Psp. Hated and loved

[Jukki]

Well about thistopic. Idea of this came in my mind loong time ago. So i finaly decided to grab my iphone and write this. (note: iphone, currenty i have only iphone.

Well most of you know psp. Handheld portablegaming console made by sony. Having 32 mb (old model) and 64 mb (newer models). Having only 333 mhz procesor and big widescreen. Bigger than iphone but resolition is smaler. It is know in homebrew communities well because of its easy hacking to be able to run homebrews.
Psp also has one very specific homebrew. Quake. This nice opensource engine wasnt realy used by devdlopers until the (imo) best psp fps shooter kurok. Kurok used heavily modified psp quake engine having lots of nice features, good gameplay, nicely done maps and models. It could be compared even to some good commericial psp games.
Well most of you guys know psp "devs" too well. Bunch of peapol who think they have superhuman abilities of making awesome game ideas (wich are suprise suprise commericial games from other consoles) who havelittle to no modding experience. Always asking for help etc. Of course there is quality members too. Solitude is one very good example. Their work is almost profesional. Other good mentions are imo csportable. Even thought it has crappy ghraphics etc with litle more work. It would have been awesome. Well of course the game i am working in nzportable is also suprise suprise clone of other game. But comparing to other SUPAHAWESOMWIDEAS we have good team and actualy good progres.
Well why there is thease SUPAHAWESOMEWIDEAS?
1) because psp doesnt have that halo/cod/l4d etc. Yes theade supahawesome games that are overfilled with super graphics and 5 year omd kids with 60 year ild grandpaps hunting them (lets not go to details). And who doesnt want to have halo on ypur psp?

2) lack of bra... Ideas. Well you decide with couple of peapol in forum post that having a mwtroid prime on psp is awesome idea. Lets form a team. (this is exactly what happened with psp game called prime). Usualy thease games have potential at start. The team usualy have a decent modeler who makes some nice model. But most of tjease die due the lack of coder. (see golden eye reloaded).

3) wanting to be famous. Well idk if this is realy the case. Bit since we talk clones games atm. Name bites. When 5 year old kidie see the black ops and psp in same sentence they go like OMGWTFSUPAH (black ops zombies portable). They immediatly get fans etc behind them saying THIS GAME LOOKS SO AWESOME even thought they have very crappy of picture of poo, i mean weapon (go laugh your self) and saying weare looking for coder (sudden death and we know sudden deaths mostly end to loose). Name bites as i said.

4) justtruly wanting to make a gameand stRt learning. Well i was once like this and i am still. Aiming to game indrusty. Some folks realy dont know where to beging. So we can merge number 2 and 3 here. Out of ideas. Hmm well if i make black ops game i gaing fans and maeby team. Good idea. Thease devs seriosly want to learn. Well i was once like that. I started woth quake and started mapping. Later moced to coding when joined nzportable. And know i have done a games qc from scratch and learning all the time more and more. Even decining a new game allready.


So that was the part of this (rant) topic. My point is that not all of us are whiny lets clone peapol and i am not pointimg fingers. I know you guys dont hate psp community. Its just that psp community doesnt have that manyquality members on quake side. Some of them doesnt even know what quake is. Ok i hope this topic will gaing some talk about psp plaftform. Psp is not bad plaftform to start making game. But thease years in it. I have realised that i should have started on pc.

Psp +/-
+ good for small games.
+ very good emulator plaftform (all your favorite gb pokemon games in single portable machine)
+ good graphocs for handheld
+ hackable easily
+HANDHELD QUAKE WHAT COULD BE BETTER???
+ lots of good homebrews, kurok, cspsp, wagic, nzp (hehee)
+ old model can be used as remote of tv

-

- community. There is alot of kids tryi g to find clone of commericial games. Over 1000 of question about IzThER3Z A Hal0Lz F0r pzp?
- sony
-very limited working enviroment
- bad popularoty in some places
- no darkplace like super opensoirce engine tp start wth (not only quake)

this is what comes in my mind. I hope i havent embraised my self too much. If o get facepalms etc replys i delete this. If any psp dev read this dont take this as ofence. I am trying to protect more of you.

