DescentBB

After 8 months of development, v0.54 is finally ready for release. And a lot has been done. Here is a very short list of changes:

* Heavily improved multiplayer and new UDP/IP code
* Demo recording now records way smaller demos (still backwards compatible)
* PhysFS support for both D1X-Rebirth and D2X-Rebirth
* Mouse speed and sensitivity problems resolved
* Many game crashes due uninitiated memory is now fixed - improved game
stability
* Menus improved
* Inside Game Logging system like Quake console (SHIFT+ESC)
* Many options now have moved from INI file to game options and will be
saved
* Collision system has been improved - no more stuck enemies or items
* If a wrong resolution has been selected your graphics card does not
support, game will reset to 640x480 instead of crashing
* NEW glReticle
* Heavily improved ingame timer - less CPU, more FPS
* MP3/OGG/AIF/WAV Jukebox support!
* Text readings are now done in Unicode to support non-US keyboards
* More accurate Homing missile vectors
* Many bug fixes, slacked code, and more! (this is a very small list,
you know)
* D1X-Rebirth now also runs on Mac!

I really hope you will have fun with this new relase and enjoy playing.

P.S. The Mac packages will be added in the following days, sorry Mac players.

Please visit http://www.dxx-rebirth.de for Downloads.

YAY! Good work zico! Keep it up, though now I think you deserve a break from Rebirth for a while.

Great Zico. I'll give it a try on my old, slow, Win 98 clunker of a computer and give you the results. You said that you were curious about whether the movies no longer stuttered on it.

The good news. The new version is absolutely gorgeous on my newer 3.4G Pentium machine. No problems whatsoever yet. Great work and my thanks for your tireless efforts.

The bad news. My old Win98 733 Pentium clunker just can't play the movies or intros without the video and sound stuttering. But at least the menus work fine now as they were very slow in the previous version. You did fix that bug. The game runs great as well.

What I'm going to do is play DXX on my newer machine. I've gotten spoiled with the look that AA and AF gives the game. It looks sooooo much better than the old jaggy look that the game has on the old computer. And I can use dual joysticks!

One question I have is can DXX be played on a 3 year old computer that has Intel-integrated graphics? I was thinking of putting it on my father's computer to play when I visit him.

Sorry to hear the movies still do not run correctly. Maybe it just needs to much power...
You still could try to use the low resolution movies if that helps (-lowresmovies, if you have installed them).

About Integrated Chipsets we had some problems with it. Mostly these show as totally messed up game fonts. I am not directly sure if this is an ingame bug or a driver bug. However it might be worth a try, but I strongly recommend to use the newest drivers you can find.

Tunnel, try disabling the mixer in the ini file. I was having trouble getting over 20 fps until i turned that off. At least in D1. D2 I'm still having issues. Haven't found the culprit yet, but I'm lookin.

I love the new reticle. and if you want some visual fun; start foolin around with the aspect.

Great work Zico and Beta testing was fun man If you need a beta tester for 0.55, count me in man!

Thanks Duper, I'll try disabling the mixer and see what happens. However, I do get around 45 fps on the Win 98 computer when playing DXX.

Anybody use an XBox 360 controller with DXX?

It's also always helpful to try to use \"-nonicefps\" - this will use more CPU, but gernerally improves the performance on lower end systems. (However this may not help with the movies I think)

Disabling the mixer, no joy. In fact, it was already disabled. One of my main problems is that I cannot upgrade any of the drivers for either the sound or graphics cards. Hewlett Packard proprietary mobo inside. At least OpenGL works fine with the Riva TNT2 card and it's old drivers. What does the -nonicefps switch do?

-nonicefps disables the game loop sleeping.
Which means:
While the game is *waiting* for the next frame to render it sits in a loop and constantly checks the time to see if enough has passed to render the next frame. To save a bit CPU power there's a sleeping call which let's the game *sleep* (and not use CPU) for 1ms.

Normally this is a good thing but depending on your OS this sleeping may be inaccurate and go to 10ms or even higher which gives you less FPS then.

