Quake Rally

[randall]

<br><br>Can't say that it is playable by any stretch of the imagination. Has anyone else been working on this?<br><br>The storage for this thing is huge- over 5 megs gzipped WITHOUT any maps. The maps are around 1.5 megs each and have insane polycounts.<br><br>It took a good 5 minutes to load- I have NEVER seen that happen before. Needless to say, unless someone else has any bright ideas, I don't think we should be expecting this mod anytime soon.<br><br>

[Paul]

so its just the maps that are the problem then?

[randall]

it has a huge footprint, so basically the only people that could play it would be those with storage cards.<br><br>I stuffed gfx/pop.lmp in the QRally PAKs, and dumped all the original quake files just to get this thing to load. And my device is about as bare-bones as you can get.<br><br>It took 5 minutes to load a map. That NEVER happens. pocketQuake normally takes 15-20 seconds at the most.<br><br>There are all kinds of errors and pauses as well. Hitting a wall results in a long 10 second pause- every time. Once, when I hit the walls, they kind of disappeared or warped real bad.<br><br>I'm getting about 2 FPS, but no RAM icon.<br><br>That's why I was wondering if anyone else was working on this.<br><br><br><br>

[999]

I played QuakeRally once and never again after I realized my car can strafe...<br><br>

[randall]

Actually you can't strafe in Qrally. Admittedly it has a weird steering mechanism- you look, and after a delay the car turns in that direction. In a way, I guess you could mistake that for strafing. After a while you get used to it and it is quite fun.<br><br>But it allows you to skid and powerslide. It is a much better "racing engine" than Racing Days.<br><br>I swear, one of those cars in QRally is a Corrado. J/K<br><br>I could do without the cheesy guns and deathmatch though. In one level you can run over people and animals and gib 'em- kind of a Carmageddon thingie going on.<br><br>I tried ripping the sounds to make the PAK smaller, but now it just scrolls all these damn "sound not found" errors, which is irritating.<br><br>I'll put this on hold- unless someone else wants to take a stab at it.

[suchiaruzu]

Just put in some empty sound files only 0,000001 s long or something. they're small and you won't get the errors when you name them like the original sound files

[randall]

Yeah, I thought about replacing them with a null sound, or reducing the bitrate. There are about a million sound files- okay, not really that many but almost 8 megs worth. At this time I can't really say it would be worth it until a low-poly map was designed.

[999]

NavySeals takes this long to load. The PAK file uncompressed is 20 megs and change. Gzipped, it's a smidgen over 7 megs.<br><br>Anyhow the pause when hitting a wall is PQ searching through that monsterous gzip file for the sound sample which is supposed to accompany the collision.<br><br>I have yet to release NavySeals because of this big inital hump you have to get over before you can finally play comfortably. One idea I had was to remove all the sounds from the pak file, and leave them uncompressed in a mod/sounds/ dir, or better yet, have a go at repacking them into their own pak file. The idea is to give PQ less to sift through as it looks for the sound file.<br><br><br><br>

[randall]

Shouldn't it cache all those files? I have scoured source code for other mods and they cache all their sounds.<br><br>Unpacked without maps the PAK is around 15 megs if I remember right. Each map is around 1.5 to 2.5 megs.<br><br>You can supply two PAK files. pak0.pak could be the main components of the mod, and pak1.pak would house the sound files. <br><br>

[999]

Randall:<br><br>Yea, it will cache them, but only after it's loaded them.<br><br>Quake only loads what it needs as it needs them. It *would* be smart to have it precache everything, but I only know of Q3 actually doing that.<br><br>This is why I am proposing putting the files in another pak, so Q doesn't have to scour a 15 megs of compressed data for a 20k sound file. Sure it will pause, but I'm hoping for not nearly as long.<br><br>