OpenArena 0.8.1 released!

OpenArena is a Free Open content package for the id tech3 GPL source code package. But why is it a game? Well you see one of the great side effects of making content for a bunch of source code out there is that it becomes a playable game itself. This opens more opportunity for FUN to the end user because they have another option to play a game that you couldn't play without the data because now there is data made for it. And since this data created is also FREE, it's very redistributable. Meaning more people can play it with little effort on obtaining it. This is A Good Thing.

The gameplay is identical to the game it's based on so fans of that other game should feel at home here. We do not intend to change the physics of the game. If you feel there is a change of physics of input smoothness, you can blame the ioquake3 team, not us; we just make MD3s and TGAs, compile the code and put it out there.

HomePage
http://openarena.ws/

Download AmigaOS 4.x version
http://capehill.kapsi.fi/quake3/openarena.lha

@samo79

Yes ! Nice indeed, very nice

I played for a moment in 800x600 resolution with 32 bit textures, triple buffering, no antialiasing, very high quality texture on myAmigaOne G3/800 with Radeon 9200 Pro and AmigaOS 4.1.

The games lacks a little bit smoothness but is playable nonethelesse

No crash either, everything worked perfectly.

A very good port, thanks for this hard work.

@K-L

Thanks for the feedback, but the author is Capehill

P.S.
Good that it works so fine at the first release

@samo79

Yeah, I know this is M Capehill but I thought you helped it a little bit with this work

By the way, I copied all the mods I was using with Quake 3 into OpenArena and they are working better with OpenArena.

You can even play Quake III with OpenArena:

1? Copy the baseq3 drawer from Quake 3 to OpenArena and rename it to Quake 3 for instance (to recocginze it more easily)

2? Choose one of your Mod in OpenArena

And paged memory is working very well too since while playing Urban Terror Mod, I ran out of physical memory but the games still went on even if the system memory was indicating 0 free memory.

So, a very very good port indeed

@K-L

Hehehe no no, i'm not a coder, sadly I can't help in this way, I just post the news about the release!

@samo79
Works great here too! One note, you do not need to unpack the .pak files (I did at first), I know the instructions didn't say to do it but I couldn't help myself which made my first install fail. Works fine by just moving the .pak files into the directory.

Thanks Mr Capehill for your fine work.

ace

Do we need to have the full version of Quake3 to play OpenArena ?
Is there an OpenArena that contain the needed files to play arena ?
I've seen that the PC version of OpenArena is 304Mo... Does this version contain needed files to play OpenArena without the full quake3 game ?

Regards,

@samo79

Thanks Samo for news ;)

A couple of words about OA:

- it is generally slower than Q3A, because it uses larger textures and more vertices in models if I remember correctly.

- if you had issues with Q3A, you are likely to have them with OA as well. The codebase is 99,99% the same.

@Capehill

You are welcome

@samo79

Doesn't work here with the sam.. the known problem about the green on the 3D but the game is a slide show.. if i try to unpack the pak3 files the game doesn't start.. like quake3 arena..

@freddix
You don't need Q3, the 304.zip file has all you need. I find it only a tad slower than Q# but I'm a terrible player so that helps me.

ace

@acefnq : Ok, thank you for this informations.
Will get it a try today later :)

@Capehill

I get random freezes and hard reset is required. Impossible to play.

How much free RAM does it need ?

@TSK

I have no idea what the actual memory requirements are, but I have an A1XE G4 @ 933 Mhz with 512 MB and a Radeon 9000 pro graphics card and it runs without problems.

Hans

I installed OpenArena on Sam440ep/AOS4.1.
It works! But it is far to slow -- even on lowest possible resolution and gfx-details. I guess, I get 1 or 0.5 Frames per second :)

Unbelievable that it should be playable on a A1@800Mhz.

Anyway, good job! works without crashes

nexus

@nexus

Quote:

That surprises me. I know that some games are playable with my Radeon 9000 pro that are too slow with a Radeon 7000 card, but the Radeon M9 in the SAM is a 9000 series card. I would have expected OpenArena to be running at a reasonable frame-rate on the SAM.

Does anyone have any specs for the Radeon M9 so that we can compare it to other cards? Also, can you please check if something is spitting out debug information while you're playing the game ("dumpdebugbuffer ram:log.txt"); there shouldn't be, but that would slow things down.

Hans

@TSK

I have only 256 MB (+ SWAP partition).

@nexus

Possibly a driver issue or maybe something wrong with the compiler flags? I don't have SAM so I can't experiment.

EDIT: and stop guessing, open console and type cg_drawfps 1 ;)

@Hans

Does 9000 have any issues with Q3, by the way?

EDIT: Q3 indeed puts stuff (console prints) to serial, but not per frame basis.

@Capehill

Quote:

I don't have Q3, so I've only tested OpenArena. I used OpenArena as a test case for getting rid of a number of graphics bugs in MiniGL (e.g., missing walls).

As for the debug output. With MiniGL 1.5 I left in a debug statement in a function that Q3 called and, as a result, Q3 slowed down. I quickly removed the output and uploaded a new version which fixed that problem. There is a small possibility that something like that is causing trouble on the SAM.

Hans