DescentBB

The screen shot code doesn't work on every hardware - don't ask me why. I have checked it 200 times and I am clueless about this. The glReadPixels() function fails for whatever reason.

You should see the screenshots taken from my X800 XT - your's is marvellous in comparison.

I am making screenies with Fraps - the free version already has all you need.

Ehhhhhhhh....o.O my weapon shots are making colors ingame get all weird. works fine otherwise (compatibility mode, win2k or 98)

Hehe, the perspective had changed allright since the previous version...but it was not -exactly- like in descent II.

Now the reticle is ok I guess...but lol, have you noticed that you shoot from a different angle when you toggle between cockpit and normal view

This means, in the very beginning first level when you fire your lasers, the door in front if you opens.

But if you switch to the cockpit view, you are suddenly firing at the ceiling. The view feels kind of tilted too...Is't there any way to obtain the original FOV and croshair calculation from the real Descent II?
If not...i guess this is as close we'll get.

But this is an easy one, could you add a transparency effect to missele explosions too?

Fusion seems to be charging too quickly, or at least it hits the period where it starts taking shields too quickly.

I've tried out the non opengl reticle. A partial red sprite with gray edges appeared a few pixels above the reticle when I fired the lasers.

This does noet always happen, it very hard to make it occur on purpose...I was able to make it happen by jumping directly to level 3 from the menu. When I try this several times, the glitch tends to dissapear. It could be related with resolutions above 640*480 but I'm not sure.

Add the D1 Fusion.

Another suggestion.
I know about the other renderer being disabled. To be honest, the current renderer may be sufficient for D2 lightning. Have you tried to decrease the saturation of the lightning colour.

lasers: Purple(not that saturated, same goes for white) lightning looks as good as it gets with the current lightning system, Green and red (very saturated colours) make some areas...pitch black!

I think this is caused by exagerated saturation of the lightcolour for the current lightning system.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to desaturate a colour to let every colour have a maximum saturation.

Actually I'm not sure if the pitch black lightning effect is caused by saturated lightning colours...but it's a guess that might be the solution.

Gregster2k wrote:Ehhhhhhhh....o.O my weapon shots are making colors ingame get all weird. works fine otherwise (compatibility mode, win2k or 98)

What 'weird'? Can you post a screen shot?

3803,

the cockpit perspective now is exactly like in D2 - I've tested that. I need to fix the firing direction however. Crap.

Green and red lack one or even two color components, so even at very high brightnesses they can darken white lit areas. I have decided to leave it that way, because I wanted the color effect. Otherwise, bright areas would blend over the color - which would admittedly be more natural.

Hey diedel instead of changing the direction the lasers fire, change where the reticle is drawn. Just an idea.

Lehm,

the problem is that the cockpit takes away the lower third of the screen, so the reticle was moved up 1/3 of the screen height in the original D2 to have it in the middle of the cockpit 'window', which makes absolutely sense. Now I don't know how to move the shots up w/o changing the angle they're fired at. Grrrr.

Hi, did you notice this Texture bug when playing Descent 1 Missions with D2X-W32?


(this is supposed to be the first Level)

Another thing that wasn't nice was the fact that the program cashed after finishing the first Level of D1.

The textures look like D2 hasn't found descent.pig. Textures are fine here. The crash I could fix.

1.48:
flickering dynamic lights

Cockpit view, in real descent2 view is moved a bit back and slightly down (possibly the view might be title slightly up/down too), in d2x, I THINK slightly back only(it's like zoomin in and out when switching)

I could be that you are trying it to fix it on sight?
Was the cockpit code removed in the icculus stadium?

Sry if I'm sounding a bit complaining, I'm just wondering really You still can do whatever you feel like.

Neumaennl wrote:Hi, did you notice this Texture bug when playing Descent 1 Missions with D2X-W32?

I have that same effect.

Diedel wrote:The textures look like D2 hasn't found descent.pig. Textures are fine here.

Hmmm, it looks like the D1 textures, hence the "Alpha" sign, just the wrong palette. Removing the descent.pig file from the directory, texture replacement with D2's textures works OK, except D2x complains about not having the descent.pig file after levels.

3803,

what do you mean with 'flickering dynamic lights'? I cannot read other ppl's minds, at least not at this distance, ya know?

Re cockpit view:

This was disabled in the icculus stage of the project (where else - do you believe I remove working stuff?). What I currently did was to simply move the reticle up and change the firing direction appropriately. Obviously the firing angle is wrong now. I know how to move the view back, but not how to move the view axis up.

Edit: I have managed to fix firing angle in cockpit view.

Coloured light flicker. Dynamic Lights is a term I got from the Doomsday Project. The term stands for any lights that are not static (vertex shading, pixel shading, this system probably too but I'm not that sure)

Actually there's a dead D2 source project from 2001 based on the Doomsday Engine. I can't remember if it had anything to do with Icculus, but I guess so.

