Warsow for DC...

Talk about Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, or other DC first person shooting game ports and mods for those games in here.
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Warsow for DC...

Post by Segafreak2 »

.....it runs of the quake 2 engine... ....its a great game.... ....online play.... .....how about it???

http://www.warsow.net
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Post by BlackAura »

Probably not. As is stands, Quake 2 itself doesn't run properly on a Dreamcast because we don't have enough memory to work with. Warsow seems to require a far more powerful system than Quake 2 itself, so it's very unlikely. Certainly not without cutting it down a lot.
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Post by emptythought »

have you taken a jab at porting q2? at least to see what you could come up with?
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Post by BlackAura »

I did try a very, very long time ago. Probably a few months before I released the first version of nxDoom. It apparently ran out of memory shortly after starting up. I didn't bother trying to fix it.

Might be worth trying again at some point, but it'd probably take a lot of work to get it functional.
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Post by emptythought »

probably. thats okay, it probably isnt worth the work anyway.

most pc will play q2 fine i can bet.
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Post by Bertrude »

Wasn't DC Soldier Of Fortune using a modified version of the Quake 2 engine?

That said, the load times were painfully slow and that was a commercial release.
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Post by Morphv2 »

I really dont see how its so hard to successfully port. The game was designed to run on a P-90 with only 4MB of RAM. The DC has a SH4-200 and 16MB of RAM.
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Post by doloop »

http://www.warsow.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8805
http://boob.co.uk/cgi-bin/ikonboard3/ik ... f=1;t=2815
http://www.dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=78635

Some questions about warsow's port on dreamcast hardware.

The answers are negative, DC can't run warsow... but I wanna believe that can :P
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Post by BlackAura »

Morphv2 wrote:I really dont see how its so hard to successfully port. The game was designed to run on a P-90 with only 4MB of RAM. The DC has a SH4-200 and 16MB of RAM.
Erm... No. The minimum requirements for Quake 3 are a P-90, and 16MB of RAM. It was actually designed to run on systems far more powerful than that. Think a P-200 with 32MB of RAM and a fast 3D card.

CPU speed's not an issue - the Dreamcast runs Quake 2 a tad faster than a P-90 did, because Quake 2 was designed around PC processors, and contained lots of hand-optimised assembly in the renderer. If we had a good hardware accelerated renderer working, it would hit 60FPS easily - the Dreamcast's graphics hardware is easily capable of handling Quake 2. Software rendering is a bit slow, but at least it works.

On the RAM side, that 16MB figure assumes that you have an operating system underneath you that provides virtual memory. Think of what happens with a typical PC game when you don't have enough memory. When you run out of memory, the operating system starts using the hard drive to hold data that's not been used in a while. The result is that the game runs slower, but it still runs.

On a Dreamast, when you run out of memory the game crashes. That 16MB figure is what the game needs to run acceptably - most of the data will be in memory at any given time, so it won't need too much hard drive thrashing. 24MB is enough to fit everything Quake 2 needs in memory at once (although large chunks of the operating system may be paged out).

If that weren't bad enough, Quake 2 actually allocates way more memory during loading. Memory usage during level loading could easily spike to 32MB, which is fully twice what the Dreamcast has.

All these problems are, of course, fixable. Using a hardware renderer would alleviate the memory problems somewhat, it's possible to optimise the memory allocations during loading, and generally streamline everything. It just takes a lot of time and effort to do it.
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Post by doloop »

but if there's a swap mem problem... ok, when u overtake the 16megs limit the game crash...

If i take the linux for dreamcast and a I create a partition to my PC harddisk, then I set a Network File System, I can swap there lol :P

I can recompile warsow-linux x86 to warsow-linux for sh4 platform... if somedoby change x86 assembly code to sh4 assembly :D

But ethernet connection is too slow...

So: Build an HD interface for the dreamcast :D
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Post by Morphv2 »

BlackAura wrote:
Morphv2 wrote:I really dont see how its so hard to successfully port. The game was designed to run on a P-90 with only 4MB of RAM. The DC has a SH4-200 and 16MB of RAM.
Erm... No. The minimum requirements for Quake 3 are a P-90, and 16MB of RAM. It was actually designed to run on systems far more powerful than that. Think a P-200 with 32MB of RAM and a fast 3D card.
If that weren't bad enough, Quake 2 actually allocates way more memory during loading. Memory usage during level loading could easily spike to 32MB, which is fully twice what the Dreamcast has.

I was talking about quake 2 requirements, not quake 3.

I have also wondered if PowerVR OpenGL (an option in the PC version of Q2, for PVR based graphics hardware) would run on the Dreamcasts PowerVR2. That would eliminate nasty Software Rendering.

Also, something as simply as 7zip compression could fix the memorry issue, and the Dreamcast has the RAM, just allocated elsewhere. 16MB main, 8MB video, 2MB sound. If you actually utilize it all, thats 28MB, according to your calculation, plenty.
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Re:

Post by HomerCIDAL »

doloop wrote:http://www.warsow.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8805
http://boob.co.uk/cgi-bin/ikonboard3/ik ... f=1;t=2815
http://www.dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=78635

Some questions about warsow's port on dreamcast hardware.

The answers are negative, DC can't run warsow... but I wanna believe that can :P
If the DC can run Q3A, then it can definitely run Warsow. The game is based on the Quake 2 engine which should be able to run in the DC architecture. The real problem is with the memory constraints. PC's don't have this problem when you have systems running with video cards that have more memory than the DC has total. Maybe someone could look at the Q3A source code for the DC version if it's available and see how they hacked down the size of some of the .bsp files and the texture sizes (lower resolution images) to make it fit on the DC.

I have been mapping for Q2 for almost 7 years now and I would love to see a Q2 based project come to the Dreamcast.

Besides all of this, I don't know how anyone can say Q2 would never run on the Dreamcast. Has everyone forgotten that Q2 was actually released for the PS1? How much memory was in the PS1? It might not have been the prettiest of game ports, but it actually ran pretty well on that system even though it only had 2MB system memory and 1MB video RAM.
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Re:

Post by Christuserloeser »

Bertrude wrote:Wasn't DC Soldier Of Fortune using a modified version of the Quake 2 engine?
Yep, I think it was.
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Re:

Post by linlinlol »

Morphv2 wrote:I have also wondered if PowerVR OpenGL (an option in the PC version of Q2, for PVR based graphics hardware) would run on the Dreamcasts PowerVR2.
The answer is no


Also Warsow uses Qfusion, which is WAY beyond Q2's requirements.
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Re: Re:

Post by Morphv2 »

Christuserloeser wrote:
Bertrude wrote:Wasn't DC Soldier Of Fortune using a modified version of the Quake 2 engine?
Yep, I think it was.
It was based off of the Ghoul engine which was basically Q2e with some code streamlining and support for hit-zone specific damage and effects.
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