Half-Life for Dreamcast has some functional multiplayer components

Aye again I don't mean to bump this thread so much. I thought testing with internet was more likely than the server connection commands so I got a little excited and ahead of myself

I'm getting a bit tired of the words 'connect and 'dll' lol but since we need to test what custom dlls allow us to do, we need the hlsdk code ready to compile for sh4. So I think getting that on github first would be a great idea. Then see what can be done with networking. If anyone wants to be added as a contributor on the github just send me a pm. By myself it will probably take a long time

 

Quick note i was looking through the cvars again and running 'serverprofile 1' crashes the game. I looked into the var and found this

http://gamegate2k.com/half-life/guides/basic-console-commands


I thought that may be useful information

 

I obtained the SH4 compile ready sources from someone. Added them to the GitHub
https://github.com/FaucetDC/HLDC_SDK

I didn't try them out or take a look at them. But they're supposed to be ready to compile
The sources are modified from the public HLSDK provided by Valve. So I hope putting them on GitHub is considered fair use. If this ends up working maybe Valve can work with us so this isn't considered piracy. Which I don't want to piss off legal people at valve/gearbox

 

Pro tip, don't contact Valve about this. Just view it simply as modding their games which they do allow. I wouldn't try pushing my luck lol.

And from what I heard Gearbox was the one who leaked the game.

 

How do you know that? Where did you read that? Just curious.

 

A few weeks ago I converted all/most of the textures from Chicken Fortress 3 to PVR format. I uploaded them to git. Its not what we need right now, but i already converted them so I figured i'd upload to SDK

 

I have heard this rumor many times over the years by a good couple of people. I have asked a few times here in threads if anybody knows the source of the leak and nobody would come forth with any information to say otherwise. I welcome any evidence that can say with a certain fact that Gearbox or an insider that worked on the game didn't leak it because they were sad to see all their work go to waste.

The only place I could see a reference to the original place the game was uploaded to was an old thread or torrent site.

 

It's really an interesting fact. I'd love to know the story behind this gem. If you have some links don't hesitate to share these with us

 

I wish it was more documented myself. I try to do "Internet Archaeology" on it but it is hard to turn up any info almost 13 years since it has leaked. I know it was leaked around January 2003, or sometime right before that.

In the Xanadu release they say only this.

All they say is they won't reveal who they got it from.

 

What's about the MUDS release? It's the same release as Xanadu?

 

All they say is this. Muds date is from February it seems too. Looks to me like they used xanadu release as a base and fixed some issues.

 

A question for anyone who can answer it; I saw that some others on this board discovered widescreen hacks using a codebreaker. So i found this http://web.archive.org/web/20040409...m/view.pl?HackingText/hackv500c#dc_code_types

Couldn't we find out the memory address that is called when we run something like 'exec server.cfg' to call the WindowsCE modem functions? I know Half-Life itself doesn't have the stuff in the executable to handle the netplay sockets, but is there anything i can look into using a CodeBreaker? Or is the only option compiling the new game DLL and using 'hooking' tactics? It might sound like a silly question but I haven't even considered trying to use a codebreaker to research further. I'm just as interested in why this wouldn't work

Edit: I don't mean making it work with codebreaker, but is there anything I could test?

 

Another update,


I looked more into Moi's SH4 ready source code. Which it seems like that's what we have. He had this to say about 4 years ago

But a few months later

So it may be likely that the sources we have is all the work that was done on this subject. But considering mods work, it might be possible to load the dll still. But I don't know

 

When I talked to Randy about this subject he said, I quote "I think I know who leaked it, (while smiling) good for him". So yeah, I think you're correct

 

While I haven't talked to Randy myself, I know someone that has spoken with him, and some of the guys over at Sierra who have mentioned off the record that it was indeed an inside leak.

The thing is, that running mods on the Dreamcast isn't dependent on doing really any coding. Dreammatrix said it is pretty much drag and drop the map files of your mod and edit some text file or something to load the maps in order and optimize the textures for PVR. This is in extremely layman's terms though. And that applies to only the most basic of modding.

I hope some day though we can further modify the game logic and add custom dll's. Some of the mods, or heck, even completely new games from scratch could be made with it. I have seen rally games made in the engine.



If we could get modding on the DC on par with the PC version, and have completely new genres of games created in the engine it would really open up homebrew on the system. It would also be on par with actual 3D retail releases since the engine is running on Windows CE.

 

Please remove this post mods accidentally double posted.

 

I agree, that should be done even if multiplayer does not work. But I think it should be debunked first whether or not multiplayer will work to know how imperative a mod loader/patcher or something is

It is a little more complex than dragging and dropping. You have to convert and downscale all the textures then re-render .WADs with the converted PVR textures, which i still haven't figured out. Then to compile a CDI that will boot on real hardware, you have to know what you're doing or the engine crashes on load

 

Well I heard back from Sizious

So it seems an external DLL is impossible. At least the way the engine is. I haven't spoken to Moi, he hasn't been on anywhere in a few months. So there may still be a way to pull it off. But it seems very unlikely at this point


However, there seems to be a better option. Porting Xash3D / XashNT. I didn't know the networking counterpart was released recently

http://www.moddb.com/engines/xash3d-engine/news/xashnt-in-development

So GoldSRC mods will not work right away, at least not in XashNT. The DLL code must be ported to Xash, then in this case, to DC. But this has been proven here
http://www.moddb.com/games/xash3d-android/news/counter-strike-clientdll-replacement


This may be a large undertaking from a development standpoint, but the result would be a multiplayer GoldSRC clone engine, with higher fidelity graphics than the HLDC build we have. And with features like ragdoll physics. Which would be really great to see physics running on DC if the hardware can handle it. At that point hypothetically, games like Half-Life 2 and Portal could maybe be ported. Since those games were developed around the Source Engine's physics, which at the time was impressive. Even a crappy graphic version of HL2 would be very impressive to see playable on DC. And would blow the doors wide open for developers to port things like that, or develop AAA quality games

Since Xash uses OpenGL, KOS most likely cannot be used since the OpenGL component of the engine is slow and unoptimized. Which means if WindowsCE or Katana libraries were used, any new games could not be sold. See here



So I think this thread ends here. If someone wants to make a thread for an Xash3D/XashNT port, go for it. I don't have the skills to start something like that myself. But I'd like to help whoever does

There's one or two more things I want to try with HLDC before the case is closed. If i do not bump again then those did not work

 

That's too bad.
However why not use hl1 sourcecode? Isn't this the complete, official, sourcecode?

 

A few more links while i'm at it






Having this run on Dreamcast would be truly impressive