Posted by
timothy
on from the nope-just-happiness dept.
szcx writes: "Two days after the code release, Dan East has ported Quake II to the Pocket PC. With NeoMagic's 3D chipset for handhelds and XScale on the horizon, how long is it going to be until we're playing Quake III: Arena on the train into work?"
You're right. It's (well, Quake 1) bad, especially on older model iPaq's. You have to balance the stylus to look with one hand, and the other hand needs to push forward, sidestep, and fire.
I could just be an un-coordinated git, but I couldn't get the hang of it.
Being able to run Quake on your PDA is one thing, being able to play it is another.
Could there be joystick add-ons? I think I could see an array of new add-on products for pocketPCs targeted for gaming, and this could be a real threat to handheld game consoles like GameBoy Advance.
Now, we don't have to bring a GameBoy, hoping other people will think it is a PDA, in a long boring meetings. We can bring our pocketPCs and play games legitimatly. Another great way to pretend to work, but a lot safer!
From the looks of that screenshot, there is alot of extra space under the main rendering area. Since many of the controls in Quake 2 are things that dont have to be done very frequently or very fast, couldent they be implemented as stylus input buttons?
Also a few games i have seen have an interesting form of input where the stylus is moved around in a definded box for joystick like control. This may be an option as well. I personally dont think a 'mouselook' type option would work well on a pocket device, and that youd be better off playing it like a fancy Doom.
-- "The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Re:Not Useable (yet)
by
RussGarrett
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
No, he said it was running well in an emulator, but only at about 3FPS at full quality on his iPaq, which he'd subsequently managed to get it running on.
I'd like to see how it goes on my 206Mhz StrongARM HP Jornada...
Re:a novel novelty, but a novelty just the same...
by
PepsiProgrammer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No, it certainly wont be as fun in a handheld version as on the pc, But you cant very well bring your PC to long meetings or boring classes either.
If your gonna say that you might as well say PDA's themselves are useless because the programs on them arent as usefull as their PC counterparts.
-- "The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Re:Only in emulation
by
PepsiProgrammer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The good thing is, there is alot of detail that can be reduced without noticing.....
Since the game is going to be running at a pretty low resolution anyway since the screen is so small. I think you could probably get away with decreasing the texture size some without even noticing a significant difference in graphic quality.
And if someone is willing to spend the time, converting all the floating point to fixed would speed it up immensely as well.
-- "The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Gameboy Advance
by
Master+Of+Ninja
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Ok, someone got Quake 2 to run on a pocket pc... But is it really worthwhile to do such a thing? I mean it might be a good programming challenge, but playing the game might not be so much fun. It would have been better to program a dedicated engine that would be optimised for PocketPC. YOu could make the engine so that it could use the four(?) buttons on a PPC unit, as well as having small runtimes and maps or whatever.
If you really wanted gaming on the move why not try the Gameboy Advance. It might not run quake (and it might cost a bit), but the games are tailored to the Gameboy, and the system is built just for games. I've heard that the game Ecks vs Sever is good, while there is still Doom for the GBA.
It's not just a cost savings but a space and (like you mentioned) power savings. It can significantly reduce complexity in the processor, and most embedded applications for PDAs. They don't need hard float for performance, action/FPS games are not a selling point for these products. Most PocketPC PDAs being made today are ARM based(some are MIPS)
I'm an embedded developer, I don't believe I've ever developed for an ARM device WITH an FPU, in fact.
Floating point alone won't necessarily expand the life of a PDA. For most people it's actually the physical construction of the PDA that determines it's life (if they actually intend to use it for it's scheduling/notetaking etc. purposes). PDAs are never designed around real gaming after all.
If you want portable gaming try Gameboy Advance. It happens to be based on an ARM processor, coincidentally, but I don't know if it has an FPU.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. It's (well, Quake 1) bad, especially on older model iPaq's. You have to balance the stylus to look with one hand, and the other hand needs to push forward, sidestep, and fire.
I could just be an un-coordinated git, but I couldn't get the hang of it.
Being able to run Quake on your PDA is one thing, being able to play it is another.
Could there be joystick add-ons? I think I could see an array of new add-on products for pocketPCs targeted for gaming, and this could be a real threat to handheld game consoles like GameBoy Advance.
Now, we don't have to bring a GameBoy, hoping other people will think it is a PDA, in a long boring meetings. We can bring our pocketPCs and play games legitimatly. Another great way to pretend to work, but a lot safer!
From the looks of that screenshot, there is alot of extra space under the main rendering area. Since many of the controls in Quake 2 are things that dont have to be done very frequently or very fast, couldent they be implemented as stylus input buttons?
Also a few games i have seen have an interesting form of input where the stylus is moved around in a definded box for joystick like control. This may be an option as well. I personally dont think a 'mouselook' type option would work well on a pocket device, and that youd be better off playing it like a fancy Doom.
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
No, he said it was running well in an emulator, but only at about 3FPS at full quality on his iPaq, which he'd subsequently managed to get it running on.
I'd like to see how it goes on my 206Mhz StrongARM HP Jornada...
If your gonna say that you might as well say PDA's themselves are useless because the programs on them arent as usefull as their PC counterparts.
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Since the game is going to be running at a pretty low resolution anyway since the screen is so small. I think you could probably get away with decreasing the texture size some without even noticing a significant difference in graphic quality.
And if someone is willing to spend the time, converting all the floating point to fixed would speed it up immensely as well.
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Ok, someone got Quake 2 to run on a pocket pc... But is it really worthwhile to do such a thing? I mean it might be a good programming challenge, but playing the game might not be so much fun. It would have been better to program a dedicated engine that would be optimised for PocketPC. YOu could make the engine so that it could use the four(?) buttons on a PPC unit, as well as having small runtimes and maps or whatever.
If you really wanted gaming on the move why not try the Gameboy Advance. It might not run quake (and it might cost a bit), but the games are tailored to the Gameboy, and the system is built just for games. I've heard that the game Ecks vs Sever is good, while there is still Doom for the GBA.
It's not just a cost savings but a space and (like you mentioned) power savings. It can significantly reduce complexity in the processor, and most embedded applications for PDAs. They don't need hard float for performance, action/FPS games are not a selling point for these products. Most PocketPC PDAs being made today are ARM based(some are MIPS) I'm an embedded developer, I don't believe I've ever developed for an ARM device WITH an FPU, in fact.
Floating point alone won't necessarily expand the life of a PDA. For most people it's actually the physical construction of the PDA that determines it's life (if they actually intend to use it for it's scheduling/notetaking etc. purposes). PDAs are never designed around real gaming after all.
If you want portable gaming try Gameboy Advance. It happens to be based on an ARM processor, coincidentally, but I don't know if it has an FPU.