More bug fixes
It seems most errors are occurring because of the lack of memory so I’ve add some code to check that and flush some cache memory when it occurs, so there maybe some more slow downs when cache is emptied/refilled but hopefully less crashes as a result. Also, this build is more optimized compiler-wise, so frame rate should be steadier.
August 7th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Nice job on the optimizations- I didnt crash after completing and loading a new level with music now, but I did crash in the middle of gameplay in level 2 unexpectedly
pc: 0209cede addr: 00000000
r0: 00000000 r8: 020e5c04
r1: 0b003abd r9: 020e574c
r2: 00000000 r10: 000004b9
r3: 000000cb r11: 020e5c10
r4: 0b003abc r12: 00000000
r5: 02258754 sp: 0b003aa4
r6: 020e574c lr: 00000004
r7: 00000000 pc: 0209cee4
0b003aa4: 02076884 0000000d
0b003aac: 00000000 0221500c
0b003ab4: 00000034 020ede60
0b003abc: c9c8c9cb 00000208
0b003av4: 00000003 02212db2
0b003acc: 02212dac 022692a8
0b003ad4: 00000000 020e5c00
0b003adc: 020e5be8 021fd690
0b003ae4: 010033c4 0006dcf6
0b003aec: 0086bb4f 021fd5ec
*phwew!* it didnt seem like much to type at first!
August 7th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Imagine doing it on a laptop without a numeric keypad. It’s not fun
Speaking of which, I had a feature suggestion for you. At work whenever programs I’m testing crash we can get minidumps. Could you generate a minidump we can send to you in some fashion, even if all it does is generate a stack trace for now? This has the added benefit of being able to catch stack traces even when we’re not in a position to jot down the stack trace & register info.
-Brian
August 7th, 2007 at 11:44 am
Oh, and if you did want to do a true minidump instead of just a stack trace, you could base64 encode the minidump so we can just paste it into a comment.
-Brian
August 7th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Mmmh, i only saved twice, loaded my game a few times, because i kept getting killed, then got “Can’t load midi.nfs”
When i checked it on the compy, everything seemed fine, but i couldn’t delete the DSCENT folder anymore and had to reformat my MicroSD again. Seems the corruption issues aren’t solved yet. :/
Thanks for doing all this work!
August 7th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Just thought it interesting to note that I am still experiencing as-of-yet perfect stability when music is silenced
August 7th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
This is probably a stupid suggestion, but have you considered adding support for that memory expansion cartridge that was included with the DS Web Browser? That might give you more overhead, although it would only be an extra 8MB of RAM.
JR
August 8th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Had my memory card get corrupted today without a crash occurring. I’m working on reproducing it.
August 9th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
This version corrupted my card too. I had my R4DS lock at the loading screen again upon a subsequent bootup, the same as I mentioned in the 4.1 set of comments. Some files wouldn’t delete, a couple others were corrupted, but I didn’t get any save errors this time, nor any crashes.
I really hope you can nail down the corruption problem, it’s a great port of a fun game.
August 13th, 2007 at 10:53 am
I believe the corruption is occuring when saving. I did a test over the weekend of playing through a level or two multiple times without saving and didn’t have any corruption. However, when I began saving my progress, after, I would guess, maybe 3-5 saves, my card was corrupted.
-Brian
August 13th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Got an exception just now after finishing level 20. I was viewing my bonuses, hit ‘b’ to continue to the briefing for the following level and received:
Exception occurred!
Data abort!
pc: 02087C6C ADDR: 819F612
R0: 02388364 48: 00000001
R1: 75E172A7 R9: 00000000
R2: 7819F60F R10: 020B3584
R3: 00000001 R11: 00000000
R4: 7819F60B R12: 023295F8
R5: 00000000 SP: 0B003AC0
R6: 00000001 LR: 02329608
R7: 000000E1 PC: 02087C74
0B003AC0: 00000001 020E9324
0B003AC8: 02388050 00000001
0B003AD0: 00000001 02088A38
0B003AD8: 000077FF 02347CF0
0B003AE0: 0214252C 02022E80
0B003AE8: 00010800 00000000
0B003AF0: 020B4A18 00000015
0B003AF8: 020E56DC 02147680
0B003B00: 020B361C 02082370
0B003B08: 00006000 00000015
August 15th, 2007 at 6:55 am
Hi, would it be possible to add motion capabilities to the port?
With ndsmotion ( http://ndsmotion.com/ ) and the like, tilting the craft would be something previously impossible and very impressive i think!
