Another week spent on MacVenture though this one was a bit uneventful. I learned a bit more about the .2mg format and saw what WebVenture was doing with it and it didn’t seem too complicated so that’s what I am adding to ScummVM right now.
About WebVenture, I actually managed to get it working. What worked was to place the game in it’s root directory and to run the website on a http-server. This should give me another frame of reference when comparing game behavior.
I am not too well versed with node/javascript development but it’s good enough for me to go through and understand what’s happening. And speaking of understand, let’s have a look at the javascript file which is being executed as the game runs.
It wasn’t exactly what you can describe as understandable with all the obfuscation and lack of formatting. Luckily this wasn’t really that big of a problem and all I had to do was to run the Closure Compiler on the repo with all optimizations disabled and generate a file with everything intact except for the formatting (which got fixed with an online beautifier).
Anyways, having a working WebVenture made it easier to step through the game as it runs and see which piece of code is called when. Visual Studio Code wasn’t doing to well with JS code and things like Jump to Definition were often going to the wrong function so this was a really useful thing.
After that I worked for a bit on implementing the required functions to get the data from the .2mg files but that had to be put on hold for a while. Colleges were finally open and I had to leave the city to get to the hostel. I had to make some preparations both before leaving and after arriving and that made it hard to get the time to work so I took the weekend off.
The blog post got delayed by a day too but I have adjusted my hostel and will be working regularly from here ?I hope to work a bit harder this week to make up for the lost time.
That’s it for this blog post. Thanks for reading you next week!