Cockpit. Only the left laser is fired here.(edit: occasionally, the right one is fired too) The lasers firing angle or origin shouldn't be changed really since that would somewhat effect network games and it's not really the way to do it.By the way,The resulting laserhit still differs for now. Despite viewangle and the slight transformation of the viewpoint the lasers should just go right through the reticle because of right calculations considering the viewpoint and viewangle, reticle positioning, and probably other stuff you can not have any knowledge of without the original code...I can't determine from you post if the original (pre icculus) code has been removed or 'disabled'.

But we'll see.

And by the way, the sound issue doesn't matter that much since it's rather hard to distinguish 22050Khz on these laptop speakers.

v1.3.50+ does the firing angle stuff right in the cockpit view. I couldn't observe only a single laser being fired.

Edit: Oops! Quite frequently only one laser is fired, or the vulcan doesn't work, or you cannot fire flares in cockpit view! Reason: Uninitialized variable.

Yeah, in my case right laser showed up very rarely...I noticed it showing up only once in the second level while turning.

Anyway, I'm off to test the new version on this computer to see if 22k sound is ok with an sb live.

Thanks in advance.

edit: done testing. resulting hit when firing is still higher when cockpit view is active. Try toggling between them. The resulting hit IS indeed "correct": in the center of the reticle.

Surprisingly I had sound probs with the sb live as well (crackling noise) while with my soundmax chip in the laptop i rather have the impression that the sound is a bit "echoed".
The following may be related to the sound problem: When finishing level 2 (possibly any level) a lot of countdown beem sounds (as in Bwèèh, Bwèèh, Bwééh etc...I love that part;)) were skipped and/or irregular. Maybe too many sounds are played at once, possibly because of a bug...I'm just guessing here.
The doomsday engine I mentioned had a sound debug thing in it...Maybe something like that could help to resolve descent2 sound problems? (allthough I can live with it for now.)

A few things I've noticed: lighting looks so much better on the nvidia geforce 2 here. The blending does never result in pitch black colours. With my ATI fire gl 2 (based on ati 9600 from what i have read in the bios) lightning can get really hidious but I don't think there's something to do about it.

the only one bug i have found lately is when a forcefield is deactivated the active sound still remains.

fusion charge and overcharge viusal indicator effect not present anymore

I was enjoying that the fusion ship effect was capped (@ 40 but 60 can work, 100-150 is crazy mad skillz), until it was removed. I can use it either way but it was nice using the fusion and effect the way it was intended on a 33Mhz system (yes folks that is what D1/D2's minimum requirements were based on)

Hi again, I'll be less ennoying this time because...I solved the sound problem

I do not have any experience programming in c but I managed to compile your sources. First thing I thought was the audio buffer...I increased the audiobuffer to 1024: #define SOUND_BUFFER_SIZE 1024 in digi.c

768 still had some glitches, 1024 seems to be ideal.

When using 2048 in 22Khz, things are still somewhat OK...in 11Khz you have a big delay.

My guess is that you can safely divide the buffersize by two if you use half the samplerate because 512 runs fine here at 11khZ, so 512 for 11Khz and 1024 for 22Khz.

The current delay at 11Khz should be the same like 22Khz with a 1024 buffer, so no harm done but note that things could get a bit delayed when you use a 1024 buffer at 11Khz!

Hope it works for everyone

bubbalou,

Now I have completely turned off the fusion charging overdraw? D'oh.

3803,

for somebody w/o any programming experience you have come remarkably far. Thanks for the hint. I will have D2X-W32 set the sound buffer size according to the chosen sample rate (11K -> 512 Bytes, 22K -> 1024 Bytes, 44K -> 2048 Bytes).

Me thinks that the firing angle in the non-cockpit view is not quite correct. In the cockpit view you are hitting exactly the center of the reticle.

I do know some vb.net and i used to keep me busy with quickbasic as a kid, tough...but programming in c seems a lot less organised compared to that...

Anyway in the first level at the starting position you should hit the door in front of you (see dos version)
This is only the case in regular view. you can actually feel there is something wrong if you've played the dos version with cockpit a lot.

Commenting out the following in laser.c (possibly something you have added) resulted in the resulting shot being correctly like it was in the first version with the cockpit:

if (Cockpit_mode == CM_FULL_COCKPIT)
vm_vec_scale_add2 (&LaserDir, &m.uvec, LASER_OFFS);

note that there is another similar occurance of this. be sure to comment out this exact line. Possibly it breaks other stuff but I think the answer is somewhere in this direction.

If you ask me, this is the way to go, now the fov should be adjusted only, without the laser direction being influenced...I just can't find out how.

A D2X remark is still there:
if (Cockpit_mode == CM_FULL_COCKPIT || Cockpit_mode == CM_REAR_VIEW) {
hud_message(MSGC_GAME_FEEDBACK, "Cockpit not available in GL mode");
Cockpit_mode = CM_FULL_SCREEN;

I don't see any of cockpit switching code...Maybe something should be set there to do dings correctly. I"ve tried to set cockpit mode to cm_full_cockpit again, but nothing happened. It might be overridden by something else.

