Monday, April 12, 2010

Robotech: Battlecry is playable!






Wow, I've been making quite a bit of progress over the past few days lately! Interesting how all this fell into place over the weekend. Taking a break from Cxbx can do wonders. When I do come back from taking a break, I usually make new discoveries and fix lots of bugs.

As the title says, Robotech: Battlecry (XDK 4721) is now considered playable (but with an asterisk). "What's the asterisk for?" Last night, me and Defiance have been putting our heads together fixing some bugs in Cxbx. We did manage to fix quite a few things (mainly PushBuffer related stuff which fixed a few bugs in Panzer as well and got proper bilinear filtering in XDK 3911). The biggest thing was changing how Cxbx reacted to a certain scenario. It doesn't look like a proper fix, but it worked. At first, it was only working for Defiance for some reason. Initially, I assumed it was another problem relating to Vista and XP again (where XP is more tolerant of the situation). I just fixed that a few minutes ago, and now it appears to be completely playable. Be advized, it does have bugs.

The biggest issue is that the skydome doesn't render, so when looking to the sky, it starts trailing. This only happens when you start playing though. During a cutscene or when the game is paused, it works fine. Why that is, I really don't know. Also, I myself am having some speed issues with my laptop. I'm running an HP dv2700 (not HP's greatest model, many were faulty and had a recall). It's a nice laptop and does pretty well, but for some reason, it likes to slow down randomly for about 30 seconds, then go normal speed again. On average, I get 20 fps ingame and generally runs smoothly. Since quad rendering and EmuIDirect3DDevice8_DrawIndexedVertices aren't very fast atm, you can expect this game to have a few speed issues. Other than that, the game is playable. I played a few levels myself and haven't had any major issues or crashes at all.

So, that's my update for today. Stay tuned for more updates as they surface.

Shogun.

15 comments:

  1. Shogun, I was wondering if you could maybe make a post or reply here about your development workflow. For instance, what text editor do you use? compiler? toolchain? platform(s)? How do you go about finding and fixing bugs? Do you use unit tests to create new code? Do you program anything else in your spare time? Indent style? Church of Emacs or Cult of vi? What libraries do you use? What programming languages? If I haven't overwhelmed you with questions yet, I can come up with more.

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  2. Well, I thought most of that stuff was obvious enough for anyone who can actually program, but I never really bothered to get that detailed most people comming to my blog could care less about my coding techniques and just want to see their favourite games playable.

    I can do a different update regarding this if you want. It makes me feel a bit better that someone wants to know how I work on Cxbx in general. Feel free to ask more. I might just do this update tomorrow.

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  3. Seeing that the slowness could be a quad issue, how's the OpenGL port coming? Have you even started work on it yet?

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  4. @Nintendo Maniac, Yeah, I already started on it. It's got a lot more work ahead until it's functional. Been a while since I've touched it though.

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  5. Excellent it announces, more since this emulator this being done in C++, do you think about making available the code source so that Cxbx seje open source or not? I say after throwing this new updating. Good I have a lot of faith in more Cxbx ties that in JPCSP for it being done in Java, that theoretically is a slow language.

    Sorry my english.

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  6. Сёгун лошара конченая!!! Сосёт у мужиков!!! Твой эмулятор гуано ябучее. Good job!!

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  7. blueshogun96 you are amazing! I don´t see this emulator in the future complete when i die.
    This emulator i think you will performer quick it was i expected ;). How knows the rest of the games can be fixed with just some little bugs.
    Everything is possible.

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  8. I cannot say more than, awesome job! Just keep it up, you're getting there. Bravo! :)

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  9. A M A Z I N G !!
    I hope this will run some homebrew too..

    Thank you for your continued dev on this!!

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  10. Wow, I thought no one cared about homebrew anymore o_O

    It runs some homebrew games too. Maybe I should do my next update on that.

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  11. Can you please make it possible to emulate 'Whacked!' ? I would also really appreciate it if you could tell me where to download the latest cxbx version.

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  12. Omg! I want to emulate that game s0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o bad!!! Too bad I was too stupid to dump that game when I had the chance. I have a copy of that game but it's at my cousin's house over 2000 miles away :( Trust me, Whacked is VERY high on my todo list. In fact, it's my 3rd favourite Xbox game of all time!

    Btw, the svn is updated if you didn't see my latest blog update. If you download it, by all means try that game and tell me what happens.

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  13. Good job ! any one have tested Buffy games ? When my exams will finished, i think that i will test a lot of my games with cxbx =)

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  14. Yo guys what SVN i need for Robotech Battlecry...I have SVN r163..I don't know to compile so i need to know is there any way to play it on svn r163,i tried but i couldn't run it...

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