Deathchase 3d v0.99

Suffice to say, some large differences exist between the games. Mervyn's pseudo-3d has been replaced with a modern-style 3d points and polygons engine, and the gameplay has had to be adapted slightly. Although it still feels like 'the same game' :

In order to run Deathchase 3d (recent version), you'll require a pentium class computer with the microsoft windows operating system. Also, DirectX (input and sound) and OpenGL (graphics) are required. Hardware acceleration is a bonus, but the game is playable on anything P200+ without. In order to run Deathchase 3d (not recent version) you'll require a ~3.5Mhz Z80 and some memory mapped display area, with seperate attributes. Ho hum.

This is release 0.99. It is as 0.95, but the sound system is fixed (thanks to 5 lines of code being on the wrong side of another 4, I was deleting direct the sound device before the buffers - which tends to lead to a crash), there is a movement towards supporting glide if it is present and OpenGL is not (since the 3dfx OpenGL is particularly inconvenient for users), and I created some sounds. I also changed the name of the executable so that it was no longer inexplicably missing an 'h'.

Verion 1.0 should have a more conventional bitmap title screen, and possibly some bug fixes, if any more arise. I am looking into better solutions for software rendering also - probably a DirectDraw 2d art version and/or a switch to 8bpp paletted mode for software OpenGL, but those may count as version 1.2 or something. Some lower detail models, and possibly some sort of distance/detail selection trade off are all possible too.

If you're thinking of porting it to your platform of choice, you must be able to provide keyboard and mouse input systems, and unless you really feel like digging into the source, an OpenGL viewport of some description. You could quite easily get away with a greatly minimal subset of the OpenGL library though. You'll understand if you see the source.

Just for reference, I've tested it on a 48mb P200 (not MMX) under software rendering and 3dfx OpenGL Beta 2 on my ageing voodoo 1. Both were playable and 'fun'. Although software rendering started slowing down greatly after about zone 8.

Anyway, enough of all that. You can download the source distribution (85.8kb) (for programmers) or the binary distribution (99.9kb) (for people who just want to play the thing).

Both distributions include the required data files, and the readme. The source code is C++ style C. When I wrote it, I didn't really know C++, and I thought it might be nice if someone could hack a port to lcc-win32 or one of the other free compilers. However, the general idea is that each C file does one specific job, containing a number of variables and procedures, some of which are visible to other source files, some of which are not. I.e. each individual source file would be perfectly happy to become a C++ object.

Until 0.95, the binaries were supplied by Chris Millett. So thanks to him! However, David Raven donated a copy of Visual C++ to me, so a) I am now able to build them myself, and b) great thanks must go to David Raven! I am contactable via this address.

Sorry if you hate it. I'm only young.