Anyone noticed this in daikatana

[revelator]

Got bored the other day and fired up this old game loaded a save in village of the damned (or something like that) decided to go explore places i newer been and took a dive in the river.
Well i did indeed find something, at the bottom there was a well with planks clogging the entrance so i busted them and swam down... suddenly a huge green dopefish attacks me
And i died well i guess the legacy of where the engine came from is no secret to anyone anymore but this was a bit unexpected hehe.

[hogsy]

Yeah there are secrets in certain levels where you can find a dopefish. Nothing that wasn't known about already...

[leileilol]

Did you know Daikatana shipped with a PowerVR MiniGL with no way to use it except through the console? (and it works, but rather slow as Daikatana really abused alpha channels and had a ton of overdraw)

The More You Know

[revelator]

Newer had a powerVR though i did have one of there later cards i think (Kyro II) though i think the chip itself was not from them (STM if i remember correctly).

Hehe yeah i guess most secrets are found though i had quite a laugh

[leileilol]

[revelator]

hehe nice i remember at the time the kyro was even able to beat the geforce2 and radeon cards but they later lost that edge as games became more optimized towards T&L was still a good card for its time though.

Still got me 2 3dfx voodoo2's in sli and i even managed to yank together a driver that supports d3d in XP only downside is that if your primary gfx card has faster D3D it wont matter since D3D will be handled by the voodoos no matter what, same for opengl so i reccomend not using a geforce 2 or later to drive it hehe.
(3dcc unfortunatly does not work for switching gfx cards in XP ) I based the driver on the last release from koolsmoky.

[hogsy]

Here's a few fun facts then...

Did you know that Daikatana was going to have a native Glide and Direct3D renderer? Sadly they didn't get very far with it.

Did you also know that Daikatana was going to feature procedural textures for things like fire and smoke?

And did you know that Daikatana was going to feature bots for multiplayer? They're still in the game but sadly do not function, as like a lot of things they were not finished.

Finally the last notable one I can think of is that Daikatana originally used an animation similar to that of Quake 3 where the player models torso, legs and head were seperate of each other and each moved individually.

There's loads more but it'd take forever to go through it all...

[Seven]

Everybody has dreams and a big wish list, when starting a new project.
Sure Daikatana had lots of these things too. That is not suprising at all.

The final game unfortunately showed that the developers should have put much more effort in 'simple' things like waypoints, AI and stuff.
Things, that handicapped so hard that it was only moderate and not a big bang game in the end.
Sometimes less is more, you know.
Making a robust game instead of a "full of inovations" half-baked thing.

So, speaking about an "amazing" wish list can be done for almost every game. Especially for Quake1 as well. That does not make the game better in the end...

John C.´s quote that illustrates it quite good:
"We put more into our mouths than we could swallow..."

But I am confident that you will do these things much better in the reload of Daikatana.
And we all can play it as it was meant to be

[hogsy]

Well the weird thing we've found about Daikatana is that quite a few of these things were finished but weren't really put together into the game in a structured/organised manner (which probably shows either a lack of leadership or lack of planning) and such they ended up being removed literally just months before the game was close to going gold.
I blame the fact that most of John Romero's design documents seem like a joke and some parts of it weren't even written seriously, hell most of the initial design document was a joke and some of those ideas had just stuck through development. He did have some fantastic ideas though and I can bet you that you'll be seeing those in OpenKatana

There's a lot of other things I'm tempted to rant about like the fact that it seems they tried to merge the Quake 2 engine with what they had already written out when working with Quake which literally looks like two worlds colliding but I'll save that for another time. It's sad what happened to the game but I do think it was Romero's poor leadership which caused most of its development issues overall. In-fact that seems pretty clear now.

[revelator]

My only gripe with the game as such is the sidekicks stupid behaviour constantly running in front of me when under attack / unable to open doors on themself / seem to go into panick mode sometimes and just plain die from the most weird things. I normally just put them on wait and go on on myself, unfortunatly that means i have to go all the way back to open all doors for them when i hit a level change which blows majorly on huge maps else i actually find the game pretty interresting and fun allbeit its looking a bit dated nowadays.

I noticed you got the code hogsy and that there where some problems to overcome before romero could opt for a GPL release
let me guess same as Doom3 BFG edition as it also uses bink and also some audio library i cant recognize.

Bink should be easy to remove i guess, i think its only used for cutscenes which could be recorded in another format like theora or we could even use id's own roq renderer from Q3.

[hogsy]

Bink isn't an issue since the game itself doesn't actually even use it since the implementation was never finished and instead they went with using in-engine cut-scenes. As for the audio system in Daikatana, they used the Miles audio engine and that obviously needs to be thrown out and replaced which shouldn't actually be too much trouble.

The biggest issue however is just cleaning it up so it's presentable. There's also a number of unused bits left from Quake 2 (and Quake) still there which can probably be thrown out... I don't want to end up doing too much to it but I also would hate to see it go out in the state it's currently in.

[revelator]

If you need a hand im pretty handy in that department
i newer became a super coder but over the years i picked up a lot about using the msvc ide correctly and im pretty good at porting stuff to.
And i hate messy code so ill probably spend a lot of waking hours to make it look good

[leileilol]

sounds like engoo plans made in the coder rush phase tbh. When you're a programmer, you often have this false sense of power that you can make anything ambitious. cue Daikatana's design doc

Hexen II's a bit similar to Daikatana (with also similar ambitous crazy code going on in there), but was produced far more quicker (started around Nov 96, E3'd Jun 97, shipped around Aug/Sep 97)

[revelator]

I guess hexen II code was a bit simpler (nearer to quakes)
took me some years but the standard quake code layout i have pretty much in my head these days, fast forward to Doom3 and im starting to wonder how much crap i can fit in that mess i call a head
And i know my limitations code wise im no math genius im ok but a lot of the stuff needs algebraic knowledge i simply dont posses so i go with what i have.

Guess i should be somewhat proud for a self learned coder with a portefolio like this.

Made my own Compiler suite and i guess a lot of the attention MinGW64 has had lately is atleast to some extent because of some of my work
Ported most of cygwins toolset to Msys/MinGW (even python).
Made some ok additions to the quake (and derivates) code base over the years.
Added MinGW64 support to CodeBlocks (though i have to maintain it myself since they want support for the multilib version which can handle both, im ok with that but it was hard enough getting it to work correctly as it was and noone stepped up to help make a version for the multilib gcc).

[scar3crow]

I would be willing to bet that a lot of the missing features were things that had substantial bugs where their presence was not mission critical. 30 bugs with the bots? Remove the bots. 150 bugs with Mikko and Superfly? Try your best to fix them, we can't remove them without redoing the story and pretty much every level.

I never did actually play Daikatana, just the demo (hated the swamp, liked the levels in other times), and that standalone multiplayer version - I really liked the Shotcycle Six.

Speaking of promises made in development, I was the biggest Half-Life fanboy up until its release, because what I had in mind based on previews and interviews was something more akin to what we know STALKER as now.