OpenKatana

[gdiddy62]

Looks great!

[hogsy]

The Living Quarters…

A rather rushed but new blog post!

The Living Quarters…

[hogsy]

New Blog!

Hello everyone, apologies for the lack of an update but don't worry we're certainly still working hard on the project.

I've recently launched my own personal blog here.

And we also have plans to share the engine code on GitHub soon.

Thanks for everyones support though, it means a lot to us and it's really pushing us to do the best we can. Thank you

[hgdagon]

I've recently launched my own personal blog here.

Personal? The team split up?

[gdiddy62]

Glad to hear from you again!

[webangel]

Im very glad too.

Hope to get some project news soon.

[hogsy]

Personal? The team split up?

Nope but I thought it'd be nice to have somewhere that I could make more personalised posts about things other than the work we're doing as a team.

In other news I've made the source-code for the project public though it's still a little messy. If anyone is interested you can find it here.

[NightFright]

I have just checked Daikatananews.net and realized that since early June, a public testing version of the 1.3 patch is available.

Hope this means a release isn't too far off any more. Now that Romero has announced he is going to make a new shooter, I think it can't hurt to replay that classic again. Regardless of its actual quality. ^^

[hogsy]

I have just checked Daikatananews.net and realized that since early June, a public testing version of the 1.3 patch is available.

Hope this means a release isn't too far off any more. Now that Romero has announced he is going to make a new shooter, I think it can't hurt to replay that classic again. Regardless of its actual quality. ^^

Sorry but we've nothing to do with that patch, but there's a long story about that; it was supposed to be an effort to get Daikatana's source-code cleaned up to be released under GPL (Romero had asked for this specifically), and instead this other guy suddenly decided he'd just mess all that up and work on his own "patch" instead (not to mention we got lied to during all this and kept in the dark even though we'd originally been doing work on cleaning up the source-code ourselves).
I don't doubt the work of some of the others that have been involved on it, but his? I've heard that there's plenty of bugs in Daikatana that he will not bother to fix. Must admit though, I'm very happy that someone's gone to the effort of adding support for Linux

Now, with that out of the way, here's a small update I posted to Inside3D!

Here's a quick update; we're releasing a multiplayer alpha very soon, either Christmas or early next year, we'll see. I hope some of you will be able to check it out, we'll probably have a server up for a few days and do a little marathon or something. Anyway here's a few little snippets...









Additionally, all the base content used for Katana (OpenKatana's engine) is being released here. Nothing major on there quite yet, but if anyone is interested in playing around with the engine then they will be able to use this content as a foundation for their own projects, and be sure to check out the license document that's included. Additionally if you're looking for documentation; https://github.com/OldTimes-Software/KatanaEngine/wiki.

And here's a response I gave to someone else just in-case it clears anything up for anyone

I couldn't find some answers in the blog:

Is this a remake of Daikatana?

Yeah, sorry about this, we plan on setting up a website to give some better details about the project at some point but you're not the only one that doesn't fully understand the project (I think even Romero himself isn't entirely sure)

This is a standalone game inspired by Daikatana, that's probably the best way I could put it.

What is the focus? Being faithful to the released PC version alone, or introducing elements from the betas / Q1-engine era / N64 versions of the game?

The focus is being something really cool to play that takes a lot of inspiration from Daikatana, hopefully being what most people originally expected while also introducing elements cut from Daikatana's development; a lot of ideas that come from their Quake Engine period of development and a few ideas also taken from after they moved to the Quake II engine. We're in a somewhat fortunate position with a lot of that, but there's so many legal considerations with a lot of it too, which is why we're swinging down the inspired route rather than the remake route.

Does it require data from Daikatana itself, or is it standalone?

OpenKatana is completely standalone, it uses nothing from Quake and almost nothing from Daikatana (that needs to change though obviously, but most of that is just placeholder content).

All textures we use were made from scratch by both me and Eukos, in slightly higher-resolution, using the original texture set as inspiration.



