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DUGL and FreeDoom (Announce)

posted by FFK Homepage, 13.08.2009, 14:37

> I've been playing a lot of FreeDoom
> lately, and all the DOS ports of Boom-compatible engines are old and
> bitrotted, hard to compile, buggy, etc. They all use Allegro (except one),
> and Allegro 4.22 (last DOS version before DOS support was dropped) is buggy
> as hell, many regressions (pat2dat, packed files, SB 2.0 mixing). Most of
> them use older Allegro 3.12, which works okay (patches.dat, vbeaf.drv),
> e.g. on my P166 (ATI Mach64 1 MB VRAM, AWE64) or DOSBox.
>
> In short, DUGL is a games lib, no? So it could probably be used instead.
> Not that I'm volunteering, mind you, but it should be possible and
> probably is a good idea. I mean, it can't be that hard. :-)
Yes DUGL is a games lib, but no game was released yet using it :-D
I started working on a 2D game, but it will take time as i don't want to reproduce what was already done on the past.
I made look to the source code of FreeDoom yesterday, and i think that we need
a volunteer that have good knowledge of the source code. And he will be helped by me. We need a list of graphic functions needed by FreeDoom and see if DUGL is able to provide them all.
By first look DUGL is missing :
- Perspective corrected texture mapping : solution is to split near/big triangles into several triangles to reduce the bad effect.
- Texture wrapping : we have two solutions, make bigger textures with replicated image, or again detect texture wrapping and split the triangle into several triangles.
- VGA : not all VESA give access to low resolution graphic mode (320x200..)
I'm not sure if freedom require low res mode, but if so we need to emulate them, by rendering to small RAM Surf and then resizing into 640x400 or so.
- Sound : What are the sound requirement of FreeDoom ? Currently only SB16 and SBPro are supported, does this cover enough PC ? each driver has an internal mixer capable of mixing up to 32 voice, i guess enough ?

Now come the legal issue. As DUGL is a free but not GPL and closed source. Can we use it into a GPL software ? maybe it's covered by the the system library exception ?

By the way i'm curious to know how much fps you get with "fog16" demo on your
P166 (ATI Mach64 1 MB VRAM, AWE64) :-D does the sound work for you ?

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