The only thing you need to do when switching to cockpit mode is pitch the ship's nose down once so that you are facing the proper direction again. From then on, everything works fine. If I knew more about the 3D stuff in D2, I'd build that into D2X-W32.

So basically what you are saying is not quite correct. When switching to cockpit view and back, the pitch gets changed a little due to a change of perspective or view angle so to speak, but that's all, and that doesn't take away from cockpit view and cockpit view angle working.

Btw, the message about availability of cockpit mode in the OpenGL version doesn't appear when I switch to cockpit mode, so wtf.

Edit: Heck, I do know enough 3D math ... well, at least I can copy&paste code doing what I need ... switching between cockpit and fullscreen view will now preserve the view angle!

I knew I couldn't post there. That's why I wondered where my bug report was...in the update notification section of course!

Sorry, I didn't meant to do that.

ok, accepted.

The cockpit code was already in D2X - the proper reticle displacement stuff and view angle fix wasn't. D2X must have been changed very much during the initial port to OpenGL.

I took care of it 3803

Hi,

First and once again: thanks for your work !

After playing around some time, here are some remarks concerning D2X-Win32:

1) Keyboard QWERTY:
Like for all Descent official releases the keyboard is only seen as QWERTY whatever the windows setup specifies.
(i use an AZERTY one)

2) Keyboard at level startup:
During a level startup, if i press a key it is not taken into account when the level starts.

3) Primary weapon autoselect:
"Allways autoselect" doesn't seem to work for Primary weapons.

Hoping you'll can have a look at these few remarks.

Afaik D2X doesn't read the windows keyboard setup. Maybe that can be changed somewhere in the SDL, but I don't know how. I'll take a look into that.

D2X-W32 will delete all buffered keyboard input when starting a level or respawning for two frames to avoid erratic ship movement on certain occasions.

I could not observe any problems with automatic auto-select of primaries.

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.
About the keyboard type, no problem, i am used to it.
It could be just a nice improvement.
Do what you can, when you can, if you can.

Concerning the primary autoselect, here is an example (toggle "Allways autoselect" is selected):
In "Minerva3", using the default selection, the gauss cannon is the weapon with the second highest priority.
There are two of them in this level.
Take the first one, then a plasma.
Shoot with gauss until it becomes empty: the plasma is selected => OK
Then take the second gauss, as i remember it should have been automatically selected and it is not the case.

Maybe did i do something wrong or missunderstand a toggle somewhere.
If so, sorry for my remark.

No need to apologize. You are very polite indeed. I am not that sensitive, and usually I follow bug reports even if they're given in a rather impolite manner (I will rather comment on the tone then. )

I will take another look, maybe your observations are right - I did not test the feature that way. Hmm ... as I think about it: I am not sure about this, but I don't think D2 switches back to a better weapon if there is ammo available for it again. Isn't it so that D2 only selects another (better) weapon if you pick it and don't have it already, or your current weapon runs empty?

I've played a lot d2 and i immediately remarked this "little" thing.

To be sure, i've justed made a test with "Descent II Win95.exe" and it does reselect an empty primary weapon if you grab a new one.

This is interesting. I have just tested with D2 W95: Gauss had highest prio, so I grabbed a Gauss, shot until it was empty -> Fusion was auto-selected, grabbed another gauss + ammo -> Fusion was kept. I double checked the primary priority list.

2^9

MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR MULTIPLAYER BUG

FIXED: took you long enough to acknowledge it!!!

Hm ... I need to find another way to move the reticle up in cockpit view ... and the way is to increase vertical FOV ... but how ...

thinkydithinkydithinkydithink ...

BINGO!

LOL

D3Hack from PD has a few bugs that he's experienced in this thread. My apologies if you've fixed them in previous versions.

Hello,

I've just remade some tests ... and you're right.
Maybe was i drunk yesterday when i tested this under D2W95 ...

But, even now, this behaviour sounds strange to me.

Sorry for having eaten some of your precious time on this.

scarabee,

it's me who decides who is allowed to eat away on my precious time. I appreciate every bug report, even if (in rare case) it turns out to be wrong, because they help me to fix D2X-W32. So thanks for your input.

Feel free to post bug reports or suggestions if you have any.

D2 W32 seems really near perfect to me know! All the "real" bugs (in single player...I don't do multiplayer) seem to be gone and it has probably all the features it should have.

I'll I can come up with are minor bugs now:
-deactivated forcefield still makes a sound. (allready submitted by someone else)
-missile explosions are not allways transparent...in .57...on nvidia, I'll check this on ATI.
-light blending looks a lot better on nvdia...so do lasers, they are more like in descent3...I will make a screenshot if you are willing to try to "fix" it.
-lowest priority, fixing midi detection so there's no need to go to the windows control panel and do some midi device setting.

And the cockpit finally works like it should. The feel of it is awesome. Old Skool

Thanks for your version of D2-W32, really.