Morrowind

[svx]

Random gaming question...

A few months ago, I was programming Morrowind for the Sony PSP.  A solo project;  I got as far as making the fonts work, textures load, menus operate, and had the world/NPC's/items rendering with proper lighting.  Everything was running at around 20 FPS, so after I had a good idea of what I was doing, I started re-writing my code...  I know I could make it run at 60+ FPS on the PSP, although nobody else seems to think so.  Magical thinking got in the way, of course.  I started wanting to do things like create a physics engine for it, or to improve on the dynamics of the original game.

And then... I... wasn't quite as drunk.  I mean.  I only write programs when I'm drunk.  What good is a program that isn't written when the programmer isn't drunk?  It's not, that's that the answer.  It's not good.  It's bad if I'm not intoxicated.

Anyway.  I got to thinking -- why am I doing it?  There's about ten people who hack their PSP's for playing homebrew games anymore.  I could port it over to the Wii or PS2 or even the PS3 or something easily enough, but would anyone bother to play it?

Ehhhh.  My question is... erhrm....  What should I do?  Should I finish my project?  Should I move on to something else?  I have some good ideas for other projects.  But I'm a loner.  I've never worked with anyone before, so everything is on me;  what's better?

1.)  Morrowind for the PSP
2.)  Morrowind for a different console / open source code?
3.)  A multiplayer Castlevania-style game using Scalable Vector Graphics and 3D models?
4.)  A window manager for X that, in fewer words than necessary, obliterates all others (as per my ideas)?
5.)  Something else??

I have a lot of time.  And a lot of booze.  And I really want something to work on.  I like soldering and working on hardware, but nothing gives me the feeling of making awesome software...

Ideas?  Nejin.  Nejin, give me ideas.

[Red-Machine]

Well, my PSP is on official firmware so I won't be able to play it, but I do have a suggestion for an alternate platform.  The Dingoo A320.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingoo_A320

There's a pretty large community for it and the community-made OS is basically Linux so it should be pretty easy to code for (the likes of DOOM, Wolfenstien, Duke Nukem have been ported to it) along with many different emulators including PS1 and N64.  However, the Dingoo does not have hardware 3D accelleration, as the likes of the GP2X Whiz do, so you may have problems on that front.

[svx]

That thing sounds awesome!  It reminds me of this one thing I can't remember that my friend showed me.  Something to rival the PSP, but with a larger screen, a 1ghz 32-bit processor, and something like 2 GB RAM...

I'm a perfectionist.  My Morrowind implementation is about as cross-platform as can be, as long as there's a C compiler that accepts c99 code for the platform...

The only thing left to do with the original version I wrote was to figure out the original game's scripting language (and the user-created scripting language extending program for some of the user-created mods for the game), and to finish some of the very, very lesser-used functions in Morrowind's mesh format and add them, as well as adding animation and adding whatever other features I come up with to it.  It'd work on that pretty much out of the box if I finished it as it is, just like it would for the Wii or for (32-bit/64-bit/Maybe even DOS on the PC if I wrote some assembly) the PC...

Do people like Morrowind enough for it to be worth me making it though, and finishing the rewrite I'm doing of the code I already have made?  I stopped about four months ago, and haven't written a line of code since just because of that thought...

Ps -- Why official firmware?  Unless it's a PSP Go!  Mine's a PSP 3k with the ChickHEN thing.  I guess.  I dunno.  I'm drunk.

[Red-Machine]

How big would it be?  The Dingoo has 4GB of built-in flash memory and can accept up to an 8GB flash card, I think.  I'm planning on getting a flash card for it soon so I can install Dungux (the community OS) and get some more games on it.  I'd certainly be interested in it if you ported it.

With regards to the official firmware, I fiddle with things too much and I'd be liable to brick it all the time if I sued custom.  My brother has done that several times with his and all he was messing with was the bootscreen!  Mine's also an original PSP 1000 Series, if that makes a difference.

[NejinOniwa]

Morrowind, huh...was a while since I played that, and I mostly remember using some weird mashfuckup of a spell and jumping like a stellar kangaroo and dying when the spell ran out. -w-;

Unfortunately I only own a DS, which isn't the easiest thing to port things to (I think), and I have little knowledge when it comes to console hardware. As of that, though, R4 cards/clones allow usage of micro-SDHC cards, which means in the ranges of 32gb as a theoretical max.

As for ideas, hack some OS-tans into it, and you have the collective interest of the entire board, I'm sure. -w-;

[PizzaDrill]

Morrowind, huh...was a while since I played that, and I mostly remember using some weird mashfuckup of a spell and jumping like a stellar kangaroo and dying when the spell ran out. -w-;

Unfortunately I only own a DS, which isn't the easiest thing to port things to (I think)

It depends on your DS, really. If you have a phat or lite, it's a lot more difficult, due to that you only have 4MB of system RAM. DSi has 16MB, and I have some experience working with the dreamcast, which also has 16MB of main RAM. 'Course, I only have a lite, so everything I code has to fit in 4MB :/

[NejinOniwa]

lite user here. It might be less, even, considering its chinese... -w-;

[svx]

How big would it be?

Ehhh, probably around 800 megabytes on the hard drive; however big the original one is, plus some kilobytes for some files to cache the contents of the game data so that it loads quicker on slower hardware like the PSP or that thing...

The PSP has 2 MB of video RAM and 32 MB of system RAM (for the old models), or 4 MB of video RAM and 64 MB of system RAM on the newer slim ones...  I eat that video memory up, but I'm guessing the whole thing could work on something with 16 MB of RAM in total, just as long as the graphics unit can pump out the triangles and textures quickly enough.

The thing with the PSP is, it supports the compressed texture format that Morrowind/DirectX things use natively, so it might need more RAM if the target system needs the textures to be uncompressed instead.  It'd make it take a bit more time to load unless I made it dump the uncompressed textures to the disk/memory card/USB drive/whatever!  Which I would.  It has practically no load time at all on the PSP for most of the cells I've tested (Balmora's exterior, Caius Cosades' House and the like -- not really complex cells), even though the original game still takes more than a few seconds on my Athlon 64 X2 5400+ PC with 4 GB RAM...

Another thing to consider though, is that I also found out recently that someone else has been working on an open source version of Morrowind.  They wrote it in some obscure programming language called D, and it seems to be more close to being finished than mine is.  But theirs isn't portable.  Or fast.  Ehh.  Maybe I should finish the rewrite of the code I already have, and put it on the internet for someone else to work on or something?

Ps -- Regarding PSP's, you're in luck! The PSP 1000 is really desirable just for the sheer fact that it's impossible to [really] brick the thing.  All you need is a spare battery to open with a razor blade, and then, if I remember correctly, you just need to unsolder or cut off one pin on the chip inside of the battery.  Then you can pop the battery in and enter the recovery menu to load any firmware you want, even if it's in bricked mode.  You might be interested in looking it up on the web just to know more about it!  Because it's cool.

Ps 2 -- That spell was awesome, Nejin.  Look up speed runs of the game on google video sometime!  It's hilarious that some people found out how to beat Morrowind in ~2 or 3 minutes from jumping that high.  Probably why the sequel  doesn't have any flying or jumping spells.  :p

[NejinOniwa]

But you could make them yourself...sorta. Fortify Acrobatics +LOTS, and there you go. -w-

[Alex_Reetz]

*yells from dark hallway*

"Fallout 3 was better!!"

*flees*

[Red-Machine]

Did you make any progress on it?