CervAnteZ
August 15th, 2007 at 8:57 am
Got a new kind of funky bug last night- [ was playing for fun, not with intent of testing, with music off- which by the way still has never produced a red screen ] In the large empty cavern at the beginning of level 12 [ Insane difficulty- with gabbagabbahey, racerx, bigred & mitzi ON ] I was being peppered by plasma from a heavy driller and the textures disappeared, leaving white gourad shaded polygons, and the game hard-froze. No red screen, no dump. Not the biggest deal because even commercial DS games have done this, although rare [ I’m looking at you, EA ] but figured it was worth reporting
August 15th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
That might be an interesting way to play descent, having the textures off for walls.
I’ve seen that type of lockup a number of times as well, usually with automap on, and particularly when I’m under heavy fire, or there are a lot of enemies around.
-Brian
August 20th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
On level 18, get the yellow key, move to the chamber adjacent to the blue key room. Face the blue key room & turn left, through this door & continue straight through the yellow door. Once in this room there’s a cavern that leads to the red key. The problem I ran into is: the entrance into the red key room from the room just inside the yellow door was blocked by a wall, but the texture on the wall was stretched in an odd fashion. There was no way for me to reach the red key room. I got stuck in the wall trying to get through, and had to restart, afterwhich I’ve been unsuccessful at reproducing this problem.
September 10th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Still getting:
“Error: Can’t open file ”
upon attempting to load level 15.
October 3rd, 2007 at 11:01 am
Months straight, still have not had a single crash as long as i turn music all the way down… But I was wondering- any success loading custom missions? I have yet to successfully load even a small one without tanking into a red dump screen.
October 17th, 2007 at 5:09 am
Are we gonna see a DScent update any time soon?
October 29th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
I sure hope this effort is still alive… You’ve done such a great job so far. Its so good, that its hard not to ask when the next update will be every time I check back here. However, I’m sure you are a busy person like the rest of us ( well.. MOST of us, heh ) and since im not the ARM7 and ARM9 coding type, is there anyone here that could help out or does anyone know someone capable/possibly willing? Besides a few quirks/issues, this game is extremely playable as it is… I’d love to eventually map for it, and if we could cram the Descent II engine in to this machine eventually…
Yeah, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Anyways, hope to see more sometime. Peoples jaws drop when I show them what I’m running on MY DS
November 27th, 2007 at 12:24 am
Has this become a forgotten project? Has ANY further development been done….even if it hasn’t been released?
I mean, I’m starting to think crickets and tumbleweeds here and it makes me sad since I consider this game to be as good as anything produced “officially” on the DS.
It would be nice for kayvenm to say something…..anything, so at least we would know where things stand.
December 16th, 2007 at 12:33 am
I miss DScent
December 21st, 2007 at 12:37 pm
He’s probably in school, meaning he doesn’t have time to work on this right now.
kayvenm: If you don’t intend to continue work on this, will you release the source for the latest version? It would be another year or so until I had time, but I’d be willing to pick up the torch if you aren’t going to have time.
-Brian
December 21st, 2007 at 8:39 pm
Good point, that school. It certainly would be nice if he decided to release the source code. I was thinking that myself but I don’t have the coding skills to back it up. Its amazing how well this game works already! I remember running Descent on a 486 DX 50 with 4MB RAM and having to crank detail down… Full detail on a 4 MB DS [ obviously better CPU and HW video support but still.. ] is really impressive. I play it so much in my free time that I’d love to help in any way I could. Perhaps custom re-sized graphics for the main menu background and briefings could be made and utilized… etc.
As usual I’m getting ahead of myself, but… umm… yeah
Kayvenm: You made an extremely looong road trip to Canada much more bearable. Thanks, man!
June 16th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Is this project completely dead? If so, please release the source, some of us might find the time to further work on this project.
-Brian
February 2nd, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Any chance of updated source code for the latest build being posted? I had to make some modifications to the Alpha 3 code to get Save games working on my Supercard. I’d like to make the same changes to Alpha 4 so I can use the updated build.
August 3rd, 2009 at 1:13 am
Daggone, I wish you’d pop back up Kayvenm. ( shoot, I at least hope nothing bad happened to you ) Went from a Datel Games N’ Music on a DS Phat to an Acekard 2i on a DSi and started playing DScent again.. Been able to port the first level from Descent II to it and run it ( the textures are closest-match and the bots are all D1 of course )
I’ve seen people all over the net talk about this project here and there, but there doesn’t seem to be any progress like the good ol’ days. This is still IMHO the best homebrew project out there, and theres a lot of room for improvement!
One thing- to anybody that still checks up here and has the time… Most of this games problems come from hitting the memory ceiling, and that got me thinking.. The sound FX in Descent.PIG are 11KHz in the registered version, but if I recall (and thats a BIG if) were 8KHz in the shareware. Perhaps downsampling at least a few, if not all SFX could greatly increase stability?
….Well, at any rate- if anyone has picked up the torch on development on this and has made progress, let us know here! It’d sure beat googling around and searching forum after forum.