Emergency Exit

The last exam has been written and Das Fest is over. The Beatsteaks was really good and I finally travelled home to family. I will prepare for finish my stuff for the next Evoke now. No lessons until october.
I am writing this text on my brother’s brand new iMac with a 24 inch screen. I really should think about getting a new notebook. A MacBook Pro with a Geforce 8 seems to be a nice piece of hardware for me. But it is so expensive, that I will have to work during the semester break. My old Powerbook G4 without FrontRow and iSight is too slow to compile voluminous projects.
My other PSP is here at home too, so I can start to work on AdHoc networking in Quake 2. I have a 1.5 and an 3.xx OE console to test. I have no idea why Quake 2 does not work with the new custom firmware. Maybe it is the network module problem that Cadu reported. I will not care about that at the moment. I do not see any reason to install the “patch-fix-patch-moreisogaming-patch-patch-patch-fix-patch” firmware. Perhaps I really should add the iso-protection again. I am really sad about the amount of people that came to this site searching for “crush psp iso”, “quake 2 psx iso” or similar.
In the last days I was relaxing at my girl’s family and did not code. I will continue my work in the next days. I already mentioned that I have written a mod for Quake 2 and I want to see it working on the console. But I primary enjoy the days with some old friends, so do not expect too much.

Here are some of the impressions I got about my Quake 2 port in the last days.

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Memory Usage

At the moment I try to optimize the memory usage of Quake 2 PSP. This will allow all sounds in multiplayer and reenable singleplayer mode if enough more can be saved. It was easy to analyse where the memory is used, but the more interessting question is what memory is wasted. I did not want to concede myself but the most memory is wasted in at texture’s memory. Most of the textures are not power of two, but the psp requires that. So I reserve more memory than needed. This wastes around 40% of texture memory. When I would scale down the textures it would result in around 20% less used memory. This will be around 60% less texture memory. As a trade-off the graphics quality will be lowered.

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I found some more questions about Quake 2 on in various boards and here in the blog. Again I want to advice to come to the chat and ask. This will be the most reliable support opportunity. I know that it is hard to catch me in the chat during the exams especially when you live on the other side of this world. When you can not join an IRC chat or you did not meet me, post here in the comments.
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I have collected over 140 images about my Quake 2 PSP port. Here are some of the very early stage of the development.

There is no need to read the following post if you are happy with your Quake 2 input. But there are some options to fine tune your input.
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A lot of people think the bot that plays on my server is too hard. But this is a pretty easy opponent, he has no movement, no aim and no style. I am playing on the psp against Zero in the video. Quake 2 on the psp is much harder. The movement is not as fast as on the pc and it also not that exactly. Watch the video or download the Quake 2 demo file.

Before you begin practicing Quake 2 on the handheld find a configuration you like. Try different control modes and styles. I would advice to use the analog nub for looking and the four buttons on the right side to move. I often frag people that can not turn around fast enough and are massacared with the chaingun from the back without being able to attack. So ensure the anub speed is high enough. There will be none linear analog input within the next release, this will allow to perform the extrem rapid turns you can see in the demo. Even they are not as accurate as with a mouse.
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Just to screenshots for today. I am too lazy and too busy to write more.

Not worth a news.

A lot of people keep asking me if I can port HalfLife or CounterStrike to the psp after I will have finished Quake 2. And here is the answer!

I hate Half Life, I despice Counter Strike and I do not like Valve. So goddamn stop bugging me with requests about one of these games. I am a quaker not a camper. In HalfLife and CounterStrike the strongest tactic is sit down and wait. This scotchs any gameplay and I am not interested in anyones opinion about the opposite. I will not waste a single second in my life by working on Half Life or CounterStrike. So do me a favor and:

Even I would be willed, let me add a note about a technical detail: there is no source code from those games, so how to port them?
I want to be offensive, but it is annoying getting the same question all day. The worst thing about this post is that I bet I will have hits from searches like “PSP CounterStrike” or “PSP HalfLife”.

Instead of flooding boards and blogs with news about bad psp games or strange xmb mods, I decided to post about the crystals in the giant quarry of psp homebrew. I want to do this as an act of respect for developers and to inform the readers which games are really worth to take a look. There is a flood of games, so how to find good games? If the game is written in LUA, skip it. It is a good script language and not all psp LUA games are bad in general, but the chance to find a good one … well you can better play in the lottery. If the screenshots does not look promising, the game is proprably not good. Those two criterias will sort out the most games and you can try the rest.

Ozone is from GearDome is one of those pearls. A pretty easy game concept paired with nice graphics and perfect sound.

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