March Roundup (Patreon)

More progress was done in the ID1 maps. Now all maps are done except for e2m6, e4m4 and e4m6.

For e2m6, I've combined the original entrance (e2m10) into it, to deliver a more complete experience. Now it's just a matter of fixing all leaks.

After fixing all leaks in a map, the map also needs to be fully inspected during gameplay to ensure that there are no missing polygons caused by brushes with non-integer vertices.

All of the recompiled maps are also being recompiled with phong shading and lightmapped liquids. The Q shadow in e1m5 was also restored by using a different method.

There's also a small side project I started working on this March, which is to remake the Ken stage from the Street Fighter II Champion Edition ROM hack for the Sega Master System port of Street Fighter II. Initially I had a few ideas on how to improve it, and after talking to xfixium in the SMS Power forums I started playing around with his SMS Editor tool and decided to see how far I could push the SMS graphics.

My version of Ken's stage is on top of the third screenshot, his version is in the bottom. Mine is still unfinished, but the difference is already noticeable. The SMS seems able to produce much smoother graphics than people are used to. I've remade half of the tiles already, employing all of the knowledge of color I've learned during Retroquad's development to improve and smooth the tiles pixel by pixel, manually performing dithering and error diffusion.

Ken's stage is the only thing I'm going to remake in this ROM hack; it's just an exercise (working with only 16 colors is quite a challenge), and I hope to inspire people by showing how this graphical quality can be achieved. I'll release it as soon as Ken's stage is done, but a few weeks ago I've paused my work on this ROM hack to resume working on Retroquad.

A couple weeks ago, however, I bricked my smartphone while trying to upgrade it to run the government's app to file my income tax return, and lost many days trying to find ways to at least backup the data from its internal storage, but nothing worked. After finally giving up I formatted the internal storage and lost everything in the phone. Now the phone is working again, but several apps and features in it are buggy or crashing. Anyway, now at least I don't need to spend money on another phone in a hurry.

I've also spent a few days trying to figure out why in the last couple months there was no progress on the lawsuit to sell my mom's house, studying the related legislation to find out what could be happening and what I can do to speed things up. Last friday I went to the court building and the workers in there told me they're going to do their work asap, but this week I should go in there again. If no progress is made this week, I'll likely have to file a complaint in the Internal Affairs office. My lawyer should've looked into this, but he's an elderly guy and I hired him for a fraction of what any other lawyer would charge, so sometimes I have to do the footwork myself.

For the next release of Retroquad, I'm planning to implement a better way to do scrolling textures, and I'm also pondering about trying to port code from other engines to automatically detect and use the contents of the Steam installation of the Quake remaster. This would simplify the usage instructions even more for the upcoming public release, allowing many people to play the registered version of the game and see the MD5 models right out of the box.

I'm also going to do a recap of my plans to see what else needs to be implemented, such as menu options for easily switching between presets (high quality rendering, or fast rendering). As always, I'm open to suggestions.