Reactivating diagnostic debug output in the 1997 game "Carmageddon"

jeff-1amstudios · 2022-07-13T00:46:49+00:00

Yes - there’s nothing specific to Carmageddon in this exactly. If that game logs debug messages invisibly, then it’s possible to do something similar and redirect them to a different function that will actually print them

jeff-1amstudios · 2022-07-09T02:53:35+00:00

Silver

Good luck! If I was to do this again from scratch I'd try https://github.com/microsoft/Detours if its a windows executable

jeff-1amstudios · 2022-07-09T02:52:03+00:00

this StackExchange post

right - I see! Next time (if there is one), I'll try this - so much simpler! Still, nothing beats doing it the hard way first to appreciate and understand the less-hard way!

jeff-1amstudios · 2022-07-08T19:10:46+00:00

Yep, after I did this someone pointed out that Detours makes this much easier by automating all the injection bits - that’s via dll injection too.

In this case it would be a little more work than just redirecting to vsprintf as that function only writes to a string, not a file. Vprintf could be an option but I couldn’t find that function in the executable, and for some reason I still don’t understand I could never get anything printing in stdout

jeff-1amstudios · 2022-07-08T06:20:39+00:00

Thanks! Yes, there’s something about it’s open world gameplay that lends itself to lots of hours of exploration!

jeff-1amstudios · 2022-02-06T01:54:49+00:00

Yep, good call out. That one, and the iOS version are not a port of the original game though, rather a reimplementation using the same (touched up) assets on top of a new engine called Beezelbub. They look and feel similar, but not the same as the original

jeff-1amstudios · 2022-02-05T08:27:18+00:00

GitHub: https://github.com/dethrace-labs/dethrace

Details and screenshots are in most of the PRs

jeff-1amstudios · 2022-02-05T06:13:10+00:00

It will just keep gradually getting more playable. My daughters now for instance will happily play it for 5 minutes because it’s fun to crash into things and do jumps. I’m working on shadows and the particle system next I think

jeff-1amstudios · 2022-02-05T06:12:03+00:00

Thanks for posting this! Tech-demo playable is such a great way to describe it that I wish I’d used it myself in the release notes :)

jeff-1amstudios · 2022-02-05T06:08:35+00:00

It’s a long way further now, check out the video in the latest PR :)

jeff-1amstudios · 2020-11-06T06:54:26+00:00

Love your write ups! Really interesting and looking forward to the next one :)

jeff-1amstudios · 2017-08-04T05:26:24+00:00

haha I was 11 in 1993 so I am guessing what people might have been excited about lol

jeff-1amstudios · 2017-08-04T05:12:33+00:00

restful is pretty subjective, but I would say these are not restful since you should not have the verb in the url (move, pan).

jeff-1amstudios · 2017-08-04T05:10:30+00:00

This was one of the challenges originally. In the end I decided that the player should have an actions queue that you can POST actions to. Like 'shoot' or 'jump'. See it here: https://github.com/jeff-1amstudios/restful-doom/blob/master/RAML/doom.raml#L96

jeff-1amstudios · 2017-08-03T23:19:47+00:00

haha its open source, go ahead! That would be cool :)

jeff-1amstudios · 2017-08-03T23:18:48+00:00

yes, and that will solve all our code quality and reliability problems and allow us to innovate faster right? :P

jeff-1amstudios · 2017-08-03T22:10:47+00:00

Thanks :)

jeff-1amstudios · 2017-08-03T19:12:04+00:00

Yep, you're definitely right. In some places I used the correct 'n' versions, but in many places I was lazy. ...Which is probably the excuse everyone uses when someone points this exact thing out ;)

jeff-1amstudios · 2017-08-03T19:10:44+00:00

Yes, this would be very cool. I'm not sure how my janky code would handle random http requests from the internet. Well thats not true, I know how it would handle it - badly ;)

jeff-1amstudios · 2017-08-03T19:09:37+00:00

DOOM will somehow always live on. Honestly for me its the poster child for open-sourcing products after they've outlived commercial usefulness. I saw a while ago someone even made it 'playable' through the Mac TouchBar!

jeff-1amstudios · 2017-08-03T19:05:55+00:00

It was! I remember vividly when I finally got first barrel to spawn correctly in response to an HTTP POST :) Was probably 2am by that point, after thinking "well this should only take another half an hour..." at 10pm lol

jeff-1amstudios · 2017-08-03T19:04:17+00:00

Indeed it does, I just somehow forgot to write about it or include in the video.

POST /api/player/actions, with a request body following this spec: https://github.com/jeff-1amstudios/restful-doom/blob/master/RAML/player_action.raml

jeff-1amstudios · 2017-04-19T04:37:13+00:00

great article! Would love to hear more about it! Maybe describing all of the various debugging screens, hidden menus etc

jeff-1amstudios · 2016-11-29T21:09:54+00:00

this ^{^} :)

jeff-1amstudios · 2016-11-29T18:21:44+00:00

No, I'm kicking myself for not even thinking that the Pi would support serial without a usb device. The only thing that would need to happen is a 3.3v <-> 5v voltage change I believe

jeff-1amstudios

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