How good are you?

[TBone]

Just out of curiosity, what level of play do most people here get out of PocketQuake? For example, when I get bored and start playing against FrikBots because I'm sick of the SP game, I usually manage to hold my own on Skill 0 or 1 only. This is a pretty big contrast from the PC version, where I'm out of practice but still better than that. I think it's a combination of getting used to the controls and having poor contrast/frame rate on my 3150 (although PQ-based levels like DMMuseum are helping on that count). Anyone else have better luck than I do? Any stories to tell? <br><br>I'm especially interested if anyone's gone online with it, because when I get back to school I plan on logging into a server on my laptop from the iPAQ so the CPU load from the bots is all remote. I'd like to think I've got a chance of being a half-decent player (so that if other people log in I don't get stomped), but I don't know right now.

[Moose or Chuck]

Tom, where do you get all these quotes in your signature? They're all as funny as hell. <br><br>And no one can play very well on it. I don't even use mlook on my Casio, so I doubt i could beat many bots at all. It's the frame rate and controls as you said.

[TBone]

"This space intentionally left blank." This is a quote from the Zork games (which I've thought about building into a level. Just imagine starting to the left of a white house... <grin>). Every now and then in the Zork text-based games you'd run into a wall or a carving or book or some kind of writing, very elaborately done, that in the end would say "This space intentionally left blank."<br><br>The dogs quote: This one's from the filthy critic at www.bigempire.com/filthy. He does movie reviews in a completely bitter, twisted, and usually hilarious way. I pulled this one out of his review of "Best of Show," but there's plenty of other good ones to pick from.<br><br>Hey, worth a shot on the gameplay. Sometimes I have these dreams about being the Thresh of GMU, and making it even more humiliating by beating people from the iPAQ. Then I realize that I probably don't even have enough memory on the 3100 to put the levels in RAM and free up the PC Card slot for the NIC. That's when I cry and start dreaming of an upgrade instead. <grin>

[Chris Edwards]

I don't think putting bots on an external server would help much.. i think the major slowdown with that is all the poly's on the player models... someone (not me cause i don't know how) should make new player models with less poly's..<br><br>anyways...um.. yes, it does work over lan/internet.. in fact, we'll probably have a few pocketquake tourny's sometime in the future.. maybe even for cool stuff... like a 384mb cf card. (solid-state)...<br><br>maybe.. we'll see.

[TBone]

Yeah, but it's not the LAN/netplay code I'm worried about it, it's getting enough space on the iPAQ. I've only got 16 megs, and although I know some people have done it I don't relish the thought. Right now I have 10.23 megs free, which seems like plenty (there's an 889k e-book I could delete for a little more) and I know some other people have gotten it running, but I'd like to do it without butchering my device. Maybe I'll use my CF card as swap space and move stuff back and forth whenever I need to to free up the RAM. It's what, 2.23 megs for the smallest .pak, smaller if I take the initial demo out of my quake.rc?<br><br>And maybe creating lower-poly models will be my next goal. Who knows of any software I could use? I think they're a couple hundred polygons now, I could likely half that and not change the looks on the small screen.

[TBone]

Another thing: does the PPC support batch files? That's the easiest way to move this stuff around routinely from CF and back that I can think of.

[Chris Edwards]

no, Pocket PC's don't support bat files (bat needs dos). Also, you can cut down your PAK file quite a bit, to like 4mb..maybe less. I think 999 got one down to about 2.5mb. You would loose the ability to play SP, but you could still play Multiplayer with bots..<br><br>I think you need a PAK explorer to do this.<br><br>Anyways.. Lower poly players would be great.

[suchiaruzu]

Yes, but where is da triple9-man?!?

[TBone]

I just did some looking around, and there isn't a lot of modeling software out there for Q1. I think I've found a utility that will do the trick, so I'm going to see what I can do when I get home. More news to come.<br><br>How much memory does Quake technically need again? I think I'm going to be brushing up against the threshold as it is to try and run it as a client, no extra memory. If I lose some of my startup programs I can free an extra meg, so that may help. That brings me to 1.65M program used, 1.69 storage used minimum (most of that's Transcriber) leaving me with about 13 megs. Lose 3 for the .pak and whatever map I'm playing at the moment, and I've got 8.5 left to run Quake (since WinCE demands that 1.29M storage memory buffer zone). I think that'll do it. It'll be tight, but I probably won't play online that much so I can save this config for really impressing people. Hell, this might even be enough left over to run bots and play Quake on just the naked iPAQ, which would kick ass.

[Chris Edwards]

i play quake on naked ipaq with bots all the time .. i have like 6 megs free.. it all works... i think..<br><br>

[TBone]

Yeah, but I'm sure you've got the 32meg version, you lucky bastard you. I've got to work with only 16 total.

[R0B]

I usually have about 22mb free .  I believe that the most that Quake can take advantage of is 16mb.  Look at one of the first lines in thwe counsule when Quake starts up at the heap size.  The hightest that it gets is 16, and changes size with the amount of free space.  I love my 64mb storage card ;]

[TBone]

Well, I couldn't get it to work naked, so I'm just going to dump the PC sleeve for the CF sleeve. After using the PC version for a while, you forget what a brick it is, and how nice the CF version is. The only reason I use the PC card one right now is if I want to dial into my ISP--since I can't do that from work for some reason there's no real reason to deal with the extra bulk.<br><br>So now Quake is right back where it started: the whole registered version on my 64meg CF card.