Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Re-establish contact with ground unit and paint us a clean target.

What is - I think - the last code change has just gone in. All this one does is just center the window properly when starting up in a windowed mode instead of relying on the vid_xpos and vid_ypos cvars. I don't know if that's going to be to everyone's taste, but you can always manually move the window after startup anyway. No big deal.

What's going to follow now is a few more days of playing Quake II in debug mode to see if any gremlins fall out. This - together with the SDA demos - was a most useful exercise, and definitely helped to root out some bugs.

Then we're onto release. The engine's going to be called DirectQII, but then you already knew that, eh?

I'm not certain if there are going to be any QII releases beyond this one. The objective was to use the knowledge I'd gained over the past half year to build a proper fixed-functionality D3D app in a codebase that's broadly compatible with Quake but that has some of the basic stuff implemented in a more sensible manner, and that has now been achieved, so it's back to DirectQ itself shortly.

I've established a good list of items that are scheduled to be ported over to the main DirectQ codebase, and which will involve some pretty major rewrites, but that's a good thing. Although 1.6.3 got things to a stage where I was very happy with the end result, there remained a lot of cruft left behind from the original OpenGL codebase, as well as from version 1.0, where - to be honest - I really had no idea what I was doing. Evolving beyond 1.6.3 would involve building on a foundation of this cruft, so it's a good time to strip back and get something more solid in before moving forward again. So that's going to be the main focus of 1.7. I'm going to let the ideas percolate in my mind for a few more days before mentioning any specifics.

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