Jukki out

[TimeServ]

That must've been a pain to type all that on an iPhone. Especially things like "IzThER3Z A Hal0Lz F0r pzp". At first glance I thought that I should be annoyed at the content of this post but I get the feeling I should be looking at this as some sort of abstract art. Alas I've never been one to appreciate art. Maybe some else with deeper understanding can fill me in?

[Baker]

I think a lot of new modders don't realize the amount of work needed to finish a mod. The QuakeC and the engine stuff have a steep learning curve. LordHavoc once 7-8 years ago that having an experienced coder or 2 is the backbone of completing a mod.

Quake is in many a very simple and flexible engine on any platform. But due to lack of documentation and a good and complete Wiki, it can be hard to get the big picture. FrikaC or someone here wrote "There never were any docs on QuakeC".

And newer guys who don't have the patience to actually learn QuakeC as a result have a great deal of difficulty achieving some of the things they want. The PSP engine is *really* in retrospect a VERY bad engine to try to start engine coding with. Since I didn't start engine coding with the PSP, I know I don't always think of how starting engine modding with the PSP is a totally bad idea.

1. There isn't really a good IDE + compile process for the PSP engine.

2. Since many PSP modders don't use a PC to test their mods on, that doubles the difficulty.

3. The PSP engine's memory limitations make even using QuakeC and/or maps and models with it a frustrating experience.

What isn't obvious to most PSP modders is that MDave had to have been IRC somewhere talking with some really smart PSP people and some really experienced Quake modders/mappers for him to obtain his goals. So he was connected to an information pipeline of experienced ppl that could give him good advice.

And he listened to it.

MDave made Kurok look easy. But it isn't immediately obvious to the average new modder that what MDave or Solitude did (or was going to do) required a ton of planning.

And that idea is not easy impressed onto a new modder.

[ajay]

Having made my first mods for Dreamcast and PC I can understand the difficulties and challenges involved in modding for a console. Having said that there was a lot of creativity around in both the DC Homebrew and Quake 'scenes'. One difference between DC and PSP quake modding (as I remember it anyway) is that there were far fewer clones with DC Quake modding.
There was definitely a reward in seeing your mod up and running (and self-booting...) on your tele and all the trials of overcoming the constraints placed in your way by the limitations of the console.
The best thing for PSP quake modding would be more and more unique mods, not just really good ones, but unique games that play to the PSP strengths.

[goldenboy]

It's OT, but before first DrS and then Supa joined RMQ, ijed and me did loads of coding (including the laying of many foundations) although we are both primarily mappers.

We did never stand there and say "Coder wanted". We learned to do it ourselves as good as we could.

That includes engine coding, btw.

All coders who joined the team came to fix bugs, or to take over certain work from others. They did not have to start from scratch.

[MasterSplinter]

The next major generation of game systems will be in pill form.

[leileilol]

It isn't legal to begin with since you must violate very much for any homebrew PSP stuff, so it's an automatic HELL NO from me

[Downsider]

It isn't legal to begin with since you must violate very much for any homebrew PSP stuff, so it's an automatic HELL NO from me

It's not illegal, at least in the US.

[dreadlorde]

It isn't legal to begin with since you must violate very much for any homebrew PSP stuff, so it's an automatic HELL NO from me

No victim, no crime.

[ajay]

It isn't legal to begin with since you must violate very much for any homebrew PSP stuff, so it's an automatic HELL NO from me

No victim, no crime.

That would be an interesting defence in court. I doubt Sony would see it like that. I'm not up to date with how you homebrew on the PSP, but if it's anything like homebrew on other consoles the 'victim' would be Sony's intellectual property.

