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Quake 3 For Android

Posted by Soulskill on from the can-i-get-a-hell-yeah dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Over the last two months I ported Quake 3 to Android as a hobby project. It only took a few days to get the game working. More time was spent on tweaking the game experience. Right now the game runs at 25fps on a Motorola Milestone/Droid. 'Normally when you compile C/C++ code using the Android NDK, the compiler targets a generic ARMv5 CPU which uses software floating-point. Without any optimizations and audio Quake 3 runs at 22fps. Since Quake 3 uses a lot of floating-point calculations, I tried a better C-compiler (GCC 4.4.0 from Android GIT) which supports modern CPUs and Neon SIMD instructions. Quake 3 optimized for Cortex-A8 with Neon is about 15% faster without audio and 35% with audio compared to the generic ARMv5 build. Most likely the performance improvement compared to the ARMv5 build is not that big because the system libraries of the Milestone have been compiled with FPU support, so sin/cos/log/.. take advantage of the FPU.''

9 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. DUDE You're incredible by linhares · · Score: 5, Funny

    Team fortress by any chance? Steal the code, kill people, I can help with whatever task is needed.

  2. Hmmm. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dunno why TFA didn't include it, but there is video.

  3. I wonder how fast... by dvh.tosomja · · Score: 5, Funny

    > Quake 3 optimized for Cortex-A8 with Neon is about 15% faster without audio

    I wonder how much faster it will be without video

  4. Re:Not impressed by Beelzebud · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah and that is Epic Software doing that. They aren't exactly a hobbyist working without pay...

  5. What about the N900? by anomnomnomymous · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The N900 has also recently received a port of IOQuake3: Have a look at their site for more details.

    If you're looking for a very nice (open) phone, I'd go with the N900. No, I'm not from Nokia, just a -very- satisfied customer.

    --
    When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
    1. Re:What about the N900? by kamapuaa · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you read the article (I know, I know...) this is actually based on the N900 port.

      --
      Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
  6. Re:Not impressed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    If that is "Unreal 3", then it's a very, very stripped down version. It doesn't even look like it has pixel shaders, which removes all benefit to using it over the Quake III engine.

    By the way, the Quake III engine is capable of handling visuals that look better than the screenshots you linked to. Here are a few examples of what the Quake III engine can do.

    http://www.szico-vii.com/uploads/photos/16.jpg
    http://www.szico-vii.com/uploads/photos/17.jpg
    http://www.szico-vii.com/uploads/photos/31.jpg
    http://www.szico-vii.com/uploads/photos/42.jpg

  7. Re:Running Demos by Thunderbird2k · · Score: 4, Informative

    Demos should run well but from the main menu they don't work for some reason. During development I always ran them from the quake3 console (so 'demo four') and that works fine.

  8. Re:How about integers instead of floating point? by jgostling · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Unfortunately floating point numbers are required here.

    Not quite. When doing this stuff on a platform with limited or non existent floating point support you can always use fixed point arithmetic.

    Cheers!