Today s update began with an experimental port to the Libretro API, but then became an onslaught of bugfixes and enhancements! Libretro Port As documented in this post, ClownDoom can now be built as a Libretro core, presumably making it the second Doom source-port to do so (alongside a PrBoom fork). The port is currently experimental, Continue reading "ClownDoom v1.2"
As I am sure any recent reader of my blog is aware, I have been modding Dead Rising 2 lately. I am not the first to do this, as even my own mod is based on someone else s. As I learned more and more about these pre-existing mods, something occurred to me: they were shockingly Continue reading "Decompiling Dead Rising 2: Off the Record with Debug Symbols"
Today s update is rather small: I was able to get the splash screen skip working in Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, as well as fix some bugs related to the frame-rate. In particular, pushable items, such as a wheelchair, would turn at different speeds depending on the frame-rate, meaning that playing at 240FPS would Continue reading "ClownDR2Fix v1.5"
In the last update, I mentioned that the survivor display popups had broken layering. The reason for this is that the game never creates a depth buffer for these popups, allowing polygons to be layered in any order, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Fixing this required learning a lot about how the Continue reading "Fixing Dead Rising 2 s Glitchy Survivor Popups"
Though ClownDR2Fix improves the resolution of mirrors and the survivor displays, there was one problem which it did not address: they were rendered without any anti-aliasing! Once again, I dived into the game s code to find out how and where it specified the anti-aliasing of its render targets. Soon, I was able to force these Continue reading "ClownDR2Fix v1.3"
Whilst playing Dead Rising 2 with my fiancée, I noticed that the little character render that appears when a survivor is off-screen was low-resolution. As with the game s mirrors, this was simple enough to adjust by increasing the width and height of its render target texture. I also updated SDL to v3.4.14, as v3.4.12 apparently Continue reading "ClownDR2Fix v1.2"
Increasing the resolution of Dead Rising 2 s shadows was great, but it made another of the game s limitations stand out: the mirrors displayed very blocky low-resolution reflections! I figured that correcting this would be as simple as increasing the width and height arguments to Direct3D9 s texture creation function, so this is what I tried. To Continue reading "Enhancing Dead Rising 2 s Mirrors"
I wanted to play Dead Rising 2 in co-op with my fiancée, but we were surprised to see just how shoddy the PC port is; controllers refuse to work, there is no windowed mode, and various graphical effects are broken. Installing a mod (DR2Fix) fixed the graphics, but it failed to fix the other issues, Continue reading "Making My Own Enhancements to Dead Rising 2 s PC Port"
On Libretro s Discord server, I saw someone mention compiling cores using Termux. That gave me an idea, and, within 10 minutes, I had ClownDoom running natively on my smartphone in HD, 21:9, and with full touchscreen controls. How could this be, and what made it possible? Last year, I created an experimental port of ClownDoom Continue reading "Porting ClownDoom to Android Unbelievably Easily"
Ape Debuts as Pre-Release Zig-Written Vulkan Implementation Debuting recently was Ape as a new Zig-written Vulkan implementation. Author kbz_8 says in the project s release notes Here lies the source code of a rather calamitous attempt at the Vulkan specification, shaped into an Installable Client Driver all written in Zig. It was forged for my own Continue reading "Every Phoronix Article…