Well, another milestone has been reached in the development of the Hopkins engine. The Linux demo, upon which I've been basing the engine implementation, is now officially completable! Yes, you can now guide the intrepid FBI agent through the start of his case, and deal with a bank robbery. I think it's a considerable happy achievement, given how recently I started work on it, and how little time I've had available to spend on it, given work commitments,
So what comes next?
Well, there are still some graphic glitches to sort out. For example, implementing proper savegame thumbnails, and the cursor drawing of actively selected inventory objects isn't clearing itself correctly when the cursor moves. I'll be concentrating next on identifying the cause of these problems and resolving them, which hopefully shouldn't take long.
There is also a need for refactoring. Now that the engine has stabilised into a usable state, I need to start reviewing code and giving proper names to all the structures that currently have names like 'field2' and 'field4'. Likewise, method parameter values and locals will also need better names. I also need to review the current separation of code I've done into various manager classes and move methods more appropriate to different managers into their appropriate manager.
Those two are the immediate short-term goals. Once they're done, there are still the two big ones remaining:
Firstly, supporting the actual full game. Whilst the game does have some basic scripting mechanisms, the bulk of the code seems to be in a massive method called 'Traduction', at least in the demo. This method consists essentially of a massive switch statement that handles all the game logic. It'll be interesting to see if this is done the same way in the full game as well. Strangerke is currently looking for someone with a copy of the Linux version of the game, that we can use as a basis of comparing against the demo version to get the changes. Hopefully, the core engine will remain pretty much identical, and we can just drop in a full game 'Traduction' method to properly support the full game.
And secondly, of course, there's the old hairy chestnut of sound support. I'm hopeful that the music, voice, and sound effects are in a standard format and that, similiar to what was done in Tony (and other) engines, I can use existing ScummVM functionality for sound playback. I really don't relish an extended period trying to re-implement sound drivers for Hopkins, like I had to do for tSage.
So, all in all, we should hopefully soon have Hopkins in a fit state as yet another game playable under ScummVM. :)
So what comes next?
Well, there are still some graphic glitches to sort out. For example, implementing proper savegame thumbnails, and the cursor drawing of actively selected inventory objects isn't clearing itself correctly when the cursor moves. I'll be concentrating next on identifying the cause of these problems and resolving them, which hopefully shouldn't take long.
There is also a need for refactoring. Now that the engine has stabilised into a usable state, I need to start reviewing code and giving proper names to all the structures that currently have names like 'field2' and 'field4'. Likewise, method parameter values and locals will also need better names. I also need to review the current separation of code I've done into various manager classes and move methods more appropriate to different managers into their appropriate manager.
Those two are the immediate short-term goals. Once they're done, there are still the two big ones remaining:
Firstly, supporting the actual full game. Whilst the game does have some basic scripting mechanisms, the bulk of the code seems to be in a massive method called 'Traduction', at least in the demo. This method consists essentially of a massive switch statement that handles all the game logic. It'll be interesting to see if this is done the same way in the full game as well. Strangerke is currently looking for someone with a copy of the Linux version of the game, that we can use as a basis of comparing against the demo version to get the changes. Hopefully, the core engine will remain pretty much identical, and we can just drop in a full game 'Traduction' method to properly support the full game.
And secondly, of course, there's the old hairy chestnut of sound support. I'm hopeful that the music, voice, and sound effects are in a standard format and that, similiar to what was done in Tony (and other) engines, I can use existing ScummVM functionality for sound playback. I really don't relish an extended period trying to re-implement sound drivers for Hopkins, like I had to do for tSage.
So, all in all, we should hopefully soon have Hopkins in a fit state as yet another game playable under ScummVM. :)
4 comments:
Nice work :)
I tried downloading the Linux demo from the Hopkins FBI site, but for some reason they've renamed the link on purpose. For people looking to download the demo, here's the actual link:
http://www.hopkinsfbi.com/dlinux/Hopkins-PDemo-1.00.tar.gz
Having a very brief look at the game files, the sound, voices and music are all in standard WAV format, so there's hopefully very little work to be done to get these working :)
Norton 360 new model of Norton Antivirus is specially good with finding and taking good care of malware.
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