The Scummvm-misc listing welcomes the new work in progress Dark Seed 2 engine by DrMcCoy. It looks very promising.
I've returned to spending a lot of my time working on the disassembly of Rex Nebular, and implementing it's functionality into the M4 engine. It's likely going to be an extended process, because the game engine is unbelievably complex. It likely comes from the MADS engine being designed as a generic game engine rather than just for single games specifically.
For example, I only just last night disassembled some of the code associated with displaying messages. Any given message is represented by a unique 'Message Id', which in turn loads a message resource that can contain an entire series of control elements for formatting dialogs. A sample message resource for looking at the curtains in the starting room is as follows:
[title25][sentence].Wincing at the "Drapes Of Wrath", you swear
to use them to light the fire when
you burn your ex-decorator at the stake
I'm dreading how complicated the actual script interpreter is going to be. :P
Monday, December 7, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
New SourceForge project - Scummvm-misc
It's been a busy month. As those of you who follow the mailing list will be aware, I finished work on an engine module called Gargoyle over a month ago, that allows the playing of Infocom z-code text adventure games. Unfortunately, the consensus was that it really didn't fit in with the ScummVM theme of point and click adventure games. So I created a new project on SourceForge named Scummvm-misc to host the project. But I'd been so busy that I've only now had time to create a proper homepage for the project.
See Scummvm-misc for the project's new website. Rather than just create a project specifically for Gargoyle, I decided to keep the project name generic.. Gargoyle isn't the first non-point 'n click adventure engine, and there may be more in the future. ScummVM provides such a solid base for creating games that can run on multiple systems, I figured it would be good to keep track of other such engines.
The index page I've created also lists all the other publicly known ScummVM engines that are either in development or for which work has stalled. Anybody in the future who'd like to start work on any new engine, and wants the source to be publically available, is welcome to share SVN space on the project.
Finally, two screenshots from the later Infocom games, that used a combination of graphics and text:
See Scummvm-misc for the project's new website. Rather than just create a project specifically for Gargoyle, I decided to keep the project name generic.. Gargoyle isn't the first non-point 'n click adventure engine, and there may be more in the future. ScummVM provides such a solid base for creating games that can run on multiple systems, I figured it would be good to keep track of other such engines.
The index page I've created also lists all the other publicly known ScummVM engines that are either in development or for which work has stalled. Anybody in the future who'd like to start work on any new engine, and wants the source to be publically available, is welcome to share SVN space on the project.
Finally, two screenshots from the later Infocom games, that used a combination of graphics and text:
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Cruise for a Corpse Complete
After many months of work, the Cruise for a Corpse engine plays the PC version of the game all the way through without any bugs.. I was also able to figure out and implement music and sound effects as well, although currently only the PC Adlib player is supported.
The Amiga and Atari ST versions of the game will probably play all the way through, although music and sound effects handling will need to be implemented for them.. I'll leave it up someone else more familiar with those systems to take care of that sometime in the future.
It's when you're diving into fixing and extending engine code like this, the old maxim 'The devil is in the details' comes to mind. Even the smallest mis-print or mistake in the code can cause errors that are hard to track down. It's actually kind of a relief that, as far as I know, it's all over and done with now.
Anyway, I plan to spend the rest of my vacation time (I'm on holiday until the 22nd) getting in some R&R, and some more generic mucking around on ScummVM - this will probably include some time spent working on the MADS disassembly, so people can look forward to further work on Rex Nebular in the near future. :)
The Amiga and Atari ST versions of the game will probably play all the way through, although music and sound effects handling will need to be implemented for them.. I'll leave it up someone else more familiar with those systems to take care of that sometime in the future.
It's when you're diving into fixing and extending engine code like this, the old maxim 'The devil is in the details' comes to mind. Even the smallest mis-print or mistake in the code can cause errors that are hard to track down. It's actually kind of a relief that, as far as I know, it's all over and done with now.
Anyway, I plan to spend the rest of my vacation time (I'm on holiday until the 22nd) getting in some R&R, and some more generic mucking around on ScummVM - this will probably include some time spent working on the MADS disassembly, so people can look forward to further work on Rex Nebular in the near future. :)
Friday, May 22, 2009
Foray into Cruise for a Corpse
Hello everyone. It's been a while since my last blog posting.. I really should get into a better habit of posting updates more often.
