Working my way through Dark Side

I've spent the last week with an in progress working my way through Dark Side of Xeen. As of last night, I've mapped out the bulk of the southern side of the map up to the mountains, released the first stage of Queen Kallindra's castle, finished the Temple of Bark, and am just winding up clearing Sandcaster and it's sewers of enemies. I've identified and fixed multiple problems as I went, and not all of them were specific to Dark Side.

For example, one bug I'd been meaning to fix for a while was finally resolved - when monsters were triggered to hate & attack the entire party at the same time, they were originally only ever attacking the first party member. This made the Dragon Caves on the Clouds side *so* much easier.. all the dragons would wail away on my first character, even after he was dead, leaving the rest of my party to kill them at their leisure. By the time I left the dragon caves, my first party member was below -5000HP :) Another, ironically, coincidental script problem meant the dragon containers didn't tax me when I walked past them, so I didn't even have to worry about losing gold and gems.

I also fixed some bugs in the sound system that could cause crashes when multiple sound effects were played in rapid succession, and a bug in the combat system that could case a crash when recalculating the order that characters and monsters fight in based on their speed. The later I'm particularly hoping will help resolve the outstanding rare crashes I was previously getting with extended combat. It may be naive.. I'll have to wait and see whether any further crashes occur.

So yeh, things are progressing, and the engine is getting more and more stable; I'll keep working my way through the game. I've got a long weekend coming up tomorrow, but honestly, I'm not sure how much time over the weekend I'll end up playing the game. I think I'll keep the bulk of it for some R&R and doing other things. We'll see how it goes.

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 :)

Work on Xeen is up in the air

As tempting as it would be to write this post yesterday on April Fools, I've left it to today to make a status update on my playthrough through Xeen. Work has been proceeding well. I've fixed lots of bugs that were identified by both myself and Dark-Star, who's been assisting me with preliminary testing. As of yesterday, I've:
- Finished the Dwarf Mines
- Mostly finished Rivercity (except for the Knights behind the training area)
- Completed the Witch Tower. Hence the post title.. the levitate spell works, and I've been walking around on the clouds :)

Many of the bugs were crashes and hangs, so it highlights that the game still isn't ready for general public testing. The Witch Tower, for example, required two fixes to get it to work.. one where I wasn't setting whether the party had the key (so it was never letting you in), and one where I incorrectly implemented the "return from subroutine" script opcode, so trying to go back into the Witch Tower from the stairs in the Witch Tower clouds hung the game. Ironic that both ways into the tower were glitched. :)

I think combat is also more settled now. Previously, there were various crashes, and none of the combat spells worked. Now, though, I'm able to properly cast them, so the monsters around Rivercity are much more manageable to defeat. Though I did still experience a problem once where the party wasn't immediately registered as dead after all being killed, so obviously still needs a bit of polishing to fix such remaining issues. Speaking of spells, I decided it was acceptable, given the circumstances, to cheat to give myself extra funds to purchases all the spells for each character. There was little point in delaying matters, trying to accumulate wealth. It also meant I was able to buy pathfinding and mountaineering skills for my party so I wouldn't be constrained where I could travel. It already proved useful, as I was able to identify and fix several bugs with the close-up rendering of forests, where they weren't properly being scaled, and were drawing outside of the scene area.

From here, I'll keep on working my way through the game, fixing bugs as I go. Given I'm already significantly into the game (at least for Clouds), I don't anticipate there'll be any major impediments to my progress. Apart from tracking down remaining issues with combat, hopefully the rest of the game will just be fixing minor problems, like that which prevented me from entering the Witch Tower.