QuakeDS release 3

QuakeDS release 3

October 27th, 2007, 13:07 Posted By: 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

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