Why Quake 3 and not Quake 2?

[q_006]

if they could get Quake 3 on the DC (and yes i know it's a watered down version) which has to be more powerful as an engine than Quake 2 then why can't we port Quake 2?

[typoEDR]

A.) Quake III was ported by a professional team.
B.) They had official Dreamcast tools.
C.) They were paid to do it.

Quake II is possible on DC, just not with the stuff we have now. Quake II was possible on the PSX and N64 (with custom graphics engines), so it's definitely possible on DC. Technically, Soldier of Fortune was built upon the Quake II engine, so in essence, the engine exists. We just can't touch it.

[TheDumbAss]

With Quake3 they had all that typoEDR said as advantages...

Plus they also had access to the source of all the content. With that they went though and edited the maps, models, sounds, music, skins, and textures to work with the amount of ram the DC has to offer. The textures were all converted to a PVR friendly format... one that sat well in the dreamcast video ram.

With Quake2 we could go through and edit the maps, models, skins, and textures to work better with the DC's limited ram... but the edited content couldnt be distributed. We also dont have real access to the .map files if we needed to edit the maps to be smaller or anything like that.

[Imerion]

The Quake 3 conversion really was good work. (Unlike the sloppy Unreal-port). It looks almost as good as on pc and really, just take a look at the first room on the first level in the laddar mode. Few games look that nice! I do not doubt Quake 2 can be done. I have it on my old amiga and it runs at 60 mhz. Shure, it uses a gfx-card but still... the DC could do it easily, if one could edit the data files.

[BlazeHedgehog]

I hate to bump - but what about the prospect of a "conversion" tool? You know, distribute a windows binary that asks for your retail Quake 2 PAK file and runs through and converts all the textures to PVR and then repacks it all again?

Surely that's all that'd be needed, wouldn't it? Maybe a sound converter, too (maybe downsample all the SFX to 11khz).

[typoEDR]

You still have the issues of map sizes, etc. Some maps may have to get split or modified to get it running smoothly on the DC (see Soldier of Fortune on the DC).

[Christuserloeser]

I've always wondered why most professionals never implemented real-time streaming routines while hobbiests like Neil Corlett used something like this for Beats of Rage or others used for all those video players, to get more out of the DC. If you can stream xxx MBytes of video data, why didn't they use an intelligent streaming routine for ShenMue (2) etc to get rid of those annoying loading times?

[BlackAura]

There's not enough spare RAM to use it for anything like Shenmue. To do any kind of background streaming, you need somewhere to put it, and you need to actually read it off the disc. Most commercial Dreamcast games use all the available memory, and they stream music off the CD at the same time.

[Zealous zerotype]

if they could get Quake 3 on the DC (and yes i know it's a watered down version) which has to be more powerful as an engine than Quake 2 then why can't we port Quake 2?

Because you touch your self at night.

[ace]

Don't spam.

[ETR]

Soul Reaver did background streaming, methinks. But Shenmue II definatly had more to hold in RAM...... Hmm.....

[typoEDR]

Soul Reaver did background streaming, methinks. But Shenmue II definatly had more to hold in RAM...... Hmm.....

I think the only reason Soul Reaver does that is solely due to the PSX version being programmed like that.