Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Clouds of Xeen is now completable

Good news on the progress of the Xeen engine in ScummVM. As of the weekend, I finally finished my first playthrough of Clouds of Xeen! I finally got to give smackdown on Lord Xeen, and watch the ending cutscene. Which I've admittedly previously seen multiple times when I was first implementing the code, but there was the emotional satisfaction of seeing it properly, rather than just using the mirror cheats. Though I will confess that I got so overeager to finally finish the game, that I lacked the patience to do it properly (with well/fountain stat raises), and instead used my debugger cheats instead. But it doesn't take away from the fact that the first game is confirmed as completable. \o/

Now, it's onto Dark Side. There were actually more bugs due to changes done for Dark Side (code I'd implemented but not yet tested) than I anticipated. I already fixed multiple different bugs on the weekend that were causing hangs and crashes. Currently I'm looking into a somewhat complicated problem with how wall decorations are handled.. it causes a crash that makes Ellinger's Tower impossible to complete. So Dark Side definitely isn't completable, and needs further testing. On the plus side, though, it shouldn't take as long to test and finish Dark Side than my Clouds testing took, since Dark Side benefits from all the fixes I've already done for Clouds.

At this rate, my initial play through & tests of both Dark Side and Swords should be done within the next month, and  the game will likely be stable enough for a public testing period. Not long now :)



No comments: