Two milestones reached

Yesterday I was chatting with Md5 about the recent progress in Blue Force, and I thought to myself that I should make a blog posting. Looking back, it seems it was June when I made the previously posting. I hadn't realised that it was that long.

As those of who frequent the IRC channel or forums would be aware, Ringworld was completed, and will be part of the upcoming official 1.4 release. We'd already had a successful testing period, with several bugs identified and fixed. It'll be nice to see another game I've worked on added to the trunk and become officially supported.

Now, onto more recent developments. As of yesterday, Strangerke and I have reached two more milestones in the progress of the TsAGE engine.

The first is that I completed the first complete play-through of Blue Force. This had been a gradual process over the last few weeks, as we identified game stopping bugs and fixed them. The save format also changed several times during this period, as we implemented the final few game scenes, and added missing game state variables. Yes, clone2727, the game is completable. So nyaaa. :)

The next step will be for us to start playing the game again from the beginning, comparing it against the original and looking for any minor graphics glitches or problems that we missed. We will also ensure that none of the fixes done for the later game scenes had any adverse effect on the earlier scenes. This includes a variety of minor issues that we identified during the first play through, but were deemed too minor to immediately worry about.

One of the more amusing glitches I came across was a scene in day 2 of Blue Force where a police inspection is done. This particular scene seems to use animation sprites different from anywhere else in both Blue Force and Ringworld. Likely some as yet un-handled flag or sprite offset - the result being that all the officers get drawn with their bodies on top of their head. Picture if you will headless officers walking around balancing on their own heads. :)


The second milestone is the commit of the beginnings of the ‘Return to Ringworld’ game - the third and final 2-D TsAGE adventure. I’d previously spent some time on the side starting to look at a disassembly of the game, and identifying all the common engine functions against my disassemblies of Ringworld and Blue Force, and got to the point where all the core functionality had been identified. I started on adding the game classes about a week ago, and have got to the point where I can at least display the first in-game scene.

I had been holding off on committing this to trunk until after the branch, since it affects a lot of the files, but now the 1.4 branch has been done. It also invalidates the current Blue Force savegame format (but not RIngworld) - since both of them share mostly the same UI code, it made sense to encapsulate it in a common base class. Given that Blue Force isn't official yet, it was easier to break the existing savegame format for it as part of this, then to try and maintain the savegames intact. So it was good that I’ve now completed the first play through of Blue Force, and can start from the beginning of the game again.


I have a tendency, for games I plan to work on disassembling, not to play them through using the original executables. That way I can have the fun of gradually playing through the game as I implement the code for it in ScummVM, and get the enjoyment from playing it for the first time in code that I’ve written. It also serves as an inducement to work hard, so I can see what happens in the game. I’m eager to see what happens to Quinn, Miranda, and Seeker in their second foray to the Ringworld.

Once we've cleaned up the Blue Force code-base a bit more, then work on Return to Ringworld will begin in earnest. Hopefully there won't be too many core engine changes, and work can proceed on it as rapidly as was done for Blue Force.

On a final note, for those of you wondering about Rex Nebular, I did start to return to looking at it, but I've been away from working on it in earnest for too long. There are still parts of the game not yet dis-assembled, and I'd need time to complete that and re-familiarise with the existing code. So it really needs some time when I'm not actively working on some other game. I'll have to see how I do when the TsAGE games are complete.