Piccu Engine v1.1.1 (reissue)

Minor maintenance release. Reissued due to bug with dedicated server.

Changes

• Vertical sync won't uncap framerate on Nvidia.
• Attempted fixes for stuttering.
• Fix red guidebot in Mercenary expansion.
• Code cleanup, please report if anything is funky.
• Fix level 1 terminal levers not showing.
• Fix potential bug with mysterious watchers..
• Fixed writing garbage string when saving on level 4.
• Default PPS bumped to 30.
• PPS range in dedicated config can go up to 40 now.
• Use -pps to change client PPS if desired.
• -usesmoothing is now default, use -nosmoothing to turn it off.

Piccu Engine v1.1

New features

No mouse polling rate limit

Descent 3 normally polled the mouse at 20 hz, regardless of what your mouse was capable of. Piccu Engine will now allow you to poll at your mouse's native rate. Do note that you will have to adjust sensitivity to compensate for this, and this does add some framerate dependence to how fast your mouse polls. If these pose problems, you can restore the 20 hz polling limit by going to Options->Config->Joy/Mouse->Adjust Settings and changing the mouse polling limit to "Original (20hz)"

Additional

• Added minidumps on crash. These will be stored in your user directory (where pilots are stored) and stored with the current UTC timestamp. These can be uploaded to help debug crashes.
• Gamma correction now works, using shaders.
• Expanded vclip frame limit, though the overall bitmap limit still applies.
• Raise number of Windows Multimedia Joysticks to 15. The entire joystick needs rewriting.
• Framerate limiter is more precise now.

Bugfixes

• OOF model polygons won't cause stack corruption if a glow is attached and they have more than 30 vertices.
• Fix weird text clipping playing at high resolutions.
• Fix game constantly nagging about portable mode when a piccu_portable file exists.
• Fix some HUD elements (such as the reactor status in D3 level 5) being positioned differently based on resolution.
• Fix Mercenary expansion not being loaded from Steam data files.

Piccu Engine v1.0.1

Piccu Engine v1.0.1

New features

• Mouse buttons 4 and 5 can be used in-game now.
• Filesystem localization.
  When first running Piccu Engine, the game will save user generated content, namely savegames, demos, and pilot files into the user's Saved Games directory. If you do not wish to do this, put an empty file named "piccu_portable" in the directory with Piccu Engine's executable, and the old behavior will be retained. If there are any pilot files in the current directory, and the Piccu Engine saved games directory doesn't exist, it will ask if you want to make the install portable. Select "Yes" to make the install portable. Otherwise, Piccu Engine will copy all of the demos, pilots, and saves into the user's save game directory.
  This will not delete any existing data, to avoid any data loss.

Bugfixes

• Make weapon fire sounds stick to the player
• Fix glitchy walls in the mission "Lunar Outpost MN0019" and probably others
• Fusion damage should now scale based on framerate
• Omega will now no longer damage user when flying a Phoenix or Magnum
• Fix minor rendering problem with invulnerability display in cockpit mode.

Piccu Engine v1.0

Descent 3: Piccu Engine

Piccu Engine is a new engine for playing Descent 3 with enhanced quality of life features. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL, version 3.

Features

Piccu Engine provides the following features:

• Centered window mode
• Scaling in window and fullscreen mode
• Fullscreen which does not change desktop settings (multi adapter support forthcoming)
• New mouse code
• Adjustable FOV, with automatic expansion for widescreen
• Missing features in OpenGL restored, including specular highlights and the ability to control mipmapping
• Cockpit actually works in widescreen, unlike InjectD3
• Faster iteration when many missions are present.
• Smoother UI (FPS limit raised to 60)
• OpenAL sound system with no crackling and environment reverb support.
• text scaling for the HUD.
• Many bugfixes

Installation

Piccu Engine can be dropped directly into an existing Descent 3 directory, but this may not be desired if you wish to run the 1.4 release.
In addition, Piccu Engine cannot currently be run from Program Files without issues. This will change in a future release.

If you want to install Piccu Engine into another directory, the following files should be copied over from a patched 1.4 installation.

• d3.hog
• extra.hog
• extra13.hog
• merc.hog (if you own the Descent 3: Mercenary expansion pack)
• missions/d3.mn3
• missions/d3_2.mn3
• missions/d3voice1.hog
• missions/d3voice2.hog
• missions/training.mn3
• missions/merc.mn3 (if you own the 3: Mercenary expansion pack)

The following directories should be copied over if you want to play Piccu Engine in multiplayer

• netgames
• online
• missions/Fury.hog (stock Anarchy levels)
• missions/bedlam.mn3 (stock Capture the Flag levels)

The following directories may be copied over, but are not critical

• movies

Known Issues

The following issues are known about the current release

• Terrain rendering limits were raised, but the rendering code was not improved, making it significantly laggy even on modern machines. Adjust the draw distance and level of detail to make it run faster.

Future Plans

The following features are intended for future releases of Piccu Engine

• Better versioning in game
• Significantly faster rendering, using GPU shaders to reimplement missing features like bump mapping. This will fix the terrain rendering slowness.
• Ability to run either in "portable" mode (save config locally instead of in registry, and save locally) or to save data in user directories, so it can be placed in Program Files on Windows.
• Fix long-standing resource management issues, including assets being loaded by custom missions persisiting across level changes and game saves and loads.
• Automatic detection and loading of Descent 3 installs on the Steam and GOG platforms.

Credits

• btb: MVE source from D2X
• GZDoom: Revision checking CMake script
• OpenAL Soft: Primary sound library