Its been almost a year since the Q3A port was released for XBOX. As great of a port as it is... its basicly a straight port. There are lots of nice new things that can be added to it that the great devs have made for Q3A on PC. Support for several great mods could possibly added as well.

Carcharius' OpenGL library/wrapper (forget which it was maybe a combination) would be a great thing to have avalible to devs as well. It'd be cool to get Darkplaces (an advanced Quake1 engine) ported to xbox but it would absolutely require OpenGL.

So this is a (polite but public) request for Carcharius to please release the Q3A port's source as well as the OpenGL related things that would be required to compile it. You must admit it'd be really interesting to see what people would do with such a thing. If the OpenGL lib is complete enough... imagine the ports that would suddenly become possible/easier.

Personally I'd love to see something like Darkplaces ported. There are plenty of great Quake 1 and 2 engines out there, rather than the vanilla ports we have now.

@Carcharius: Now that the the xbox scene is almost dead and you have stated that you won't work on any projects (besides ScummVM) for the Xbox, why don't you release the sources for your OpenGL wrapper?

There are lots of cool OpenGL games out there and I'm sure that would bring some new life to the Xbox.

Yeah, why was the source for this never released? Carcharius's site no longer even has any reference to it.

Probably coz he didnt want people bastardising/stealing his hard work.
That said, its probably a good time to put some much needed life in the xbox scene... though whether there's anyone left with the talent and determination to do much with it remains to be seen.

I don't want to sound like a dick, but if you alter GPL code, and someone asks for the source, you are legally required to give it out.

share

enderandrew is correct. the quake 3 arena engine source was released under the GPL and as such the individual who released the modified engine must by the license release the source.

just wondering whatever happened to the source, as I am sure that some people including myself would like to update the code base using ioquake3.

I'd understand if he didnt want to release the opengl wrapper.

But the rest of it would be nice. I'd love to rewrite it for Direct3D

I no longer have the source for several of my previous projects, Q3A being one of them.

I had a hard drive failure some time back and lost a lot of stuff that I really should have had backed up. I've learned my lessons from that!

Carcharius

Does that include the opengl->direct3d wrapper?

oh damn, any reference material, print outs? anything??? argh no lost source brings me to my knees... for ever more do we require the services of backup and DVCS

It's something i'd like to work on next...

Sadly yes.

I lost lots of stuff. As well as Q3 and the OpenGL wrapper I lost the source to DoomX, SpeXtrum (my Sinclair Spectrum emulator), my original ScummVM port (that's why the last release was a re-port) and several unfinished projects that I had been dabbling with - Martahon/AlephOne, MESS, DoomLegacy.

Pretty much the only thing I managed to keep was the source for Xenesis (my port of the Sega Genesis/Megadrive emulator Gens - my first xbox project) and that was sheer good fortune - it was still on an old drive that I was using all that time ago.

But as I said before lessons have been learned.

Carch

Ouch........ that's painful man. Sorry to hear about your loss (and apparently the loss for the entire community as well)

No buddies you shared it with (online or offline) while you were working on it?

I finally got me 2 1TB hard drives that are mirrored and I've opened up a majority of stuff I've worked on for the last few years to everyone. Who knows? I might just be asking people if they can re-upload all of my stuff for me to grab one day.

Take care, and better luck in the future.

~Rx

Just wanted ya'll to know I found some DirectX source code for Quake III. The difference here is that the guy wrote the source before the Q3 source came out, so it may not be 100% the same. Anyways, his site is super slow so I uploaded via MediaFire.

http://www.dxquake3.dsl.pipex.com/ --The site I got it from

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?mdznz0tnmye --The download link for the source

Hopefully this'll help with creating a nice neat engine for Xbox that folks can build content from. Since Quake III's formats are so readily available that means folks can basically make whatever they want once this version of the engine is ported.

So I've looked deeper into the source code/tested the executable. It's not without bugs. There's something in his shader code that's very different. It reports quite a few missing shaders, which is technically correct, however iD's version of the game ignores a shader if it's missing. There is also the random crash related to some sort of timer (only happens on a few levels) and a few reported FS (file system) logs reported in the error log. Other than that the game seems to run on fullbright, as there's no lighting, and there is no bot support.

That being said, it runs on DX 7/8 as near as I can tell, so it looks like it may be a very viable engine for "dumb" games. What I mean by that is games that have no true AI. A good example is Guitar Hero 1/2. The character's animations are driven entirely by a midi files, which means they don't have to do any real thinking. So a Q3-based Guitar Hero clone would be a good candidate for this engine if it weren't for the fact that you need adapters to even use the instruments.

adapters are the least of problems really, usb connection can be wired into an existing xbox gampad. Lots of tutorials available, personally would love to see any guitar game ported.

Yeah but even then you can't just plug any old USB device into the Xbox and have it work. To make 360 guitars work you'd need to write Xbox drivers. Not saying that can't be done - on the contrary, it could be. It's just finding someone with the know-how. I could probably do a semi-direct port of what's here giving a 3D world to work with, but past that I'd need some specs on midi files and whatnot which I know nothing about.

gtteancum i know midi files pretty well...i usually play frontman/GZ/FOFiX

Yeah I get their structure, but how to load/manipulate them through C++ is where I get stuck. Truthfully if I had all of that I'm not in a big rush to attempt something huge like this as I already have Rock Band 2.

Hey Guys,

I'm not sure if anybody is interested but if you're serious about getting openGL support on the xbox maybe MESA is a good place to start.

Yes I know what you're thinking "MESA is software only" but back in 1999 (when the seas were so blue) a DirectX 6 hardware driver was created that maps OpenGL to Direct3D.

"Ahh, but it's old"

True, and OpenGL to Direct3D is an uncommon thing to want in the PC world. but:


Direct3D to openGL is a lot more common, many people have made conciderable effort to get various Win32 Games working on other platforms, such as linux.

the Wine Project and to a lesser extent the realtech VR DirectX Port both have Direct3D->OpenGL mapping and is for a far more recent direct3D than the MESA driver.

Starting with getting mesa working in the XDK along with the opengl driver would then allow the community to expand the driver using knowledge reaped from Wine so that more and more features of OpenGL are done in hardware.

If the initial work was done and the wrapper was working no matter how slowly on the xbox, then I suggest several projects start at the same time. There would be a number of OpenGL games that could come across to the xbox and if there were several projects all using and updating the opengl wrapper, implementing features where needed: the mutal benifit of a good OpenGL wrapper would drive development.


with OpenGL support there could be a renewed interest in xbox development again.

lets face it, for all the consoles out there for homebrew, the xbox is still the best

And to follow on from that, Carcharius :

I hate loosing code.

my computer was once struck by lightning.

It really did happen.


I won't elaborate past the point of "It did not work any more"

----


Where did you start when writing your OpenGL->Direct3d code? can you offer any tips from when you were hacking away? If any attempt is made to work on this your input would be invaluable.