Quake II Starting again

June 18th, 2007, 04:45 Posted By: fatcat04912

via McZonks Blog http://emergencyexit.untergrund.net/

A lot of people asked, why Quake 2 runs on the old Playstation (33 mhz, 2 mb memory, 1 mb video memory) and I have problems with the PSP which offers 32 mb memory. Most crashes and hangs are memory problems. There are a lot of reasons and i will try to explain a few of them. But let me show some screenshots first.


All gamers who tried the game on both playforms will notice some major differences. The models are reduced in polygon count, texture size and animation steps. The maps are remodelled so the polygon count is reducest drastically, some areas are removed completly and there are loading time inside of the map. It would be a bad idea to remake the maps for the psp version too. A huge benefit over the Playstation version is, that the psp version can load any Quake 2 map without modify it.
Memory Usage

The question is, should Quake 2 PSP be more like the Playstation version or the windows version which uses around 50 to 100 mb memory. There are some reasons why my goal is the real version. But where is all the memory used? As already mentioned before the PSP offers 32 mb memory to use. The firmware uses around 9 of them. So you have around 23 mb for your application. After game initialization Quake 2 uses 5 mb, for code and data, for console and menu.
So what to do with the rest of 18 mb. The maps files are between zwo and three mb on the memory stick. But the bsp tree will be use around 4 to 8 mb in game and graphics engine and the map textures will also use around 2 to 4 mb. When the map is loaded you can run through an empty world. Weapons, ammo packs and items will use another 2 mb. The enemy models will take around 5 to 10 mb.

Quake Soldier

Let us take a look at the basic unit in Quake 2: the solidier. This easy enemy occures on nearly every map with different weapons and look. The Model is 456 kb, the textures are 345 kb and the sound files are 356 kb, what is 1.1 mb in total - Yes, there will be sound in the next release.
Another problem is that the PSP has no memory managment unit. When the Quake 2 beta crashed during loading the next level, it was usually a problem because of fragmented memory. So you have to take care that you do not split the memory in to much little pieces. I solved this by unloading the whole stuff when quit a map. Unfortunatly this will increase the loading time for the next level.


I have rewritten the sound engine complety. It is now, same as graphics and input, full custom psp code. It is unfinished but there will be audio output in one of the next version. Perhaps i can integrate a streaming music player too, but this a less imporant feature on my todo list. The challange in single player mode will be to reduce the memory usage to make all or at least the most maps working on the PSP. Multiplayer will not have the memory problems since only some player models has to be loaded. There is a bot library for Quake 2 which would be nice to include. I’m unsure if I should focus on single- or multiplayer first. I also would like to externalize the game engine into a .prx, so I can load mods. This is a nice time to test my new poll script. What feature would you prefer?

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