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Homebrew Quake 3 is being ported to Wii U

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mayo1990
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Name choice

  • ioQuake3-U

    Votes: 9 69.2%

  • ioQuake3-Cafe

    Votes: 4 30.8%
  • Total voters
    13
  • Poll closed .
Mayo1990

Mayo1990

I just play vidya
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I spent my last few months porting Quake 3 Arena to most consoles that didn't have a port yet (Wii, PS3, PS4, Xbox One), but my main roadblock was always the Wii U. Thanks to all the experience I gained from my previous ports as well as a new toy I'll release later I decided to give it another shot and I got much farther this time. The port is far from playable at the moment, but I lifted most of the roadblocks I ran into last time, which made all this very promising. Since this is my most important project so far, I'd like the first release to be very, very polished. However, I'm still unsure about which name I should pick this time around, so I'll pick the one with most votes the moment I have to do the release.

Main features
  • Crossplay with other Quake 3 clients, either via LAN or online
  • Gamepad + Pro Controller support as well as other controllers through Bloopair
  • Mod support
  • Open Arena, Team Arena and CLASSIC (specific build to crossplay with Dreamcast clients) support.

Installation

This homebrew can only run under Aroma. Place ioquake3_wiiu.wuhb for Quake III Arena, ioquake3_ta_wiiu.wuhb for Team Arena, ioquake3_oa_wiiu.wuhb for Open Arena and ioquake3_classic_wiiu.wuhb for Classic inside wiiu/apps/, then follow the instructions below where to place the required files.

Quake III Arena
Place pak0-8 in /quake3/baseq3/ from your own Quake III Arena copy.

Open Arena
Place all the pak files in /quake3/baseoa/ from your own Open Arena copy.

Team Arena
Place pak0-3 in /quake3/missionpack/ from your own Team Arena copy.

Quake 3 Classic
Place pak0-8 in /quake3/baseq3/ from your own Quake III Arena copy, as well as dc-mappack.pk3 inside quake3/baseq3/


Latest release

Pro and Cons compared with each of my ports:
Wii
+ More stable framerate
+ Mods can load more reliably
+ Higher resolution, higher quality models and textures
+ Team Arena support
+ Automatically sets Player name based off User's Mii (with limits, due to characters limitations)
+ XInput support thanks to Bloopair
- No mouse and keyboard support
- No additional video modes
PS3
+ More stable framerate
+ higher quality models and textures, but not as noticeable as Wii's
+ XInput support thanks to Bloopair
- No native OSK (for now) for text inputs
- No mouse and keyboard support
PS4
+ Faster boot times
+ XInput support thanks to Bloopair
- No native OSK (for now) for text inputs




1783681165511.png
 
Last edited by Mayo1990,
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The renderer and the networking were a REAL pain to implement. But now that those are lifted the rest is just straight forward. Here's the current progress. Shame that ioQuake3-U is winning, but this time around I'll let the community name the 2nd last Quake 3 Arena port that was missing to the bunch. The last one left is the GameCube one. But who knows for that.

 
Got most of the main things sorted out. Currently in the polish and bugfixes phase now.

Also implemented one of the extras (it will now fetch your Mii's name when booting the game on first boot, so it won't default to "Unnamedplayer").

Expect a release this upcoming week.
 
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Yeah as this port is reaching the first playable build overall (It's already playable, but there are some things I want sorted out before publishing) I'm finding new stuff as time goes on. And at the same time.... I'm finding stuff I expected to implement but I fell short. Thankfully the main headaches are sorted out so It's just a matter of polishing the edges.

Honestly, the best tip I feel like handing to those taking on homebrew ports is to not test stuff on emulators. They aren't absolutely reliable. This project was started last week and I began implementing the graphic renderer earlier this week and I lost so much time because I went against my own policy and tested things on Cemu first before testing them on hardware, so I had to rewrite most of the renderer.

This is what the game looked like on emu. Nothing to say about that, there's some work to be done, but nothing too harsh.
1783767183620.png

Now let's see what it looked like on hardware:
1783767316719.png



Thankfully this is a thing of the past since I sorted it out and the renderer now works as intended, but that's still a very important lesson.
 
