Most wonderful Ringworld demo

Hopefully everyone had a happy Easter weekend; or for those of other religions, were able to enjoy a long weekend wherever you are. :)

It's been a little over a week since the TsAGE engine hit the trunk, and a big thanks go out to everyone who's helped out with commits - fixing compilation problems, and cleaning up the code. Special thanks again go to Strangerke, who has been busy working his way through the Ringworld game to fix bugs and make the game completable. I too have spent most of my time fixing some of the outstanding bugs, as well as newly identified bugs in the core engine.

On another topic, we've had a stroke of exceptional luck. I had been starting to get bogged down in all the various classes related to sound handling, and I wasn't looking forward to trying to figure out what it all did. But then Strangerke discovered that one of the two available Ringworld demos actually had embedded symbol information for most of the variables and methods of the demo!

Since the full game engine isn't anticipated to be much different from that used in the demo, it likewise means we've suddenly got a huge jump forward in understanding the remaining sound-related parts of the engine. Fuzzie was able to extract the information into a text file listing, and I wrote a quick and dirty script in IDA's IDC language to load the symbol information into a new IDB file for the demo executable.

This isn't quite as good as getting the full original source for the game, but it's still a major find. The biggest limitation of the symbol information is that such symbol tables don't include information for fields within structures. So, for example, the 'ASound' class has 282h bytes of information, but the instance of the class only has the symbol for the first byte, not all of the bytes. Therefore, I'll still need to spend a reasonable amount of time figuring out the contents of the various methods. But at least with the method names known, I can more easily figure out what each method actually does.

In the space of under two days, I've already implemented support for the two Ringworld demos. Luckily, the demos use a single script sequence rather than direct code, which made it very easy to add support for. All that still needs to be implemented for the demo are a few custom dialogs, and ensuring none of the full game functionality, like Saving and Restoring, is enabled for it.

Implementing support for the demo also identified a key difference between the two versions of the demo - the second demo was similar to the CD version, in that they changed the format of how the data for priority regions and walkable areas was stored. Having a disassembly of the demo with symbols made it easier to identify the relevant areas of code, and figure out the differences.

In addition to polishing up support for the demo, I'll likely making a branch to work on the sound classes separately. We currently have some hard-coded logic in the existing engine to properly signal actions that any played sound has immediately ended, so I don't want to interface with that whilst working on a proper implementation of the sound system.

So things are definitely rapidly moving forward. :)

TsAGE has now hit the trunk

Hi all,

I'd been meaning to write a new blog post for a while, but progress was progressing so quickly, that I never quite got around to it. Now, though, work has progressed far enough that the tSage engine has now been merged into trunk. Huzzah! :)

Many thanks go to Strangerke, who joined me in implementing all the various game scenes of the Ringworld game. Together, we've implemented all the game logic.

The following is the state of the game:
* All the game scenes for the floppy version of the game are implemented, although some still need some bug-fixing, so the game isn't completable.
* Sound isn't supported yet, and still needs to be reverse engineered in the original game.

So we have the following goals for the near future:
* We'll be working on fixing the remaining scene bugs, and ensuring the game runs smoothly from start to finish.
* Implementing the sound code.
* I also want to implement support for the original game's cheating/debug functionality.
* Add support for the CD version of the game, which has some minor differences.
* And add support for the demo version, if possible.

All in all, it's a celebration for another engine being added to the ScummVM universe. :)