memory in a crazy way. One problem I had before I sorted this out was that I could *just* squeeze a demo into 32 + 4 megs. After looking into it I realised that 70% of that memory was actually going to waste! The *demos* ought to run in ~10 meg of RAM now.
- it's 8-bit write hell, and I'm gonna have to go strb hunting to sort that out!

No promises, but there's a chance I may actually work on this properly :-)

**Pilot_51** · November 25th, 2007, 22:49

Good to know progress is being made on it. This is my most anticipated DS port. Keep up the great work, Simon!

**bassCore** · November 25th, 2007, 23:56

You can do it, I know it.

**Echo1** · November 26th, 2007, 01:12

Good to hear that you're still working hard on it.

**Sigma83** · November 26th, 2007, 04:55

mmmm, rail gun *drool*

**simonjhall** · November 26th, 2007, 10:14

Texture mapping's in now, lighting to go in shortly...

**fook123** · November 26th, 2007, 11:18

I cant wait to get to try quake 2 on my ds.

**Echo1** · November 26th, 2007, 13:50

If it's going to anything like your port of Quake, it'll rock!

**simonjhall** · November 26th, 2007, 19:48

Lighting's in...this is just too easy :-S
Anyway, I can't decide whether or not to support coloured lighting. The software renderer uses only greyscale lighting, but the OpenGL version of the game used coloured lighting, yet many people complained about it...I can't decide what to do.

EDIT: forgot to clarify: this will ONLY EVER WORK on people's DS if there's a slot-2 RAM card plugged into the bottom slot. At the rate this is going, you'll require a minimum of 16 meg on the card, 32 meg recommended. It's unlikely to fit into the 8MB Opera RAM expansion.