Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Quake II Update

I think the graphics work is now complete. Better water warp remains outstanding, but it's not so much an issue in QII as it is in Q1 (I half suspect that the QII qbsp may do some slightly more intelligent stuff with splitting water surfs on nodes). There are still some places where the poor quality warp is noticeable but you really have to go looking for them. In any event, unless a good solution presents itself quickly enough it's not something I'm going to worry about here, although I do want an eventual solution nonetheless.

Coming up next is some work on the sound code. I've already stripped out the Primary Sound option (although you can do it, DirectSound does not advise writing to the Primary Buffer - it's much the same as writing to the front buffer in graphics) and upgraded the support to DirectSound 8. I need to remove some of the remaining scaffolding around this, then consider removal of the wave only option. As with DirectQ, I'm of the opinion that wave only was a good idea back in the mid/late 90s when DirectSound wasn't yet a mature and established standard and when there wasn't any proper driver certification available. Time has moved on since then, and a sound card that doesn't support DirectSound is more likely to be badly broken than anything else.

I have some Managed DS code for setting effects on buffers so I may try to hack in a cheesy underwater gurgle effect. I tried this in DirectQ but all I had to work from was the SDK docs, and it didn't work. I'll see how it goes.

I'm also chewing over the possibility of removing the joystick code. I'm in two minds about this one though owing to the fact that there is no real gain in simplification from doing so.

1 comments:

xaGe said...

..Then leave it. ;-) ..Once in a while I get the urge to take out my Panther XL and rock it old SKOOL! =)


"the fact that there is no real gain in simplification from doing so."