Battlefield 1942:
My work on bf1942 is done. The nasty parts of the port are pretty much done,
and DICE is taking it over and maintaining it in-house now, which is a good
thing for several reasons. The icculus.org mailing list (and, if DICE wants
it, the bf1942 Bugzilla) are sticking around.
Serious Sam:
The First Encounter: Beta three is out.
The Second Encounter is now available, too!
Details are
here.
Unreal Tournament 2003:
2199 patch is out.
Digital Extremes Bonus Pack is out.
Epic Bonus Pack is out.
New demo is out, for those that want to try it with all the bug fixes but
haven't put down their money yet.
OSX port is more or less done now...waiting on 10.2.5 and some other minor
things.
MOHAA:
My initial OpenAL attempt isn't as bad as I thought. It still has a ways to
go, but I was amazed when walking around that it does what it does at this
point.
There is a 2.15-compatible Spearhead server now, btw. Look
here.
America's Army:
Apparently it's not just the use of alloca() as a function argument, as
Murray Jensen pointed out to me...GCC _does_ know what to do with this, and
preallocates the space before pushing the other arguments onto the stack, as
a brief look at a test program's assembly dump verifies. Still, there's some
strange mojo going on there and we're either misbehaving or the somewhat-
more-complex-in-practice function call still confuses it. Replacing the
alloca() fixed it, so I put my brain cells elsewhere. Thanks for the info,
though, Murray.
Other stuff:
Games, games, games. I'm a Nintendo whore this week, between The Wind Waker
and trying to spank the SA-X so I can be done with Metroid Fusion. The
GameBoy Advance SP is worth
every damned penny if you are still using
the original GBA...progress in Fusion has accelerated quite a bit now that
I can actually see the screen (and I love the fact it's got a rechargable
Li-Ion battery...I was afraid I wouldn't have another power adapter to lose.
No seriously, I like it.)
As for (what I've seen thus far of) The Wind Waker:
- It's friggin' beautiful. Anyone that tells you they think the "cartoony"
look was a cop-out is full of shit. I think it looks great, and really
enriches the feel of the game.
- Navi is gone...your sidekick is now a talking boat. No, really. The parts
that need immediate communication (where you'd get Navi yelling "LISTEN!")
have been replaced by a stone in your pocket that pirates use to
communicate with you. It fits, just accept it.
- The Ocarina is now a conductor's baton...now you need to memorize music
AND keep the beat while casting spells. I'm going to suck at this, I have
no doubt.
- The game has a good sense of humor. Everyone makes fun of your clothes.
(and they should...you look like a dork.)
- The camera _sucks_. The best thing about Zelda 64 is that the camera was
always right where you needed it. Here, it gets stuck behind trees, it
aims at angles that make swinging between platforms hard, and the
controls to manually rotate it are backwards...like "inverted mouse" but
even left and right are backwards. Frequently I find myself hitting the
L button to recenter it, which is a pain when something is in Link's view
and he decides to focus on it.
- The level design rocks.
- The first boss fight is gimmicky. I want, just once, to fuck some shit up
in a swordfight in this game. There hasn't been _really_ good swordplay
since the Shadow Link dude at the end of Zelda 2...I'm talking about
blocking and countering and dodging, and really getting into it. This
too-cute-for-words tactics to beat Gohma are a bad sign.
- Setting this on a mostly-ocean world makes it feel a little less linear
than Zelda 64...sure, I
know it's still linear, but at least I'm
not standing on Hyrule fields conscious that there's exactly
X exits from this particular map. And honestly...riding around in the boat
is unexpectedly fun. I'm not sure why.
- Miss Tetra rocks. I'm hoping the pirates show up again later.
--ryan.