Tonight's game on OpenPOWER: Shadow Warrior

Well, it's been awhile since we expanded our games library, so let's go back to our regular fast food diet of FPSes and select one from the Build side of the house this time: Shadow Warrior. Build games have a reputation starting with Duke Nukem 3D (a game for another day) and that reputation is well-deserved, so let's get this out of the way: if you found these games iffy in the 1990s, rest assured they've aged badly, because you'll find the content level positively radioactive now between the adult humor, graphic violence and (this game in particular) incredibly inappropriate cultural stereotypes. Stop reading this article now and look at some of our other game builds.

On the other hand, Shadow Warrior was probably the most technically superior of the Build games (with the possible exception of Monolith's Blood): more sophisticated sector effects, coloured lighting, true transparency (including water, though used sparingly to avoid spoilers and performance issues), fog and clouds, larger levels, room-over-room effects and the part I liked the most (and was curiously missing from the classic Mac OS port by MacPlay-Westlake Interactive), voxel-based objects that were truly 3D. All of these features plus OpenGL have made it to JonoF's Shadow Warrior Port (JFSW), using Ken Silverman's Build and Polymost engines (more info).

JFSW builds pretty much out of the box with SDL 2; just type make (or make -j24 or such to exercise your other cores), then copy the .GRP group file from either the 3DRealms shareware install or a registered or retail version to ~/.jfsw (I used my MacPlay CD and named it swmac.grp). Shadow Warrior used redbook audio for the retail version, so for music, rip the tracks and save them as track02.ogg (intro) to track14.ogg ("Lo Wang Raps") in the same directory. Then go to where you've built JFSW and start the game with ./sw, and a configuration window will appear to select your resolution. Note that while widescreen resolutions are supported (and look good), the game still uses 4:3 assets, so things like Lo Wang's sword will be cut off.

A note on resolutions and colour depth: 8bpp modes are rendered 100% in software, which is very fast even on Blackbirds with just BMC graphics, and works beautifully on virtually any system. If you select a 24bpp mode, the game will try to use OpenGL. On my system this caused a freeze (actually an infinite loop, once I stepped through it in a debugger) whenever it attempts to render reflections in a mirror. This appears to be related to non-POT texture support which virtually every card anybody would be running probably supports properly. If you get the same freeze, kill the game and edit jfbuild/src/polymost.c. On line 4903 or thereabouts you'll see if ((method & METH_POW2XSPLIT) && (tsizx != xx)) which if you change to if (0) will get around the code that glitches. I can't tell if this is specific to my card, to OpenPOWER or to gcc, and it doesn't happen in software mode, which plays 100% fine all the way to the end including nuking Zilla himself.

Don't mess with Lo Wang.