[Baker]

I don't claim to be anything at this point except an intermediate engine coder, but I'd like to believe I've been a fairly productive one for my definitely non-godlike skill level.

The first thing I swore to myself upon starting engine coding:

"Never ever email or private message another engine author asking for help." Now the reason I swore this: if you are going to get into something complex, you have to do it yourself and earn what you learn. No one else can do it for you.

That being said, on a few occasions someone like aguirRe or R00k personally contacted me and gave me an important piece of advice without asking. MH a few times posted in threads suggesting or flat-out telling me how I screwed up. A couple of times, aguirRe flat out bailed me out of a couple of situations where I was WAY over my head within the first couple of weeks. That being said, I think I did ask Metlslime an easy OpenGL question once via email, but I felt such a simple question with a very narrow scope and felt it wouldn't impose on him.

So my personal belief in the coding department is that to be a good citizen is "Never obligate someone else to help you; but be appreciative if it does happen" and "Definitely payback to the community with tutorials or gained knowledge to help someone learn because you used to be there."

It is very important to contribute back to the developer community.

/My thoughts on development, for what it is worth.

[Spike]

if your code is copy+pastaed from somewhere else, if you never took the time to learn it, you will find that you are completely unable to maintain it, adapt it, fix it, etc yourself. Once you're in that situation, you're either wholey dependant upon someone else to do the stuff for you (which will generally annoy the helper and result in you getting ignored), or you give up on your project entirely (in which case, why help in the first place).

asking someone for help is a form of colaboration. it can work wonders if the participants can be considered equals. it can be a massive time saver - the other person will often think differently. But if its one-sided, or too trivial for the other participant, they'll resent any contact with you.
many programmers are problem solvers, many of them actually enjoy logic puzzles. many people actually get a certain joy out of knowing they helped other people. asking questions is not a problem.
asking questions that take longer to understand what you want to achieve than it does to formulate/write a response just doesn't have any merit.
everyone needs someone to bounce ideas off. its a great time saver when you get stuck. but it needs to work for all participants, or it won't last. note that this generally only works when both parties actually know what they're talking about.
someone willing to say 'wtf are you doing' when you propose your newest and greatest idea is the greatest timesaver ever. :)

[mh]

Knowing how to ask the right question is half the battle. All too often I see questions posed in terms of "how do I do X?", where it's quite clear that there is an underlying problem that the asker wants to solve, has decided to solve it by doing X, now wants to know how to do X, but has never stated what the underlying problem actually is. Simply providing that single piece of info can cut out a lot of dead ends and wasted time.

At the same time I'll be first to admit that chasing a dead end can sometimes be a great learning experience and you can pick up a LOT of useful info (that's not necessarily even related to what you're trying to do) BUT you have to be prepared to admit to yourself at some point in time that it's a dead end, that you're not going to get anything to solve your initial problem from it, and you have to know when the time is right to stop.

With Quake you're very often fighting against the formats, fighting against design decisions that were valid for something that had to run on an 8 MB Pentium 60 MS-DOS machine but are utter madness today, fighting against design decisions that maybe needed a second pass over them (that they didn't get - the second pass happened with Quake II) to iron out wrinkles, and it's very often a fight you're just not going to win.

You can get a lot out of Quake, but eventually you're going to hit a wall. That's when it's time to decide if you want to accept the limitations and refine/fine-tune what's already strong, or go off into the unknown with something new.

[leileilol]

It's not illegal, at least in the US.

Oh really? Have fun with that DMCA. Encouraging the protection broken just to run unlicensed software isn't my cup of tea.

[Downsider]

It's not illegal, at least in the US.

Oh really? Have fun with that DMCA. Encouraging the protection broken just to run unlicensed software isn't my cup of tea.

Failing to see how running legal homebrew-made apps has anything to do with breaking copyright laws, but if you can explain it to me then I'm okay with that. I don't understand the law too well.