This way -nonicefps will disable this sleeping. This would give you more accurate FPS calculation, but eat up to 100% CPU.

But do not worry: Even with 100% CPU usage, DXX-Rebirth would not slow down other applications. It just takes what it can have to calculate the FPS.

Hmmmmmm. I'll give that a try next. Thanks.

Zico, after some experimentation, here's what I've found out. With the old Win 98 computer, nothing I disable or change affects the movie stuttering problem. With version 0.54, I even have to disable the mixer in order to stop the sound from popping within the game itself. The slow menu problem that showed up in v0.53 went away with the new version for your information. I've found that the movies only work stutter free with the original Win 95 and Voodoo versions of Descent 2 on my old clunker of a computer. Frankly, it's just not worth the effort to track down the source of the problem and it's probably a driver issue that I can't remedy anyway.

What I'm going to do is use version 0.51 on the older computer since it seems to work the best on it with no pallet flash, menu problems or crashes. I'm going to use version 0.54 on my newer computer since I like some of the added features you put into it, like the persistent debris and the new crosshair selection. The movies also work fine there as well. Great work!

One question I have is can I just set AA at the card level and not set this option within the game? I'd like to use a higher AA setting than the 4X that is selectable in the options menu. I know, it seems like overkill, but it looks so good and my machine can run it with the higher settings. Was there a reason that you took most of the OpenGL switches out of the .ini file in the latest version?

Tunnelcat's comments raise a question, and that is, is it still possible to download the older versions of DXX? I know there used to be links going back to Version 0.30 on the project site, but all I see are the latest version now.

\"Was there a reason that you took most of the OpenGL switches out of the .ini file in the latest version?\"

Actually yes: I took them out so they can now restin in the menus. I thought this is an easier and more \"clean\" way to set options.

\"Tunnelcat's comments raise a question, and that is, is it still possible to download the older versions of DXX? I know there used to be links going back to Version 0.30 on the project site, but all I see are the latest version now.\"

No and there are two reasons for it:
a) Much webspace
b) IF something is wrong in a new version I would like to have it reported instead of people just stick with older versions and I NEVER know why or WHAT is bugged. That does not help me nor it helps the development and I would see no reason to continue.

Just a quick question Zico. I'm not checking the 4X AA option within the game menu and instead I'm forcing 8X AA with the card driver, so that works fine and looks great. However, I am using the trilinear option in the game menu to get that to work.

My question is, do I bother setting any anisotropic settings at the card level? I don't notice any visual differences with any settings I try. The only setting that does affect the appearance of the game is checking the trilinear option in the menu.

Also, does anybody have any thoughts on turning Vsync on or off either?

For a question like this you could have made a thread for it. I'll give zico a link to your post tomorrow if I see him.

Hey tunnelcat.

Yeah I guess using AF settings on your card would not currently make a difference, but I would try to support ir if possible in further releases.

For the VSync question I would definetly recommend using it. The homing missiles are - for example - not bound to FPS anymore so it doesn't give you any disadvances if you run the game higher than 30 or 40 FPS.

However the main advance of VSync is that the game will 100% Sync the FPS with your monitor refresh rate. Way more accurate as you would set -maxfps to your monitor refresh. This will give you the most smooth game playback and reduce tearing to none.

But there might some things you might consider:
I know for some games VSync can cause the game be even more choppy, but that should only be the case, if the game only hardly manages to reach your desired FPS.
If this happens for your DXX, try using -nonicefps from the INI and always check if the FPS (-fps) reach your monitor refresh rate.

BUT (the big one): If your monitor runs on 85Hz or more, your should not use VSync at the moment. DXX only supports up to 80FPS currently, so VSync would fall back behind it making the game more choppy. The next release of DXX-Rebirth will allow up to 200FPS and fix that problem in the same place.

Hey zico, while I remember, I had something to bring to your attention - in third-party missions with credits such as the just-released Enemy Within, Rebirth 0.54 appears to display the default Descent 2 credits instead of the mission's credits.

Thx for the hint.

Thanks for the answers. I know that I should have started another thread, but the questions were just quickies.