Very nice work! I saw your thread in the PS4 subforum and was really tempted to try it, but I held off since the setup involves a few extra steps. I’ve been having a great time playing Quake 3 on my PS Vita in bed in the evenings, but I’m definitely looking forward to switching to the Wii U (GamePad) once your port is stable.
 
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meeeow said:
Very nice work! I saw your thread in the PS4 subforum and was really tempted to try it, but I held off since the setup involves a few extra steps. I’ve been having a great time playing Quake 3 on my PS Vita in bed in the evenings, but I’m definitely looking forward to switching to the Wii U (GamePad) once your port is stable.
Click to expand...
Thank you! Yeah the PS4 port needed an extra step due to shaders. This one does need CafeGLSL to be loaded in the console, but since It's not copyrighted I can pack it on the wuhb and make it self-extractable in case the user didn't install it prior.

All the core features I wanted to implement are in anyway. I'm polishing and bugfixing some stuff now before pushing a release.
Post automatically merged:

Managed to get Open Arena and Team Arena running, but my CLASSIC build (the one that is supposed to crossplay with Dreamcast clients, although super niche, is something I really wanted to port to this build as well) has some huge performance issues. Just that one, though.

Besides that I only have two more issue to address, and then I can push the first release:
  • Closing the homebrews will hang the console. I prob wired something wrong with CafeGLSL.
  • The Gamepad's audio has very low quality. I need to investigate this further. Plays fine on TV though.
Things I attempted but shelved (for now):
  • Gyro aim: Felt unsatisfactory and awkward to use.
  • OSK
Post automatically merged:

1783862551312.png


Icons are fully built and I fixed the crash on exit issue!

The bottom left icon is just the Wii build, it has nothing to do with this project.
 
Last edited by Mayo1990,
Awesome!

I did some minor testing on my Wii U (with a custom map) and would like to give some feedback:

- Great performance with default (graphics) settings! Way faster loading time than on PS Vita.
- Even rumble works! Another plus compared to the PS Vita.
- Sound has some minor glitching: e.g., the rocket launcher has an additional "metallic" sound.
- All in all: impressive! (meant to be in the Quake 3 announcer's voice); especially for being the first public build!

Thank you for creating a great port for a great console! Compared to the insanely active homebrew community of the PS Vita, the Wii U is criminally neglected.
 
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meeeow said:
Awesome!

I did some minor testing on my Wii U (with a custom map) and would like to give some feedback:

- Great performance with default (graphics) settings! Way faster loading time than on PS Vita.
- Even rumble works! Another plus compared to the PS Vita.
- Sound has some minor glitching: e.g., the rocket launcher has an additional "metallic" sound.
- All in all: impressive! (meant to be in the Quake 3 announcer's voice); especially for being the first public build!

Thank you for creating a great port for a great console! Compared to the insanely active homebrew community of the PS Vita, the Wii U is criminally neglected.
Click to expand...
Thanks! Honestly I don't think it can match the PS Vita port yet... and yeah, that's sort of expected. Given the rocket launcher part, I suppose you heard the sound from the gamepad rather than the TV. Sadly I couldn't improve the quality further.

That (almost) closes the circle, though. The only modern console without a Q3 port right now is the GameCube... which I'm not sure if I have the skills to work on and I'm focussing on other projects. But besides that, every platform now has a Quake 3 port and they can all crossplay together, which was my primary goal.

The issue with Wii U is the SDK. Whenever you see a very active homebrew scene is because the SDK is very mature. Wii U's SDK is not as mature as PS Vita's in many, many aspects. My main goal was to turn this into the bridge between the Wii and PS4's ports (Wii having the most care when it comes down to gimmicks such as lots of input devices, and PS4 as in polish and performance), which would have resulted in the definite version, but every time I wanted to implement something I had to face the "Welp seems like the SDK doesn't support that yet!" or "Yeah the console can't do that" to most things... which was truly a shame. Still, I'm happy that It's finally on Wii U as well, even though I worked on a Wii port at first.
 

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