[ongoing] Descent DXX-Rebirth AGA (v0.57.3)

[arti]

Good work mate !
Can I try it with NetSurf?

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by arti

Good work mate !
Can I try it with NetSurf?

Hiya,

I don't think it would help with Net surf as it's it's only 8bit and only full screen.

[arti]

Why not try?

Look, here is NetSurf in 256 colours

Some extra work would be needed for os3 but it's possible.
NS has 8bit plotters.

[mihcael]

Sorry for off topic, but in one of your threads you appeared to invite suggestions for future ports, how about Unreal Tournament. Doom and Quake2 predate my interests in PC's, UT is right on the money. Took a minute to google it and appears to be open source and not requiring 3d hardware.

[NovaCoder]

I think I'll take a break after I've finished porting Descent 1 & 2 to AGA, then if I have the energy maybe I'll look at porting DukeNukem 3D (which would be my 2nd attempt).

I think UT would be too much for AGA, even Quake 2 is a bit of a struggle to be honest.

[arti]

But at least it will work on AGA

[NovaCoder]

Project updated:

Been pulling my hair out recently, I couldn't get the colors to render correctly in 8bit mode. The port uses SDL and has an 8 bit back buffer and a 32 bit display, when you set the display to 8bit you get those nasty colors (see my attachments above).

I was getting the same kind of display with both my hacked AGA SDL and with the original 68k SDL, I asked about it on the Rebirth forums but I don't think they knew what I was on about.

Anyway it's all a bit bizarre (I find the whole SDL library very bizarre in fact) but I managed to get it working right by doing this:

void gr_flip()
{
     SDL_Rect src, dest;
     int i;



     dest.x = src.x = dest.y = src.y = 0;
     dest.w = src.w = canvas->w;
     dest.h = src.h = canvas->h;




    SDL_BlitSurface(canvas, &src, screen, &dest);

    // nova - update palette.
    SDL_SetColors(screen, canvas->format->palette->colors, 0, 256);

    SDL_Flip(screen);
}

What extra line of code does is take the 'current' palette that is in the canvas (kind of like a back buffer) and sets it to the display palette, this now gives the correct colors at last

Obviously I don't want to do this each frame (too expensive), I'll just have to mark the palette as dirty in the Descent code and then just update the colors that have changed (that's what I also did in my ScummVM port).

I'll attach a new screen shot, looking much more like it now

[NovaCoder]

Another little update:

Got the SDL keyboard and mouse handling working now (not done the joystick yet).

I've noticed that it doesn't seem to be saving my config changes, not sure what is going on there yet as I thought my file handling code was 100% complete.

Got some funny colors with the palette still at the start screens but it comes good for the game itself (again, not sure why yet).

Next up will be to look at maybe adding the AHI sound to my SDL AGA hack, I can also feel a video of it running on my 1200 coming soon

I'd say we are getting there, I think my SDL library is probably at about 60% complete now and the game must be at least 90% there.

I hope the Descent 2 is very similar to this code (and from what I can see, it does look pretty much the same), that means I'll be able to do a double port (Descent 1 & 2 to AGA).

I'm also going to send my AGA SDL lib to Arti to see if he can use it to create a quick and dirty port of NetSurf 3 for AGA.

[squidbass]

That's great news NovaCoder! I used to love Descent - it was the first game I played after I got bored with Doom hehe

[NovaCoder]

Ok I've done a quick video to show it running on my 1260.

[ Show youtube player ]

Obviously lots of work still to do on this puppy but at least it's running, that's a good start

[tolkien]

Want to play it nooooow!

[NovaCoder]

[ Show youtube player ]

[Big-Byte]

This is pretty amazing really! Its such a shame you didnt get into Amiga's until after you had moved away. We could have had a lot of fun swapping tutorials on assembler programming and 3d techniques.

[NovaCoder]

Yep, that's right John, you're meant to be the Amiga coder....not me!



Check out my AGA Quake 2 port, now that is pretty cool

[Reido]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

[ Show youtube player ]

Very cool!

[NovaCoder]

Another update, getting somewhere but still lots do do yet :P


[ Show youtube player ]


TODO: Get sound working, fix up bugs, make faster, drink beer.

[NovaCoder]

Ok well I've been drinking lots of beer but not doing much else

Actually I did manage to get AHI sound working (copied over from the existing RTG 68k SDL). I did intend to make it a bit faster by using an interrupt based sound engine but the SDL library is not designed for it and it would take lots of work

In theory I could write my own external sound engine using Quake 2 AGA as a basis but to be honest I just don't have the time so this SDL based sound engine will have to do. The performance difference wouldn't be that big anyway (< 5%).

TODO:

1) Still a bit slow, it looks like it's performing way too many palette changes so if I can stop it doing that it will help
2) There's still a couple of little bugs (like recoverable crashes) with the demo system so that will need to be looked at
3) I need to add joystick support (which I'll just copy from the RTG SDL)


Update:

I think I've found what's slowing it down, it's the same kind of thing you see a lot with these modern ports. As they are targeted at really powerful computers the authors don't really care about wasted CPU cycles. I can see that this port is sending pointless window redraw events all over the place which are triggering the palette updates (even though the palette hasn't actually changed!).

[NovaCoder]

BETA 4 video now online, as an added bonus we now have sound!

[ Show youtube player ]

It's still performing too many screen updates, I'll need to fix that to increase the speed.

I should probably look into including Vorbis support for the music playback and I still haven't added joystick support.

It will either take me 2 more weeks to finish this or 2 more years, not sure which.

[tolkien]

It sounds good. Let's drink some beer!

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by tolkien

it sounds good. Let's drink some beer!