wHeretic v0.5a Build 6 Released

[Mordeth]

Robin McLeod sent word that he has released a new version of his Win32 Heretic port wHeretic. Among the new features are:

• Overhauled the sound engine.
  
• Fixed a bug in the network code which prevented it from working with more than 3 players.
  
• Tweaked the video handling for improved speed.
  
• Converted the last of the column drawing funcs to ASM.
  
• Added the option to use MMX in the drawing funcs.
  
• Tweaked the keyboard code to work properly on Win9X.
  
• Disable artifact skipping when "always run" is enabled.

Problem with the new sound engine is that 486 users won't get a decent framerate. He might look for an alternative if enough people are interested in running wHeretic on those systems. There's also a diagram showing a fill rate comparison at different resolutions and word on MMX options.

As usual, you can download this new version from our source port section.

[DemilinX]

With MMX enabled, the rendering at 640x400 looks terrible IMO. The textures are defocused even when upclose and cause bad distortion from a distance. I am not sure why the MMX enabled feature or so different from disabled.. My guess is that the MMX rendering is supposed to be some low quality, software bi-linear filtering which ends up looking worse in the end. Besides the new MMX option, wHeretic is a great new way to play Heretic again.

[Guest McLeod]

The use of MMX in the drawing code is to just basically give me a few more registers to muck about in. From a pixel point of vue, I'm just flipping pixels during rendertime. I had another look at it again last night and I think that I agree with you. I think it might look OK on the spans but I'll probably remove it from the columns. An issue has cropped up with the sound in terms of performance so you can expect another build within a week or so to address this and a few other issues. Thanks for the support :]

[DemilinX]

Cool. :) Yeah, it was mainly the column rendering that looked distorted. Everything else seemed fine though. If you can squeeze a few more FPS out of optimizations through MMX or whatever, than that is appreciated. BTW, I have an AMD K6-3/400MHz and an Aureal Vortex2 (Monster Sound MX300 using latest reference drivers). So for myself, I don't care about 486 support. ;) Thanks for wHeretic and the A3D support!