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Messages - Mrakoplaz

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46
nDoom / nDOOM - Work in progress
« on: January 01, 2011, 06:09:12 pm »
First of all, hello everyone! I've been lurking around this community for a while, and now that I finally have something to contribute, decided to join (well, that's the first reason; second reason, I realized my join date would be 1-1-11 if I signed up today ;D).

Anyway, you probably all got excited by the title, so here are some screenshots first, before I bore you with lengthy explanations and details:


Good Lord, this is an eyesore...


Whee! I know how to waste bullets!
(not obvious: Doom actually has a very nice lighting engine - dark corridors are lit up by gunflashes and everything!)



Did I mention I am not very good at first person shooters?



As you can clearly see, there is still quite some work to do. Not only are the wall textures and the status bar messed up, but there's also a few bugs on real hardware that you don't get on the emulator - namely, low contrast, and frequent crashes at startup (while the WAD files are being loaded).

Yes, you read that right! Wad files! This is not a custom implementation of Doom, but a fully functional port! When it's finished, you'll be able to load any official or fanmade .WAD file (including Doom II, Ultimate Doom, Plutonia map pack, etc.) and expect it to work. I'm working from the official 1997 release of the source code and changing as little as possible to ensure this.
Well, that's the theory, anyway - so far, I did not test it with anything except the demo for Doom I, mostly because the Wad files themselves are utterly massive: Four megabytes for the demo, ten for the full version of Doom I, and who knows how many for Doom II (many people do, just not me ;D).

And yeah: The filesize is going to be the real killer for this project. The executable itself, even after GCC optimization, is still 500kb, and the wad files themselves are many times that... fortunately, Texas Instruments have given us around seventeen full megabytes to play with, and you're never going to spend all that space on maths, so you should be able to stuff in at least the demo.

Performance might sound like an issue, but so far, in all my tests, it's been brilliant - even without overclocking, the Nspire has massive amounts of processing power and a large RAM, and I experienced no slowdowns so far (then again, the game's only been in a sort-of playable state half a day, so...). The screen blur is annoying, but tolerable.

If there's demand, I'll put the current build up for download, but before you start asking, you should know that right now, it's barely started working, and I have no idea how stable it will be when playing for longer times. Also, there's no savegame support yet, opening the menu causes the game to crash, same for the automap, since all the textures are screwed up you can't tell doors from walls sometimes, etc etc... a proper version shouldn't take too long though, as I still have a week of holidays left  :)

Perhaps most importantly, I'd like to extend a hearty "thank you" to ExtendeD and the rest of the Ndless team (I can't find much information on who to actually thank... I'd list more names if I knew them, so if you work on Ndless, tell me!), as well as the whole Omnimaga community: Without you, this never would have happened. And I mean that, as sincerely as I can. You guys are pure awesome (games! on a calculator!).
So keep it at!

In conclusion, yeah. Doom on a calculator. Proper Doom too, not a scaled-down remake.
Man, I love this Nspire. This finally outweighs the fact that we had to get it, mandatory, in our school...

PS: To stay clear legally, I'll never distribute the wad files of the full games, just the demo... so, if you want the full game on your calculator, you'll have to go and buy a PC version, then get the wad files from there!

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