Having largely finished adding Discworld 2 support to the ScummVM Tinsel engine some months ago, rather than immediately returning to work on MADS, or some other project, I decided to take a detour and work on the existing 'Cruise' engine, which plays the game 'Cruise for a Corpse'. This was an existing incomplete engine in the ScummVM SVN, which had been languishing for a while without any significant progress being done.
Having been working on it since late February, it's now in a somewhat cleaner and more stable state than it was previously. A lot of bugs have been fixed, and I've also done a lot of cleanup of the code as well, such as giving structure variables more proper names, fixing up variable types, etc.
I'd originally hoped to have reached a milestone of having played the game all the way through to the end before I made this blog posting, but my debugging practices almost demand that I fix these bugs before carrying on with the game.. those remaining bugs tend to be annoying buggers.. I'm currently grappling with two really nasty ones:
* I've got an animation of a moving handle in the engine room that is drawn incorrectly for only two of it's frames.. it could be a problem with the transparency mask for the image, but all fixes I've tried so far screw up the decoding/display of every other image in the game.
* There's a bug in the path-finding code code that's particularly noticeable in the area below the top deck, in that you can walk through walls directly from one exit to another.
I was really on a roll up until I discovered those bugs.. I had reached the 1:30pm segment (the game is divided into time segments that only advance once you've done certain actions) and had fixed several crashing bugs, and was hoping the end of the game was in sight. Now it will have to wait until I've fixed these bugs.
I'm hoping to get Cruise to a nicely completable stage soon. The only other major remaining area in the game after that, apart from some minor ones like getting the game speed exactly the same as the original, will be the sound support. I was given a suggestion that I might be able to copy and paste the code from the previous version of the engine (cine), but whilst the formats seem similar, and I was able to get some sound playing in my experiments, the sounds played are incorrect.
As I've always been on record as saying, music handling is my least favourite area to work in. I may try some further experiments to get it working, and if i still have trouble, I may simply drop it completely, and leave it to anyone else who might be interested in taking it up in the future. At least they'll have a more solid game base to add onto.
On a final note, my holidays for this year were severely delayed, so I'm still looking forward to a month's holiday at some point. I anticipate some productive time spent happily disassembling and implementing games for ScummVM. :)
Having largely finished adding Discworld 2 support to the ScummVM Tinsel engine some months ago, rather than immediately returning to work on MADS, or some other project, I decided to take a detour and work on the existing 'Cruise' engine, which plays the game 'Cruise for a Corpse'. This was an existing incomplete engine in the ScummVM SVN, which had been languishing for a while without any significant progress being done.
Having been working on it since late February, it's now in a somewhat cleaner and more stable state than it was previously. A lot of bugs have been fixed, and I've also done a lot of cleanup of the code as well, such as giving structure variables more proper names, fixing up variable types, etc.
I'd originally hoped to have reached a milestone of having played the game all the way through to the end before I made this blog posting, but my debugging practices almost demand that I fix these bugs before carrying on with the game.. those remaining bugs tend to be annoying buggers.. I'm currently grappling with two really nasty ones:
* I've got an animation of a moving handle in the engine room that is drawn incorrectly for only two of it's frames.. it could be a problem with the transparency mask for the image, but all fixes I've tried so far screw up the decoding/display of every other image in the game.
* There's a bug in the path-finding code code that's particularly noticeable in the area below the top deck, in that you can walk through walls directly from one exit to another.
I was really on a roll up until I discovered those bugs.. I had reached the 1:30pm segment (the game is divided into time segments that only advance once you've done certain actions) and had fixed several crashing bugs, and was hoping the end of the game was in sight. Now it will have to wait until I've fixed these bugs.
I'm hoping to get Cruise to a nicely completable stage soon. The only other major remaining area in the game after that, apart from some minor ones like getting the game speed exactly the same as the original, will be the sound support. I was given a suggestion that I might be able to copy and paste the code from the previous version of the engine (cine), but whilst the formats seem similar, and I was able to get some sound playing in my experiments, the sounds played are incorrect.
As I've always been on record as saying, music handling is my least favourite area to work in. I may try some further experiments to get it working, and if i still have trouble, I may simply drop it completely, and leave it to anyone else who might be interested in taking it up in the future. At least they'll have a more solid game base to add onto.
On a final note, my holidays for this year were severely delayed, so I'm still looking forward to a month's holiday at some point. I anticipate some productive time spent happily disassembling and implementing games for ScummVM. :)
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