One more gaming application review... I'll be reviewing softwares in my next few posts. This time we have Quake S60.

Software Download
The application can be downloaded here and best of all, it's free!

The demo .PAK file can be downloaded here. You need to install the game and then copy the .PAK file to your memory card.

My Review
I am sure many gamers have played Quake when it first came out for the PC. Well, luckily for us, now we are able to play it on Symbian S60 phones. The game looks great and plays well on the keyboard. For those with the newest E90 firmware (V 07.40.1.2), the FPU is utilized which makes the game run smoother. The only problem at the moment is that the center navigation button can't be assigned to any action which means we can't use it as the "fire" button.

The internal wide screen is used to its maximum and little screen space is sacrificed when showing the player GUI.




Tips & Tricks
For those that feel the game isn't running as smoothly as expected, there are a few tweaks that can be done.

By creating an autoexec.cfg file, certain commands can be run automatically once the game is started. To create the file, just create a new text document and add in the commands that you want. After that, rename the document to
autoexec.cfg and put it into your quake folder (E:\quake1\id1). I found 2 commands that affected the performance of the game as well as the graphics:

Syntax: d_mipcap
Default: 0
Sets the detail level. Values range from 0-3 with 0 giving the highest detail.

Syntax: d_mipscale
Default: 1
Sets how much detail distant objects have. Values range from 0-40 with 0 not bluring distant objects at all. (Uses lots of ram if set to 0)

The commands were obtained from this site

Here are some screen shots with various settings:

mipcap = default, mipscale = default

mipcap = default, mipscale = 0

If you look closely at these 2 pictures you will notice that the 2nd one, with mipscale set to 0 is more detailed and sharp. Try looking at the spikes at the top of the screen and also the words "hard". Although it is more detailed, the game runs less smooth and lags a bit.

mipcap = default, mipscale = 40

Just wanted to show how awful it would look if the detail was set to the lowest.

mipcap = 1, mipscale = default

Here we have mipcap set to 1. If you compare this screen shot to the default one, you will notice that the textures are less detailed. I find that this setting improves the speed of the game. It seems more smoother to me.

Some other commands which you might be interested in are:

Syntax: showram <0/1>
Default: 1
Toggles if the ram icon appears when then game is running out of memory.

Syntax: nosound <0/1>

Default: 0
Toggles if sound is on.

For me, I don't like the ram icon appearing so I turned it off and I usually don't play with sound so I turn it off as well. I'm not sure if there is a performance increase if the sound is toggled off, but there could be.

Note: The screen shots have been edited to increase their brightness.

Reviewed Version - v1.03

0 comments:

Newer Post Older Post Home

Blogger Template by Blogcrowds