Thank you very much, even though as you said, many elements of this were rushed and unpolished, I am proud of the “engine” code I wrote for this game. Not so much the gameplay code, which was tacked on at the end.

Indeed it’s a very expensive 1996 SGI workstation, but the O2 was a low-end SGI product, so I’d put it at most in parity with a high-end ‘98 PC. I intend to port this game to 3dfx glide at some point and do direct comparisons with voodoo cards, but I suspect even the voodoo2 might have better texture mapping performance, even though it comes with severe feature limitations over what SGI’s OpenGL implementation supported. And yes it is written entirely in C and OpenGL.

I can’t answer about the textures, but I think dstar’s notion was that you’re entering a sci-fi complex through some natural caverns and old entryways. The true reason for it of course is to give some visual variation to the level.

The sound lag you mentioned is an unfortunate bug that only appears on windows. The SGI and GNU/Linux versions do not have that, so I only noticed it at the very end of the jam when I tested the windows build just before submitting it. I suspect the issue is in the mikmod library which I’m using for cross-platform music and sound playback, but I haven’t had the time to dig into it yet and see if I can fix it.

Most of the crashes are there because during the rush of the last 10 minutes before the deadline when I was trying to build across all platforms and submit the game, I left in some extra floating point exceptions enabled which I had enabled for debugging. I essentially released a debug build. Sorry for that :) Of course they are still bugs on my end, but they would result in probably imperceptible glitches here and there instead of crashes if I remembered to remove them for the final build.

Thanks for the feedback, and for taking the time to report the issues you encountered!

Exactly! SGI machines were like the unobtainable holy grail for poor graphics programmers like me stuck on DOS PCs. It was “professional gear”, big league stuff … which is why I became obsessed about collecting them later in life :) And why it also seems almost absurd to use them as a game platform, I like the irony in that :)

And yes absolutely I was always getting disoriented and couldn’t play much of descent at the time, and I never liked fast action games very much anyway… but mechanically this freedom of movement makes it very interesting as a programming exercise :)

As for the level visuals, all the credit goes to dstar who made the awesome models and textures, and designed the level from scratch.

Thanks! you can change the mouse sensitivity in game.cfg (it will be created automatically first time you run the game). The option is called “mousespeed” and takes a value from 0 to 99. It’s under the “controls” section. I intended to make an in-game settings screen for all this, but couldn’t make it in time.

edit: optimus just pointed out that this won’t work. the reason is a stupid rename bug… the game looks for control settings under “ctl” not under “controls”, so it won’t find the values you put there. Rename the section to “ctl” and it will work, but unfortunately it will also over-write the config file with the wrong name again on exit, so save a backup :)

edit2: or better yet, just run this patch I prepared, which patches the windows executable and fixes the issue. run it in the same directory as the game executable, delete your game.cfg and start the game again to re-create it with the correct “ctl” section, then edit the mouse sensitivity and it will work: http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/sw/games/deeprunner/releases/deeprunner_patch1-win32.zip

ops! sorry about that… it’s a silly bug. It looks for these options under “ctl” not “controls”… rename the section to “ctl” and back-up the file, because unfortunately it will overwrite it with the wrong name again on exit…

edit: I prepared a patch for the windows version which fixes the issue. Run it in the same directory as the game executable, and it will patch it to use “ctl” everywhere. Delete your game.cfg and run the game to re-create it correctly, then edit it at will: http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/sw/games/deeprunner/releases/deeprunner_patch1-win32.zip

Thanks!

Keyboard remapping was almost there, but I didn’t have the time to make the options for it. The input code does go through a mapping table though because I had remapping in mind, so future versions will definitely allow for it.

I noticed the sound lag on windows. I’ll try to fix that at some point. I’m using a 3rd party audio library (libmikmod), and I’ll have to dig into their windows backend to see what’s going wrong. The bug is windows-only. GNU/Linux and SGI IRIX play the sound effects correctly.