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News
19/2/05
I've got the midgame editor up and running. One slight hitch - the
number of frames displayed for each midgame seems to be hardcoded
rather than calculated from the given midgame file. It's no major
issue, but it would be cooler if new frames could have been
inserted.
On other news, I'm gearing up for a release of the new functionality.
I just want to take a bit longer to spruce it up a bit.. things like
fixing up the portrait image import bug, and a few more tweaks to the
map editor (to get things like object descriptions and container objects
to work).
7/2/05
I've got a prototype viewer (screenshot
here) up and running for viewing the contents
of the MD midgame cutscene files - none of the existing forms quite
fit the job since the cutscene files intermingle text and graphics
streams. The next stage is to add editting capabilities to the new
editor form and test the results in the real game.
31/1/05
I've made some updations to the
Martian Dreams Technical Document. In the editor, the Bitmap
tab in the Shape Editor now includes more files that I've identified
that contain bitmaps.
26/1/05
I've identified that only two new opcodes have been added to the
MD script engine, and although I don't know what they do yet, I've
set up method stubs for them. Conversation saving now works fine,
and the map display is working (with minor problems). I'm now
going to devote some time to investigating the scene file formats.
21/1/05
I spent the evening diving into a disassembly of the executables to
figure out the font format, and I succeeded. Boo ya! The Martian
Dreams technical document (link below) has been updated with the
technical details of the font file.
19/1/05
I've gotten the conversation editor working on Martian Dreams now. If
anyone's interested, I've just committed a file called md_scripts.zip
into the u6edit/doc folder of the project's CVS repository that
contains all the actor scripts for the game. I've also got some of the
bitmaps to load, although only a few - I still need to investigate way
so many of them won't.
16/1/05
I've been a bit lax about keeping the front-end website up to date with
that of my work in the Sourceforge back-end for the project. Just to keep
you aware, I've spent some time over the Christmas holidays disassembling
the Martian Dreams executables to a stage where it's been yielding up
information of the various file formats. As of today, I've added editor
support for loading in the shapes, objects, actors, portraits, and
mouse pointers. I anticipate rapid progress in the next week or two, so
I'm going to hold off on releasing a new executable for the moment.
For those interested in the technical details of Martian Dreams, you can
download a copy of my in-progress technical document from
here.
7/6/04
I've now released version 1.1 of the editor. The most important enhancement
is a great deal of optimisation on the memory usage. The initial version
didn't work on many people's computers because of it; this new version
should work a lot better. There are also other miscellaneous enhancements
such as the able to edit the details of all 256 characters (although note
that doing so may cause problems running the game on the original interpreter).
18/2/04
Well, the big news is my getting SourceForge project space to hold the editor project.
I've tried to set up a project homepage website as best I could, not being particularly
talented in designing websites. I borrowed some of the layout ideas from the Nuvie
website; they probably won't mind. As I've previously mentioned, I got caught up in
doing a work project that required late night and weekend work, so I haven't had a chance
to fix any of problems people reported about the initial version; I promise I'll get right
on it once I can reclaim some semblence of a private life again. :)
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