QuantumG's Blog

The never ending effort to recreate a game from 1993 continues. There's now nine developers in the project and none of us do much. Every now and then I get bored and fix something.. go to check it in and discover that, shock, someone else has checked something in too! Then I have to update and resolve conflicts. Take the good with the bad I guess. Anyway, in release 0.2 you will be happy to discover that we have done some work to get sound faithfully reproduced. For a while, we were focusing on music and trying to get the SDL midi synthesiser to play back this ancient XMIDI format. Believe it or not, this was actually acheived. Slight problem though, Syndicate used custom instruments. This was not uncommon at the time. The result was that the music just didn't sound good.. but it was good enough to ignore for a while. Having declared that I wasn't going to touch sound.. I got bored one day and changed my mind. I told myself that I really ment I wasn't going ...

Sometimes copyright law is just stoopid. Sometimes the rules just don't apply. Have you heard the story of Steve McDonald and White Stripes? Here's nice flash animation of what happened, or you can keep reading.. Steve McDonald is a veteran member of the band Redd Kross. He likes the White Stripes, but he thought they would sound better if they had a bass guitarist. So he appointed himself. He had the equipment, and the skill, so he made up some bass tracks and added them to his favourite White Stripes songs. He then posted those songs on the Redd Kross website - without permission. Of course, this could land him in hot water, but luckily he bumped into Jack White who gave his assurances that he wasn't going to sue. Before that happened I'm guessing Steve McDonald just didn't give a damn.. after all, he's a rocker, man. I'm not a rocker, but I am a rebel, ask anyone. I once posted the full c99 standard to my web site so people wouldn't have ...

Hehe, after struggling to place the head, torso and legs of pedestrians together to make the animations work in FreeSynd for the last week or so I happened to find this information about HELE-0.ANI, HFRA-0.ANI and HSTA-0.ANI. Turns out these three files contain just about everything you need to know to draw objects in the game. There are 1970 animations which are made up of frames taken from a pool of 8949, each of which are made up of elements taken from a pool of 10486, each of which index into the available 1180 game sprites. The amount of work required to manually reproduce these animations (and that I had intended on doing) is phenomonal. A conservative estimate is that this information has knocked a year off the development time. In just one day (today) I have figured out the exact placement of units on the map, fixed the drawing of animations and cleaned up a lot of very ugly code. The result is that agents can now walk around, with and without all the different weapons ...

Breaking my own rule that improvements should be belayed until such time as the original game has been reimplemented, I've added waypoints and path finding to agent movement in FreeSynd . I found this documentation of the A* path finding algorithm to be most enlightening.. although, frankly, the sketch is more than adequate to implement a useful algorithm for agent movement. It always annoyed me when I told my agents to go to point X and they got stuck inside buildings or took some inordinately long path. Now you can hold down the ctrl key and enter waypoints manually, or you can let the path finder do its job (this is the default). Pressing the ctrl key without clicking the mouse will display the selected agents' current path(s) as a bright yellow line. At the moment the planning algorithm does not take elevated terrain into account, so trying to send agents onto bridges or up stairs simply won't work just yet. There's still a hell of a lot to do before the game ...

I've recently been working on some game related projects. First, there's the RPG engine I've started which I call Stallion . I've received just about no interested about this from anyone so I havn't been paying it much attention. Now and then I get the desire to hack on an RPG and none of the available codebases for graphical RPGs interest me as much as the ones for textual RPGs. So why not hack on a textual RPG? Because it's just so dry without players to consider, and with players to consider you've just gotta be so dedicated. Then there's my other project. I've always been a fan of Bullfrog's Syndicate. My fan page gets a lot of hits (probably because I give out copies of the game on it). If you've never played Syndicate you probably won't understand the attraction. You'll also think we're all crazy for fooling around with DosBox or old hardware to get the game to actually run and never consider doing the like yourse...