Well, it's been a little under two months, and now the Tinsel engine has been released to an eagerly awaiting public. I just hope people don't get too distracted playing it that they forego testing the other games for the 0.12 release. :) Currently Discworld 1 is supported, but not the demo. Kudos to everyone else involved in bringing the conversion to ScummVM to fruition so quickly.
On a more technical note, those of you who are proficient with using the debugging console may wish to experiment with the console in this game.. there are several commands, such as "scene", which allows you to jump to any particular scene number. Another nice one is the "sound" command.. I particularly like "sound 5931". :)
Given the amount of time spent on the Tinsel engine, I haven't had much time to work on the disassembly of Rex Nebular. So there hasn't been much to talk about on my blog. But now I'm back into it again. When last I left, I was starting to plunge into the depths of the dialog display code. This actually proved a useful starting point because:
1) The difficulty dialog is the first thing displayed by the game as it starts, which makes it easy and quick to trace to when running the game in the debugger.
2) We already more or less know both the screen and sprite format used by the engine, which makes it easier to understand and decode the related routines.
3) It also uses font display, which again, allows me to quickly identify the appropriate routines.
4) It allows me a starting point for identifying various other routines, such as mouse/cursor handling, event loops, and graphics routines.
As you can see, the dialog code provides a useful starting point for understanding core functionality used by the game. By identifying these routines, it will make it easier later on to understand other game routines that make use of them. The only problem is that the dialog display code seems to be unreasonably complicated - it seems they tried to used the same code to potentially handle various dialog text, such as headers, control options, and savegame names.