The majority of models have been made from scratch, though the placeholder content I talked about are models that got pulled from the Daikatana alpha that we're just temporarily using. The prisoner gets a lot of abuse...

Where did the idea of this project come from? What inspired you to do it?

I used to do a lot of work with the Source Engine, but I wasn't really learning much from what I was doing with it and eventually decided to throw myself into something else for a change. I'd decided to try and figure out the differences between the base GLQuake engine and the additions that'd been made to the GLQuake engine used for Daikatana's alpha; I'd never done anything with file formats and such before, let alone anything major with the Quake engine, so this seemed like a good opportunity to learn new things. This was back in June 2011, and this is also when I decided to use FitzQuake as the engine of choice for a lot of this, purely because it just seemed like a cleaned up GLQuake with some additions that at the time I didn't care all that much for. I got fairly far with that I suppose, eventually I started trying to see if I could remake some of the levels using screenshots as reference just as something to do at the time, and then eventually Eukos joined in August, then proceeded by us receiving an archive of content from Daikatana's development, including a collection of builds from 1998 up until it's final release (some of these are public now); but I think that last part, oddly enough, was what drove us into making this into more of an inspired game rather than just a simple remake. There were just about all the levels from Daikatana's development included in this archive, which made a remake seem a little pointless to me when, practically speaking, just about everything was there and done. There's loads more to say about this project and how it developed into what it is now, but I guess we'll leave that until a post-mortem or something; we have a collection of early OpenKatana builds to release at some point anyway since they're almost completely different to what we have now (including incredibly messy QuakeC code, yay).

I like to think we did a pretty good job doing what we originally set out to do...


But doing a remake on a game that was still in development just doesn't work out too well, you could only produce something awful unless you put your own thought into it and hence why we're doing a bigger job now than what we originally wanted to do. Not to say it couldn't still come out awful, but it just hopefully means we'll have something a little more like a game and less of just a collection of incomplete ideas.

What are the main differences between OpenKatana and Daikatana?

There's actually a lot of differences I could go through... Daikatana is obviously based on the Quake II engine, while OpenKatana is based on a heavily modified FitzQuake engine (which is obviously based on GLQuake), for a start. Additionally just about all the characters in the game are slightly different than those from Daikatana, we threw out the names and thought of new ones (Hiro is still Hiro though, but his full name is now Hiro Hiyazaki). All the weapons have/are being redesigned from scratch. OpenKatana will probably be a tad darker in tone than Daikatana. We have a completely different soundtrack, it's a little more ambient and abstract. In some respects, OpenKatana should look better than Daikatana. A lot of the levels in OpenKatana are built upon some of the original 1996 levels with some really heavy modifications (entire portions have been completely shifted around), so levels will be completely different than Daikatana, so don't expect to see the same stuff.

OpenKatana's graphics looks really good, by the way. Specially the textures - and the green clouds are wonderful.

Thanks! Glad that our efforts aren't for nothing

[mankrip]

Yay.

[hogsy]

Thanks to Sly for producing the excellent concept-art for this weapon (which we'll hopefully show soon). This is a model that Marco has been working based upon that concept art, and all the other weapons will eventually have the same treatment.

This is still being heavily worked upon but I wanted to let you guys know how things are going.

Ignore the environment, it's just a small level that we use for ensuring that additional functionality to the tools/renderer doesn't end up breaking anything.

[R00k]

very nice! glad to see u still hammering away!

[QuakeKid]

Is this still a thing? I sure hope so, reading from the beginning to now was inspiring. What a great project.

[hogsy]

Yes this is still a thing...

[hogsy]

I know it's been a very long time but here's another rather quick update just to let you guys we're still at it!

And here's a video showing off the material editor that's been developed for the game.

Now here's some bad news, currently there's four of us actively working on the project; myself, Maik Merten, Sly and solemn warning. It sounds like a large number but we currently lack a modeller for the project, and we're desperately looking for someone interested in taking up the helm!

If you've got the time or you're interested in helping us produce this game and join the team, we'd really appreciate it right now.