giwake

game developer, I think?

  • they/them

i make games and music, sometimes.

profile picture by @thewaether!!!

moving to https://bsky.app/profile/giwake.bsky.social


Kinsie
@Kinsie

A while back I put together a handy Trello board called Sector Effectors. This takes pretty much all the 1990s-2000s-era first person shooters (and some adjacent games) available for legal purchase via digital distribution (as well as a few that used to be but have been delisted for whatever reason TIM), and serves two purposes:

  1. It tells you what state they're in "out of the box" - a depressing number of them are barely compatible with modern systems off the bat, even when attained from GOG, who kind of made fixing this kind of thing the thing they built their reputation on.
  2. It tells you how to make them work better on modern systems. Config file tweaks, DLL wrappers, source ports, alternate master servers for multiplayer, and so on and so forth.

Every so often I go in and improve/tweak things as I double-check whether half my library still works. Hopefully you find it useful! If there's anything you think needs improving or that I'm missing, shout at my face in the comments!


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in reply to @Kinsie's post:

UT2004 runs alright out of the box but in widescreen it chops off the top and bottom, and the fov slider doesn't go high enough to bring even 16:9 resolutions on par with 4:3 ones. This patch solves it but requires a manual ini edit described in the readme: https://github.com/alexstrout/foxWSFix-UT2k4/releases/latest

Also, UT2004 (and all pre-9 directx games) have broken vsync on windows 10, which can cause screen tearing. In UT2004 this can be easily solved with this: https://github.com/crosire/d3d8to9/releases/latest

As expressed on discord a few weeks ago regarding quake 3, I think quake3e is a better choice than ioquake3 due to ioquake3 defaulting to a terrible opengl 2 renderer that has broken vsync and defaults to enabling some postprocessing effects like tonemapping and exposure somethingorother that are barely perceptible vs the original renderer but use more resources. quake3e has an updated opengl 1.1 renderer with functional vsync and a few other modern options like anisotropic filtering.

It may also be worth directing people toward the unofficial patch, this hud version that works properly in widescreen and auto-adjusts fov, and the famous CPMA mod. CPMA also has their own source port, which I haven't tried.

Interestingly, that widescreen patch page for Clive Barker's Undying now directs to a mod called Undying Renewal that has a vulkan renderer. I may try that since a glide wrapper makes the lighting look like shit vs the directx renderer, but the directx renderer lacks some minor effects the glide renderer had.

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