Thank you very much, even though as you said, many elements of this were rushed and unpolished, I am proud of the “engine” code I wrote for this game. Not so much the gameplay code, which was tacked on at the end.
Indeed it’s a very expensive 1996 SGI workstation, but the O2 was a low-end SGI product, so I’d put it at most in parity with a high-end ‘98 PC. I intend to port this game to 3dfx glide at some point and do direct comparisons with voodoo cards, but I suspect even the voodoo2 might have better texture mapping performance, even though it comes with severe feature limitations over what SGI’s OpenGL implementation supported. And yes it is written entirely in C and OpenGL.
I can’t answer about the textures, but I think dstar’s notion was that you’re entering a sci-fi complex through some natural caverns and old entryways. The true reason for it of course is to give some visual variation to the level.
The sound lag you mentioned is an unfortunate bug that only appears on windows. The SGI and GNU/Linux versions do not have that, so I only noticed it at the very end of the jam when I tested the windows build just before submitting it. I suspect the issue is in the mikmod library which I’m using for cross-platform music and sound playback, but I haven’t had the time to dig into it yet and see if I can fix it.
Most of the crashes are there because during the rush of the last 10 minutes before the deadline when I was trying to build across all platforms and submit the game, I left in some extra floating point exceptions enabled which I had enabled for debugging. I essentially released a debug build. Sorry for that :) Of course they are still bugs on my end, but they would result in probably imperceptible glitches here and there instead of crashes if I remembered to remove them for the final build.
Thanks for the feedback, and for taking the time to report the issues you encountered!